When I said that 2022 was the hardest year of my life, I wasn’t prepared for how long my bad luck would last. I was deciding whether or not to attempt to change a tire near the end of a 15-hour drive from Montreal, where I had recently started a PhD program, to my parents’ house in coastal Virginia, where I was born and raised. Should I try to change it myself from the narrow shoulder of the bridge where my tire gave out? Could I get a tow truck to bring me to a mechanic—or at least the end of the bridge, where I could probably leave the car for the night, get a ride home from my brother, and figure it out in the morning? It was almost midnight at that point, and after swearing under my breath for an eternity in the cold, I asked for advice from my dad.
What do you do when the circumstances that made it so easy to move from one milestone to the next no longer make sense in another context? In my case, I mostly stayed quiet. I spent the pandemic working tech jobs, applying to PhD programs in some vague attempt to reconnect with my writing after shelving the thought of becoming an academic when Covid hit. I had worked through my master’s while covering new shifts on nights and weekends for SPIN Magazine, and stumbled into a similar gig with Pitchfork to coincide with the PhD. But Montreal wasn’t a place to be constantly working from a laptop. For one, most businesses weren’t open early enough to wake up incredibly early to make headway on writing before attending classes (the only routine that has ever worked for me). And when the first snow settled that winter, the city revealed itself to be a profoundly seasonal place; everything got quiet for the first time since I’d moved there, and a depression set in that was among the worst of my life.
So I found a therapist, read the fine print of my health insurance, and started taking an antidepressant strong enough to help me get by. I left Pitchfork, bought trail running shoes, and resolved to make it up Mount Royal on as many frozen mornings as I could manage. I made friends in the department, went out to bars and clubs and karaoke, and justified it as my last chance to be careless before returning to the dullness of American adulthood. I moved to a new neighborhood, found new restaurants and cafes and music venues, and resolved not to think about the future. By the time the next winter settled, the silence that once felt suffocating came to seem oddly peaceful, a solitude that clarified the cliché.
With time, my life would again become unrecognizable. I finished all of the requirements confining me to Montreal and moved, first back in with my parents for much of the summer of 2024, and later into a small sublet in Brooklyn like the ones that felt so meaningful when I was 22. I met the most incredible girl, sent voice memos and playlists between cities; we became inseparable in person and moved in together in 2025. I found a day job, woke up early enough to make headway on a proposal for my dissertation, and after about a year of steady progress, defended it before my committee, only to have to start writing the dissertation itself. After gritting my teeth for years to make it by, everything seemed to come up in my favor.
Like everything else, this luck wouldn’t last. In September 2024, I learned that my PhD advisor, Dr. Jonathan Sterne, was hospitalized again, and that doctors were testing to see if, after a few years of successful treatment had allowed him to return to academic life, his cancer had returned. I remember seeing the news in my inbox, not knowing what it would mean for Jonathan or the department or my own future in the academy and resolving not to think about it, convinced that any course of action would only get in the way. I put my head down, kept trudging forward on writing that increasingly felt meaningless, and took pleasure in cooking, running, and other distractions.
Jonathan would spend much of the next few months documenting these tests on his personal blog, where family and friends were directed to check for updates. Students in the department anxiously read about his treatment, which included detailed descriptions of his procedures. Yet no matter how difficult things ever got for him, his blog posts were, like so much of his other writing, also incredibly charming, curious about the machinery around him and the physical responses of his own body. Some of this is captured in his final book, but it’s also just true of his nature generally: However much pain he was in (and to be sure, nothing was ever easy), he was always in good spirits, willing to listen to students talk about their projects, and to be frank about academic life and its future.
Jonathan died on Thursday, March 20 in hospice care near Boston. There’s so much I could say, and so much that has already been said—by friends, family, faculty, and students, not to mention the many publishers, conferences, and other organizations he worked with—that I’m not sure this is the best place for this kind of reflection, especially so many months later.
Yet in the time since his passing, I’ve found myself thinking about the life that Jonathan lived, and how he understood the life of the mind as a project worth pursuing. Andy Kelleher Stuhl touched on this a bit in his great remembrance, calling it a “romantic pragmatism”—“a capacity to feel and act romantically toward the why of academic life by being extremely practical about the how.”
But to me it’s also a clear-eyed expression of his politics; he understood in no uncertain terms how power worked, recognizing the shortcomings (and unique benefits) of the academy as it is currently instantiated, and the ways that he could contribute to larger institutional change. And yet, for all of his advocacy for student and faculty unions, or his vocal support for Palestine, this ethics of care—at once social, political, phenomenological—was also central to how he lived every day.
As a teaching assistant in his undergraduate “Introduction to Communications” course, I was, like Allysa Rodgers, also struck by the “no bullshit” policy he had for his students. The course framed the study of technology as part of an attempt to produce “better citizens of reality,” namely through the development of a pedagogy that was as much an education in civics as it was in anything related to communication theory. “Jonathan asked his students to show up earnestly, to listen generously, and to care about their ideas, their work, and their colleagues,” she wrote in her reflection. There is, as Alyssa astutely notes, a well-documented relationship between bullshit and fascism, with the former contributing to an erosion of meaning that perhaps provides one foundation from which fascism can flourish. Yet even without this framing, Jonathan’s approach to education was guided by a foundational commitment to transforming lives for the better, to produce a more thoughtful, selfless world through rigorous inquiry.
His approach to graduate education was informed by similar commitments. Long an advocate of the school of thought known as social constructivism, Jonathan knew that technology was developed by and for an unjust world, and that each technological object we encounter could just as easily have taken so many other forms than the one through which it was popularized. A seminar on digital interfaces became a crash course in academic writing, teaching us the epistemic legwork that scholars use to connect and substantiate their claims, the ways that thinkers conceptualize their audiences, and the frequent shortcomings of these conceptualizations.
Charting course through classic papers, contemporary artistic interventions, and so much current scholarship in disability studies, he was steadfast in his commitment to exploring the politics of each technology, by proxy developing an egalitarian pedagogy that was itself deeply attuned to these politics. As with his undergraduate course, he took seriously the opportunity to produce “better citizens of reality,” encouraging everyone to become more rigorous versions of the scholars he saw them becoming with only limited regard for disciplinary boundaries, considerations for the job market, or other other stifling constraints.
In the months since he passed, I have come to view his web presence in the same light. As many people know, Jonathan has long maintained a personal website, where he has collected an abundance of professional resources aimed at academics at every stage of their careers. His web presence was an extension of himself—a warm and selfless educator who loved to write, and who held onto his incredible sense of humor until the very end.
As I continue forward through this difficult, rewarding PhD process, I am reminded of Jonathan’s web presence, and how much I want to develop a similar site of my own. Looking through the old photos and blog posts his site contains as part of the preservation process has shown me how powerful a personal website can be, both to oneself as a personal archive and to the larger community it can cultivate. I want to use this site, blog, and newsletter to better document the work I’m doing, and make a deliberate space to produce new work on my own terms. I look forward to doing that together, in public, with you. Everything will be available for free on this blog, but if you'd prefer to receive each post as an email newsletter, feel free to sign up to do so here.