iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 25/04/2025

Why would I want to be my own boss? Bosses suck.

Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 17/03/2025

Apologies for my chihuahua's contributions to the program!

Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 17/03/2025

My first podcast interview of 2025 is available now: I spoke to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025). Mark has been a pioneer of critical research on policing for decades, so it was an honor to interview him newbooksnetwork.com/pacification

newbooksnetwork.com

Mark Neocleous, "Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police" (Verso, 2025) - New Books Network

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 07/03/2025

It's like the national Democratic Party is now the Florida Democratic Party. Half expect them to nominate Charlie Crist next time around. Or Liz Cheney. That'll show 'em.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 16/12/2024

But I've already made it so much farther than somebody with my background should have. My inner critic has it exactly backwards: statistically, I am an overachiever, even if it may not look like it from the outside, with no knowledge of my life story.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 16/12/2024

I'm continuing to work on myself. I'm not where I want to be career-wise (to put it mildly), and I want to try to publish something to get my ideas out there. To achieve these goals I need to tackle some maladaptive cognitive tendencies and behavioral patterns that I've developed over the years.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 16/12/2024

So yes, I have self-sabotaging tendencies and maladaptive coping strategies. How could I not? But I've made huge progress in losing weight, kicking alcohol, bringing my blood pressure and cholesterol down to 'normal' levels, and taking fitness and nutrition seriously in the last few years.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 16/12/2024

...had serious mental health problems (borderline personality disorder). No statistical model would ever predict that I would have a college degree (much less a PhD), am able to hold down a full-time job, am in a very healthy marriage, and am sober.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 16/12/2024

My inner critic's biggest theme is that I'm an underachiever. The fact that I self-sabotaged my way out of academia certainly feeds this narrative, but it goes back a lot farther, to when I struggled in school despite being the 'smart' kid. But I'm the child of two alcoholics, one of whom...

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 11/12/2024

Breathtakingly bad take. Unfortunately the lesson that most people in the foreign policy bubble learned from the Iraq War was 'those tribalistic fanatical Arabs aren't ready for democracy,' as if that's what the US actually tried to establish there.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 24/11/2024

My latest NBN interview is up: I spoke to the political theorist Begum Adalet about three recent articles that she has written about infrastructure, racialization, and the politics of development newbooksnetwork.com/infrastructu... We spoke about how the green revolution shaped racial formation...

newbooksnetwork.com

Infrastructure, Development, and Racialization: A Conversation with Begüm Adalet - New Books Network

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 24/11/2024

Cool, looking forward to reading it!

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 24/11/2024

Finally, we spoke about the continuities in material practices and discourses of development between settler and overseas colonies in US history. You can find the episode on Spotify and elsewhere under New Books in Critical Theory. You can also find links to the articles in the link above.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 24/11/2024

...in Turkey. We also spoke about conceiving of anti-colonialism as a multi-scalar endeavor involving more than just formal sovereignty, for example including reconstruction of the built environment (at the urban level) and freedom from colonial codes of behavior and dress at the scale of the body.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 24/11/2024

newbooksnetwork.com

Infrastructure, Development, and Racialization: A Conversation with Begüm Adalet - New Books Network

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 20/11/2024

I really enjoyed this interview, and look forward to reading the book. Gender needs to be at the center of conversations about nation-building: newbooksnetwork.com/the-states-s...

newbooksnetwork.com

Park Jeong-Mi, "The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea" (U California Press, 2024) - New Books Network

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 19/11/2024

Feeling good after a solid writing session. May you all tell your inner critics to stfu!

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ASA Political Sociology @asapolisoc.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

It's LIVE: Political Sociology has its first Starter Pack! Follow us all here: go.bsky.app/QaLr2JG

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 18/11/2024

We spoke about how narratives that portray the rise of finance as a response to (or cause of) the decline of manufacturing overlook the constitutive interconnnections between finance, production, circulation, and consumption. Financialization narratives risk truncating the critique of capitalism.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 18/11/2024

My latest NBN interview is now available: I spoke to Nick Bernards about his new book Fictions of Financialization (Pluto): newbooksnetwork.com/fictions-of-... The interview is also available on Spotify and other platforms under the New Books in Critical Theory heading

newbooksnetwork.com

Nick Bernards, "Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2024) - New Books Network

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 17/11/2024

*I'm trying...and struggling...to navigate post-academic life *I have a couple of writing projects that I am struggling to bring to fruition *beyond nerd stuff, I like European soccer, NBA, spy and mystery novels (esp historical and/or international), and pretending I don't watch too much tv

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 17/11/2024

I've got some new followers, and picked up some random people before this, so a quick intro *I have a PhD in polisci (comparative) and wrote a diss on Turkey *I'm interested in Marxism, state space, security, imperialism *I'm a podcast host for the New Books Network

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 14/11/2024

We spoke about how the focus on the growth of the financial sector leads to a truncated and politically limited critique of contemporary capitalism. The problem with finance is that it makes more capitalism possible, not that 'financialized' capitalism is somehow worse than what came before it.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 14/11/2024

Just had a great chat with Nick Bernards about his new book Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Pluto) for the New Books Network. www.plutobooks.com/978074534889... The interview should be available in a few days

plutobooks.com

Fictions of Financialization

For decades, many people on the left have decried the finance sector as the main culprit for the toxic effects of capitalism. Financialization is commonly in...

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 14/11/2024

Sounds really interesting, can't wait to read it!

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 13/11/2024

"Are you fucking serious???" -- me at each new appointment that Trump announces

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Pluto Press @plutopress.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

❄️Our Holiday Sale is here!❄️ 50% off all books until December 5th! plutobooks.com

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 10/11/2024

Has anyone in psychology written about how attachment styles affect advisor relationships in higher ed? My relationship with my first advisor was definitely a classic case of anxious style (me) and avoidant style (them)...and it was not a good combination at all. Suspect it's a common dynamic.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 06/11/2024

Opportunity economy was horrible messaging. That kind of shit might have worked during the 90s but felt pretty out of touch for 2024.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 05/11/2024

Who do I vote for if I want to make all MLMs illegal? Amway and crypto, gone

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 05/11/2024

The main problem with more finance is that it makes more capitalism possible

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 05/11/2024

Writing questions for my upcoming interview with Nick Bernards about Fictions of Financialization for the New Books Network. His critique of the literature on financialization is utterly compelling. I'm looking forward to seeing the critical debate that it sparks: www.plutobooks.com/978074534889...

plutobooks.com

Fictions of Financialization

For decades, many people on the left have decried the finance sector as the main culprit for the toxic effects of capitalism. Financialization is commonly in...

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 05/11/2024

Tina Weymouth is the most important Talking Head

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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 05/11/2024

"but he did electric cars" We paid rich people to buy his cars instead of doing real environmental policy. California's ZEV credit system shuffled $10 billion more to Tesla, ~$1 billion of which was based on battery swap fraud. He got a free pass on safety and environmental regulation for a decade.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 04/11/2024

Part of the problem is that, if somebody were to say "you should check this article/book out, it might provide a useful insight to help improve/clarify this point" my brain would hear it as "you're stupid, why did you think you could do this?" instead of receiving it non-judgementally

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 04/11/2024

I have to constantly remind myself that I do not need to read everything ever written in history about topics tangentially related to the focus of my article before I can write anything

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 03/11/2024

I interviewed Adam Hanieh about his new book Crude Capitalism (Verso) for the New Books Network. We talked about the entanglements between oil, geopolitics, high finance, and ecology, and about how oil came to be in absolutely everything. newbooksnetwork.com/crude-capita...

newbooksnetwork.com

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 01/11/2024

It's about opposing the war for the right reasons. As long as you a) agree with Bush that invasion was about helping Iraqis but b) think helping ppl in other countries is bad, you're just a hard-headed realist in a world that's out to get Us. But if you don't agree with a your not on Team America

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 31/10/2024

What people in this country call "isolationism" is what most other people would call "bellicose unilateralism"

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 31/10/2024

Had a great chat today with Adam Hanieh about his new book Crude Capitalism (Verso). The book is an outstanding history of the geopolitics, economics, and political ecology of oil. It's also very elegantly written. The interview should be available from the New Books Network in a few days!

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 30/10/2024

i keep seeing all these articles where people are like "finance is completely deterritorialized." nonsense. no matter how complicated, financial assets are still tied to revenue flows deriving from "real" economic activities that are not, in any sense, deterritorialized. it drives me crazy

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 15/10/2024

My latest @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social podcast is available: I interviewed Sharad Chari about Apartheid Remains (Duke, 2024). We talked about race, capitalism, biopolitics, and resistance in Durban over the longue duree newbooksnetwork.com/apartheid-re...

newbooksnetwork.com

Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford, 2004) and Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023).

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 03/10/2024

The Omen is a biopic about JD Vance

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 30/09/2024

#polisky Democracy and Empire is a great book that deserves a wide readership in political theory and comparative politics. Provides really interesting ideas about how to think about imperialism in historical democratization research, where it is largely an absent presence

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Laura Seay @texasinafrica.bsky.social · 30/09/2024

Absolutely heartbroken to learn of Dikembe Mutombo's untimely passing. A story: one day in 2010, I got the most random phone call to my office at Morehouse. It was Dikembe's personal assistant, asking if I'd be willing to meet at his office to talk about the D.R. Congo. Obviously I said yes. (1/n)

espn.com

'Larger than life' Mutombo dies of brain cancer

Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo, the "larger than life" center who played 18 NBA seasons, has died of brain cancer at the age of 58, the league announced Monday.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 29/09/2024

I had a great conversation with Inés Valdez about her new book Democracy and Empire for the @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social. We spoke about how imperial social relations shape demands for popular sovereignty in the US and Europe newbooksnetwork.com/democracy-an...

newbooksnetwork.com

Inés Valdez, "Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023) - New Books Network

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 25/09/2024

This is one of the most viciously racist things I've seen a member of Congress say in years.

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 25/09/2024

I'm a literally anything else not a political scientist

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Geoff Gordon @melancholyleftist.substack.com · 25/09/2024

Just conducted a great interview with Inés Valdez about her book Democracy and Empire (Cambridge 2023) for the New Books Network. I can't wait to share it with everyone in a couple of days!

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