this is aaronland

Postcards from Montréal, 2026 We were in Montréal recently. I made some postcards while we were there. This is the story I want to remember. I had hoped to do more half-time sketches like the ones I made during the 2024 Euro Cup but circumstances were such that we often didn't arrive to watch a match until after the second half had already begun. In the end I did have just enough googly eyes but, still, this piece remains unfinished.

Weird-shaped tools Matchbox case: American Airlines 1970s Gift of Thomas G. Dragges Collection of SFO Museum 2014.058.002 Every spring, for the last few years, I have been invited to speak to a class of museum studies students at the University of San Francisco. What follows is this year's talk. It felt, and still feels, like an odd-shaped talk. Did I really want to talk to the class about AI? No, but I did. The topic is sort of inescapable these days both because the marketing campaign which…

stones and cans and comic books in a kettle One night, a couple of years ago while I was making dinner, I heard an an interview with the singer-songwriter Allison Russell on the radio. I was unaware of her work until then and at one point it was mentioned that she grew up in Montreal. That was nice but not overly suprising. To quote the early episode of This American Life devoted to Canadians: We walk among you. Then she mentioned that she'd gone to the same high (secondary) school I went to:…