Tommy Craggs
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tcraggs22.bsky.social
Tommy Craggs
@tcraggs22.bsky.social
8.8K followers 970 following 33 posts
Writer and editor. Late of "Game Theory With Bomani Jones" on HBO, Mother Jones (no relation), HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, Deadspin, etc. Subscribe to @flaminghydra.com. Email: tcraggs22@gmail.com.
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Reposted by Tommy Craggs
graue.bsky.social
Ouch. www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...
What people were actually witnessing as they watched a particular product get worse—enshittify, to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage—was not the slow approach of some inexorable fate, as many believed. It was, as the tech writer put it to me, “evidence of a company doing very well by being very bad.” A lot of sharp people still don’t see it, in part because of a faith, not yet exhausted, in some kind of self-correcting market mechanism: A costly and degraded product would be punished somehow. It simply had to be. Forget generative AI. That faith is the biggest bubble of all.
October 28, 2025 at 5:21 AM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
neilturkewitz.bsky.social
Nice piece of writing. Love the shout out to David Noble’s 1984 classic, Forces of Production: “Men behaving like machines paved the way for machines without men.”

And this observation from @tcraggs22.bsky.social is exquisite:

“The computer has never been innocent of the world that made it.”
Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI
He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.
www.wired.com
October 27, 2025 at 3:40 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
I talked about "Kpop Demon Hunters," the Eighth Army's occupation of Korea & the origins of Kpop, the only person more driven by resentment than Michael Jordan (my mom), rooting for pretty (again), and the greatest natural athlete the world has ever known (Kim Jong-Il)
awesomechoi.bsky.social Amy S. Choi @awesomechoi.bsky.social · 20d
My old dear friend Tommy Craggs (@tcraggs22.bsky.social) is navigating this moment of Big Korean Energy in sports, fandoms, parenting, and culture by becoming an insufferable 삼촌. Just kidding! Kpop Demon Hunters and Dialectics! A convo made for us. Listen to the whole ep wherever ya get ya pods.
K-Pop Demon Hunters & Dialectics: A Love Story
YouTube video by The Mash-Up Americans
www.youtube.com
October 22, 2025 at 5:50 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
Riding my hobbyhorse into the sunset, via @redford.bsky.social's rad new podcast: Sports conspiracy theories are how fans do structural analysis.
October 21, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
eafreem.bsky.social
🥲 I have a new piece out today with ORB! Would love for you to read it. Truly a labor of care on everyone’s part & I’m grateful for that & the insistence that off kilter, slightly dark work Around Books fits & is in fact, the point. ORB forever! Messy girls with mental health challenges forever!!
oaklandreviewofbooks.org Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 27d
This stunning piece by @eafreem.bsky.social exemplifies the kind of "books writing" ORB wants to publish: it's written around and through and about A Book, but is less a "review" than an effort to understand what it means to live in the world (in Oakland) and how books are part of the way we do it
oaklandreviewofbooks.org Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 27d
"After I had sent a few customers home with Cassandra, I started to feel a bit uneasy. Should I be warning them? Am I obligated to tell adults to brace themselves? Call of the void, that’s a thing we all have, right?" www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/cassandra-at...
October 15, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
"The Oakland Review of Books is coming!" it says on our website, and if you haven't noticed, we've started publishing ever-so-slightly-more ambitious things as we ramp up towards really cutting loose.

If you'd like to follow along, for the low price of $0 (American), you can get it in your inbox:
ORB ⧹O⧸
The Oakland Review of Books is coming!
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
September 23, 2025 at 6:43 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
There's an excellent crank theory that insists we're playing a lot of old music at least twice as fast as was originally intended, and I wrote about it (and about the collapse of the Western order) for Defector's music week: defector.com/are-we-playi...
Are We Playing It All Wrong? | Defector
At some point in the thick of the pandemic, I became briefly obsessed with a silly-seeming online controversy over what is known as the double-beat theory. The argument concerns classical music, which...
defector.com
August 13, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
mariabustillos.com
Good time to revisit @tcraggs22.bsky.social on this very topic at @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/who-made-cai...
August 4, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
scmaestra.bsky.social
This is truly wonderful. It's about Sinners, yes, but it's about this moment, the power of the squad.
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/all-hands-si...
All hands
Like any movie in the Squad Assembles genre, "Sinners" is secretly about full employment
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
June 19, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
maxread.info
in this week's newsletter, a plea for robin d.g. kelley to write about sinners maxread.substack.com/p/who-are-th...
I think this is a good read on the movie, but I would push it even further. What do the movie’s vampires represent, anyway, beyond the dream of a squad permanently assembled--a eternal general strike against mortality, a perpetual mobilization against death? Smoke and Stack, the ex-gangster twins played by Michael B. Jordan, assemble a small and termporary communitarian escape from drudgery and oppression. But Remmick, the Irish vampire who chances upon the juke house, offers not so much an temporary escape as an entirely new settlement: “This world already left you for dead,” he tells Smoke. “Won't let you build. Won't let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.” Huh. If we follow Tommy in focusing on Sinners’ historical setting we might note that promises like Remmick’s--a new fellowship, built together across racial lines, in pursuit of dignity, pleasure, and freedom--were relatively common in the South of this period: Robin D.G. Kelley documents in his great Hammer and Hoe the outsize role played by the Alabama Communist Party, among other communist parties, throughout the interwar civil-rights struggle. I’m not saying the Sinners vampires are communists, exactly--the movie is too dense and expansive to function as a simple allegory--but I’m not saying they’re not communists. Remmick is, after all, a materialist, in a vulgar-Spinozist sense: “We are Earth and beast and God,” he lectures. “We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.”
June 13, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
As the world burns, a few of us are making an Oakland Review of Books. We don’t have money, but why not? We’re moving slowly. We're trying not to break things.

But we’re trying to imagine: what if Oakland were enough and we cared enough to look? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
ORB \O/
The Oakland Review of Books is coming!
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
June 13, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
erocy.world
Watch the squad assemble now and see, perhaps, a dream of a different sort of social wholeness, not that of the battlefront and the homefront, of the barracks and the assembly plant, but that of people abandoning different parts of a system of domination, rejecting its perks and consolations, joining with each other not to reinforce or reshape the regime but to bring the damn thing to its knees. This is not a draft. This is a general strike.
June 13, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
flaminghydra.com
TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the Squads Assemble school of cinema, and the social context that makes them so seductive. "They are a dream of everyone fits somewhere, costarring Ludacris." flaminghydra.com/r/442ea64e?m...
Get together / Play a show
Tommy Craggs on foxhole solidarity, and Rax King at the Dew Drop Inn
flaminghydra.com
June 12, 2025 at 12:38 AM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
Like all movies in the Squad Assembles genre, "Sinners" is a film about full employment. flaminghydra.com/issue-338/#a...
All Hands
The first hour or so of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a classic of that unnamed but easily recognized film genre which we’ll call “the Squad Assembles.” We follow the Moore twins, both played by Michael B...
flaminghydra.com
June 12, 2025 at 2:17 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
Even more ashamed than usual of the alma mater. You can support Steven here: forms.gle/Rn9Rmq5fQUhq...
thrasherxy.bsky.social Steven W. Thrasher is finishing The Overseer Class @thrasherxy.bsky.social · Mar 20
My statement on being denied tenure at the Medill School of Journalism drive.google.com/file/d/1BBBI...
Please use the link in the post for a link to the full text shown in this image
March 20, 2025 at 6:44 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
There's wisdom in Super Bowl conspiracy theories if you know where to look: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
The Reason Why This Super Bowl Has So Many Conspiracy Theories
These days even routine NFL decisions can send fans down a rabbit hole. What’s going on?
www.bloomberg.com
February 7, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
felixgillette.bsky.social
Gotta read @tcraggs22.bsky.social on Super Bowl conspiracy theories:

"Just the other day, the comedian Bill Burr went on The Rich Eisen Show and started talking like Hal Holbrook in a parking garage."

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
The Reason Why This Super Bowl Has So Many Conspiracy Theories
These days even routine NFL decisions can send fans down a rabbit hole. What’s going on?
www.bloomberg.com
February 7, 2025 at 3:03 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
In re the social death of trans people being reckoned a "distraction" from meat-and-potatoes economic issues:
A screenshot of something I wrote in 2020. It reads: "In such a world, the material cannot be so easily cleaved from the cultural. Is it material or cultural for gay Americans to demand civil equality? Is it material or cultural for women not to want to be subordinated to the reproductive function of their bodies? Is it material or cultural for transgender people to wish for bodily autonomy? What about the fact that they are, by one recent accounting, much more likely to be unemployed than the general population, much more likely to have salaries below $10,000, much more likely to make less than $30,000 even when they have college degrees? Is that material? Is that cultural? How much less meat, how many fewer potatoes could Aimee Stephens afford after she was fired from a funeral home for being transgender?"
January 29, 2025 at 1:15 AM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
mariabustillos.com
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November 19, 2024 at 8:22 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
dmgreene.bsky.social
This from Max Read is the best post-mortem I've seen. It's less that there's a YouTube or TikTok mind virus and more that the hegemony of precarity--whether macho hustle culture or back-to-the-land tradwifery--is native to it. The feed makes a small businessman of us all. The traditional fash base.
The TikTok electorate
Young men, social media, and the TikTok subject
maxread.substack.com
November 8, 2024 at 1:19 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
This, by Samantha Michaels, is excellent on Oakland politics in particular and on the politics of "crime wave" moral panic in general: oaklandside.org/2024/11/05/s...
Oakland's merchant of bad vibes
How spin doctor Sam Singer sold a crime wave and two recalls. (Reported by Mother Jones and republished at Oaklandside.)
oaklandside.org
November 5, 2024 at 7:36 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
Here's something I wrote in 2020 about punditry's idpol contras that I don't recommend reading so much as printing out on absorbent paper, ripping into pieces, wadding up, moistening with saliva, inserting into a straw, and shooting at Jeremy Peters's computer www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Two paragraphs from a story I wrote in re American punditry's quadrennial anti-idpolapalooza: "McCaskill seems to have her cultural history backward. In the realm of discourse, at least, where these voter-alienating offenses are allegedly being committed, the left is on a big winning streak. The fact she felt compelled to apologize is a sign of this. On some level all the culture-contra pundits know it, which is why their political analysis seems so forked. They complain about the hegemony of identity politics and in the next breath urge, as a matter of cold-blooded realpolitik, that the Democratic Party defy the hegemon. There’s so much potent, culture-shifting wokeness afoot, they complain. Democrats have no choice but to…reject it? "This isn’t a contradiction so much as a statement that it doesn’t count as winning if the winners don’t really count. Take a look at how McCaskill balances her equation. There are the vulnerable, people who exist as political creatures at the sufferance of the Democratic Party, and there are the 'voters.' Her invocation of the 'voters' here, with their families and their kitchen-table issues, is doing some slyly invidious rhetorical work, akin to the sneaky whitening and gendering that happens with 'taxpayers' and 'workers.' These are special categories, reserved for those Americans who get to move through the discourse without ever having to show their papers—Americans who count."
November 2, 2024 at 7:21 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
This is about fighting in the NBA, but it’s also about democratic self-governance flaminghydra.com/issue-191/
Brawl and response / Really racist
Tommy Craggs on ultra-violence in the NBA; Arwa Mahdawi reviews ‘The Message’
flaminghydra.com
November 1, 2024 at 1:03 AM