I went to New York in October for a seminar in ASAP, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. I did write about improv, college, stripping & Marx? See the seminar description below. I took almost no pictures of people, even though it was so sustaining to reconnect with friends I only see at conferences.

I walked the Highline down the waterfront and then across the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw the extraordinarily moving Alvin Ailey exhibit. I let my friend in Brooklyn spoil me, while I fell in love with his cat. We went to a play and a Knicks game and a comedy show, and nothing has ever been more glorious.

And I got to put in some quality time with my uncle, Paul Chihara, and his lovely wife Carol, who teased me about Marxist humor and told me stories about the past.

It has been great to get back into the classroom with face-to-face contact with students. No one wants to talk about the pandemic anymore, except that I think we talk about it all the time beneath the surface. I'm conscious how much it means to show up, in person. I have been trying to bring a lot of energy to the classroom, and perhaps as a result, or perhaps just because I came back, one of my students suggested that the student paper write an article about me. I kind of assumed would just be a squib on the fact of my return, but they published an entire full page feature. Can you hear me blushing? Sports Editor Olivia Nunez put real care into the writing. I'm honored and touched.

In April and May, I worked with a group of graduate student who had won competitive grants from the UC Humanities Research Institute to write public-facing essays on the theme of work and refuge. They participated in a larger set of initiatives exploring refuge and its refusals. After having met only once via Zoom for a workshop, we found ourselves together at the University of California's well-appointed lakeside vacation cabins.

On April 4, I had the privilege of acting as a commentator for papers from Stefan Eich and Christine Desan for a symposium entitled Cutting The Gordian Knot of Finance. I'm still reading their other work, which I highly recommend. Here are a couple of takeaways (which I probably could have done a better job of summarizing in my talk, I was trying to relate their work to some stuff I'm working on about EB-5 financing and the Oceanwide project downtown...

Radical walking tours and a zine paying tribute to Mike Davis. Davis was mythically angry, but his work also made a shared history of solidarity visible. He saw cities—big, crowded, and dense, with all their flaws—as a source of hope. We want to bring alive his vision of being together, densely, so that we can both live well and protect green spaces outside the city walls. So we invited Los Angeles, the city that Mike raged against and loved, to party in his honor…

Here's The American Vandal : "The series finale finds "Dear Television" correspondents joining the podcast to discuss the Fall 2022 franchise season, foremost HBO's "House of the Dragon," but also Disney+'s "Andor" and Amazon's "Rings of Power."

Steffie Nelson, Stacie Stukin, Jori Finkel and I read from our essays about Joan Didion at the Santa Monica Library — Stukin is with me above.

Also, around this time, The Atlantic where a reporter visited some of the locations that I had discovered were connected with Didion, in my primary reporting on the Didion family’s holdings.

Said other reporter may have been encouraged, perhaps by someone in a fact-checking position, to cite my work directly—which she did.

On the most recent episode of The American Vandal Podcast, Matt Seybold is joined by three scholars of Critical Finance Studies and Economic Criticism to talk about the current speculative episodes, as well as what preceded it.