Epistemologist @NYmag Writing: @Pitchfork, @Harpers, @nprmusic, @RollingStone, @PacificStand (rip), @VICE, @Outline, @thefader, @MotherJones, @nytimes
Joined September 2015
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I spent time with Nirosta Steel during a very interesting moment in his life
He dated Allen Ginsberg, partied with Steve Rubell, and somehow has one of the buzziest albums of 2026. It only gets stranger from there. vulture.com/article/can-niro…
fascinating thread on Adorno's music writing, cognition, and technological panic
very insightful piece of criticism
I wrote about Cormac McCarthy (including the new biography) for @Harpers harpers.org/archive/2026/11/…
Jack Denton retweeted
Nah we're going to indoctrinate you with media theory and explain that his first 8 symphonies were significant for their use of metronome dictated tempo markings that indicate the dependence of romanticism on the regulated discontinuities of machines
It's 2011. A 45-year-old Too $hort is enduring the "are you drunk right now?" voicemail as he tries to impress a younger woman he's just met. "Drake Who??" he wonders. "Four times this week?"
hit up Too $hort to talk to him about all of the music that has shaped his 60 years of life, everything from sly stone and Jimmy Spicer to The Pack and Megan Thee Stallion pitchfork.com/story/too-shor…
thinking once again about how David Berman anticipated the poetry of the golden age of weird twitter here
One thing I love about this vivid celebration of an upstate restaurant I’d previously never heard of, is how it subtly doubles as a tale of Hudson’s rapid gentrification—and the restaurant’s own (and ultimately self-annihilating) role in that process
Read all about it: grubstreet.com/article/lil-d…
Jack Denton retweeted
what kids these days don't seem to understand about aughts hipster culture is the extent to which being a hipster in the aughts was about being into disco, the-dream, baltimore club, the diplomats, and west african highlife music
When “indie sleaze” was actually happening, it was just called indie. But as the era gets repackaged through playlists, party photos, and Pinterest boards, the Black artists who helped shape the era are being left out.
@Santigold, Spank Rock, and @kilokish shed light on the scene they experienced, the boxes the industry put them in, and how the people telling its story shape what gets remembered.
Read the full feature by @precious1otus here: pigeonsandplanes.com/read/wh…
Jack Denton retweeted
For a specific variety of listener, Nirosta Steel was the hot new artist of the summer. It just so happened that Steven Hall, which is his real name, was almost 70 and most of this “new” music on the record ‘My Skyscraper’ was decades old. The album’s earliest inclusions date back to Hall’s day in Poets’ Building days in the early 1980s. “It feels like I’m playing a part in this movie about myself,” he says. “Like being in a parallel dimension.”
When decades-old music or books are excavated and celebrated, the artists are often long gone. The difference now is that Hall is still here, posting stories and telling them — with complex effects on his legacy. Hall’s past played first out as an opportunity for nostalgia. Then, it threatened his sudden fame.
Jack Denton spends time with Nirosta Steel and unpacks how his rise set off a fractured discourse: nymag.visitlink.me/OJGjF2
Jack Denton retweeted
jack went off to profile a musician (that apparently all the cool kids are talking about) and came back with the most precise essence of the time
Jack Denton retweeted
This is the best piece on Nirosta Steel. Avoids simple hagiography like other pieces have and honestly engages with him as an artist and person, NY past and present, Allen Ginsberg and NAMBLA, race, fetishism, stardom in the present day, social media surveillance, and more.
Jack Denton retweeted
"Do you want the old New York? Well, here it is."
vulture.com/article/can-niro…
raphael rogiński reimagining the velvet underground—“new york’s folk music”—at john giorno’s old loft: unquestionably one of the musical events of the year
Jack Denton retweeted
I know they say never pick up a call from Isaac Chotiner but it was very late at night and I had just survived a pogrom so I figured why not. In the end I thought it was a good conversation about the hell that is the West Bank olive harvest.
New Interview: I talked to the journalist Jasper Nathaniel about what he witnessed in the West Bank when the WaPo’s Heidi Levine & multiple Palestinians were attacked by Israeli settlers, as well as what’s been happening there before the Israeli election. newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/b…
Jack Denton retweeted
Just passed a house with a child's skeleton as a Halloween decoration. People should realize these are not cute; when you see one in reality it is at minimum a human tragedy and at worst a #WarCrimes
it’s funny that Elliott Smith isn’t coming up more with the new album—I don’t remember hearing that so much on their earlier stuff. the wonky harmonies that maybe sound a little like Sung Tongs were a bigger part of Mind Palace Music imo
