jeffrey moro

Diptych

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Thomas Jefferson

began keeping a weather diary on July 1st, 1776, while in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress. He had finished writing the lion’s share of the Declaration of Independence two days before. He was renting the second floor of 700 Market Street, a red brick three-story house constructed a year earlier. The diary at first comprised only three columns: the day, the temperature, and the time of its taking. He usually took two readings a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. On July 13th, 1776, at around 2 PM, the temperature in Philadelphia was 76 degrees Fahrenheit. Later in the evening, it rained. Jefferson continued to keep a weather diary with consistency for the subsequent fifty years. He never recorded an explanation for why he did so. In 1784, he wrote to James Madison and encouraged him to keep a weather diary as well. His rationale was simply that it might be “an amusement.”

How Much Computer

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am writing this blog post on a 2023 Mac Studio with an M2 Max processor chip and 32 GB of RAM. Compared with the first laptop I owned, a 2009 unibody Macbook Pro with a Core2Duo processor chip and 2 GB of RAM (which I upgraded myself to 4 GB back when you could still do that sort of thing in a laptop), my current machine is somewhere between ten and three hundred times more powerful, depending on which benchmarks one chooses. That 2009 laptop, in turn, was more powerful by a similar order of magnitude compared with the first computer I remember my family owning, a non-name Pentium tower running Windows 95 that my parents had assembled at a local Circuit City in the mid-90s. And all these computers smash into smithereens the 2 MHz processor of the Apollo Guidance Computer that helped land us on the Moon in 1969. I’ve never landed on the Moon with my computers. I mostly use them to move words around.

Silence

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

John Cage wrote: “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”

Except he didn’t write it like that. He wrote it in four columns, the words and punctuations spaced out so as to guide the rhythm of speech. “I am here,” [beat] [beat] [beat], “and there is nothing to say.” This was Cage’s art: carving time, the space between things, time as the space between things. Tartovsky called cinema “sculpting in time.” Apocryphally, Cage, or Laurie Anderson, or Steve Martin called writing about music “dancing about architecture.” The comparison sounds facetious to anyone who has never written or danced; others know better. Dance especially: dance is not about the arrangement of bodies in space but rather the construction and destruction of space itself, with the body as an instrument. Kazuo Ohno wrote: “To appear on a bare stage with no preparation does not mean that it contains nothing. On the contrary, the vacant space is gradually getting filled and in the end something is realized there. Something happens in the process fills the space up.” Process fills space: nothingness takes work. What silence requires is that we go on talking.

Sick Day

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I write to you, dear reader, ensconced in only the finest of Ikea-branded blankets, Vitmossas and Lapptågs alike, sinking deeper into the right angle of my chaise couch, a cardboard box filled with tissues on the ground below me (best to keep the powder room wastebaskets in the power rooms), sick – as the poets say – as a dog. I have been overdue for a good wallopping. There are worse ways to spend the back half of my spring break than going a few rounds with the Jake LaMotta of rhinoviruses. It gives me time, after all, to catch up on my correspondence (blogging).

Keys, Ranked

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

24. F major

Fuck ass key. Like running across flat ground and then tripping on a little rock. Very clearly for brass instruments. Unsubtle and boorish.

23. G major

ooooh look at me I’m G majorrrrrr I’m just as boring as C major but I try to stand out with my extra little sharp aren’t I dainty aren’t I demure fuck OFF

22. C♯ minor

Here’s the thing about C♯ minor. When I was younger it was my favorite key mostly because of Chopin leaning heavy on it to express Yearning but also Tempestuousness (two things a closeted thirteen-year-old knows plenty about) but after I have gotten older I have come to see it as a bit trite and also it lays annoyingly in the hand. When we grow up we must put aside childish things and etc.

Hōjōki

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The late twelfth century was hard on Kyoto. On the twenty-eighth day of the Fourth Month, in the year Angen 3, a fire broke out in a ramshackle brothel in the southeast of the city, at the intersection of Higuchi Street and Tominokōji Street. Wind whipped the fire into a blaze, cutting a clear line of smoke and ash to the Suzaku Gate in the northeast. One third of Kyoto burned: the fire took down the Hall of State, the university, and the Popular Affairs Ministry, alongside countless homes and businesses. Three years later, so the stories say, a whirlwind rose up at the corner of Nakanomikado and Kyōgoku: it flattened four blocks. Gates and doors and possessions crashed against each other, and dust blotted out the sky. Two months later, perhaps heeding those soothsayers who saw in the fire and the wind ill portents, the emperor decreed that the capital should move. Naturally, many protested. Others, those who put their faith in the emperor, or who at least depended on their masters’ favor for their daily rice, disassembled their houses and floated them in pieces down the Yodo River. Later that winter, the emperor changed his mind and returned to Kyoto. But the houses were never rebuilt.

Roundup 2k25

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Good afternoon Moronators. Class is not in session (UMD is blessedly still off for a few weeks yet). We are seven days into the new year and so much has already happened. We are at war(?) with Venezuela(??) or Greenland(???). My best friends had a baby (her name is Dorothy) (the baby, not my best friends) (although soon the baby will be my best friend too). My cat has learned how to jump onto the kitchen counter. It’s shaping up to be one hell of a year.

Dumbphone

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that the Phones are Bad. We all know this. Some of us are able to bracket the deleterious psychologiacl effects of Phone and get on with our days. I applaud them, but I am not one of them. Some of us (me) are not so well-equipped. For some of us (me), Phone offers a bottomless abyss of distraction and temptation, a simulacrum of social participation and knowledge acquisition, all yoked to corporatocratic algorithms that yadda yadda yadda honestly I’m bored even typing it out, we all know the spiel, we have been trapped in this hell for fifteen years now with no sign of it abating but that doesn’t make it any more interesting. We know the story. Maybe Phone will destroy society as we know it. Maybe it already has!

Intracoastal

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The low sweep of the Georgia coast looks at first as though a long war between land and sea has come to an uneasy truce. Each front has gained on the other until distinctions no longer hold, leaving exclaves and enclaves like a Balkan border: brackish pools and miniature lakes shape the negative space of a latticework of grass; above, crows and herons and turkey vultures prowl for their catch of the day. Roads risk the coast and bridges hold where they can. The sea, underneath all, secrets itself behind mangrove and palm, but you can still smell it. The salt-rot is in the dirt.

Bench Press

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You want your feet on the ground. I see too many people at my gym forget this part. They’ll have just their toes or the balls of their feet on the ground, but not the whole thing, not the heel. Full, flush contact, feet pulled back as far as they will go. There are some variations in which you might take them off the ground: I’ve seen folks brace them up on the bench itself, even. But for the most part, you want your feet on the ground.

Sonnets

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been derelict in writing these past few weeks, to no small shame given that I got through two posts of this blog slash newsletter slash thing and immediately fell off the wagon. Mea culpa. My excuse: that I have been packing up my life in DC and moving it, after months of stops and starts, to Baltimore. We’re mostly unpacked. The cat is unfazed. I have spent more money than I thought even possible. It’s an adjustment, a good one, I think.

Wood

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When we bought the house, one half of a two-story duplex in north Baltimore (the stage left half), we thought the floors on the first level were pine. Up the stairs and into the second level ran grey carpet, wall-to-wall. We would have it removed, we said. We didn’t know what was underneath; the inspector suggested generic subfloor and we didn’t know enough to disagree. Homeownership, I have learned, even in its preliminary stages, entails putting your faith in others. So when we bought the house, the floors were pine.

The Heat

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“The temperature’s rising,” Brian Eno sang. Out of the ten tracks on Eno’s debut solo record Here Come the Warm Jets, released in 1974, the third track, “Baby’s on Fire,” has always held me hypnotized. The song’s “plot,” such as it is: an unnamed woman on fire, papped by giggling onlookers, Eno crooning out her plight with a barely contained sneer — and then that guitar solo, three-and-a-half minutes of Robert Fripp freaking the fuck out over the steady cacophony of the song’s two (count ’em, two) chords. Fripp was no stranger to violent and surreal art rock: the opening track of his band King Crimson’s debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, released five years earlier, declaims “innocents raped with / napalm fire” over a set of accelerating free jazz riffs. The temperature in the 1960s and 1970s was no doubt rising, if metaphorically — meteorological data suggests that summers in the United States and Europe were if anything a bit cooler during those years compared to pre-industrial averages — but politically and socially, the heat was on.

A Beginning

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t kept a regular blog for several years now. There are many reasons for this, many macro, others micro. The macro ones you know about: they’re all the same reasons you’ve felt distracted, on edge, tired for much of the past few years. At least, I suspect you have. If you’re the kind of person taking the time to read a blog post (a quaint medium: I just as well might write you a letter and tie it to a pigeon), then you share with me, I would venture, some values that are hard to come by these days. An appreciation for the art of a sentence. A desire to move slower rather than faster. A stubborn attachment to the past, not to repeat it, but to understand it and its relationship to the present. And a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to give the internet a hard reboot.

My Dissertation Defense Talk

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On April 1st, 2022, I defended my dissertation, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination,” and became a doctor. Below is the text of the talk I gave at the top of my defense, which explores the project’s argument, context, and next steps.

Friends, family, esteemed colleagues: I am proud to welcome you to the defense of my doctoral dissertation, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination.” Thanking all those who have supported me over the three years of its writing would take all day, but I would like to extend a special thanks to my committee, in particular my director Matthew Kirschenbaum, whose support and guidance made this project possible. Over the next twenty minutes, I’ll discuss the dissertation’s contours and major arguments, explore its chapters, situate its work within its allied fields of digital media studies and the environmental humanities, and offer some thoughts on its future development. This is a project whose urgency, I believe, has only magnified during the years I have spent on it, as questions of the air and its mediation have moved from the background to the forefront of our daily lives. So let’s dive in.

How I Write

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today, a friend asked me how I write. Not like, existentially or anything (although it’s a challenge these days!), more my workflows for writing. Since they’re not the first to ask this, and since I went ahead and wrote it up for them, I thought I might as well post it on here for anyone else interested in workflows that incorporate plain text, citation integrations, and open-source software.

My workflow is one that I developed early on in my graduate studies with the intention of maximizing flexibility and minimizing the temptation to fiddle with it further. There’s definitely stuff in it that only works for me because I’m willing to tolerate. It’s also one that strongly draws from a few others’: in particular Scott Selisker’s “Plain Text Workflow for Writing with Atom” and Grant Wythoff’s and Dennis Tenen’s “Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown”. These lessons are honestly better and more schematic than my post, but since this space changes so frequently I thought it’d be worth having my contribution for 2020.

Against Cop Shit

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Thesis: abolish cop shit in the classroom.

For the purposes of this post, I define “cop shit” as “any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers.” Here are some examples:

ed-tech that tracks our students’ every move
plagiarism detection software
militant tardy or absence policies, particularly ones that involve embarassing our students, e.g. locking them out of the classroom after class has begun
assignments that require copying out honor code statements
“rigor,” “grit,” and “discipline”
any interface with actual cops, such as reporting students’ immigration status to ICE and calling cops on students sitting in classrooms.

While I am most familiar with higher ed, cop shit undoubtedly reaches its sine qua non in the K-12 classroom, particularly given how such classrooms are even more militarized (actual cops, metal detectors, education premised on compliance, etc.) than higher ed. While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, my stylist told me about her daughter’s math teacher, who is currently punishing her daughter for falling behind on work due to a broken arm by assigning her upwards of fifteen pages of homework a night. The child is seven. This is pure, uncut cop shit.

the problem with bringing back blogs

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

1.

The problem with bringing back blogs is that Twitter is still the distribution platform. I never bothered to put analytics on this website, because to do so would be to give Google the ability to further spy on my readers and that kind of defeats the purpose of blogging in 2k20? It’s sort of like becoming a vegan and then exclusively eating vegetables from mega-corporate farms, or getting really into quinoa without attending to how you’re destabilizing Peruvian foodways or something.

Qualifications

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There comes a time in a doctoral student’s life wherein they have to qualify to keep going on toward a dissertation. Usually it takes the form of an exam on a comprehensive list of materials. I find these lists useful and interesting not only for how they frame a field of inquiry for a person’s diss, but also how they function as snapshots of what academia looked like for a particular student at a particular time. In assembling my list (my exam’s in September), I found other folks’ lists immensely helpful in thinking about scope, framing, and blind spots. Maybe you’ll find mine to be too.