ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #1

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared that we came this way for a brief moment. - Harlan Ellison, "Palladin of the Lost Hour." (in the 2024 collection Harlan's Ellison' Greatest Hits)

 We live our lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty -- the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet (1). - Popova, Maria. The Universe in Verse: 15 portals to Wonder Through Science & Poetry. Storey Publishing, 2024. 

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Burton, Vernon and Kenneth Mack. "We the People: Equal Protection." Throughline (August 15, 2024) ["The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It's shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or not: Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, plus other Supreme Court cases that legalized same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, access to birth control — they've all been built on the back of the 14th. The amendment was ratified after the Civil War, and it's packed full of lofty phrases like due process, equal protection, and liberty. But what do those words really guarantee us? Today on Throughline's We the People: How the 14th Amendment has remade America — and how America has remade the 14th."]

Cobb, Paul, et al. "The Battle for Jerusalem." Throughline (October 3, 2024) ["Today, the city of Jerusalem is seen as so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. And that struggle goes back centuries. Nearly a thousand years ago, European Christians embarked on what became known as the First Crusade: an unprecedented, massive military campaign to take Jerusalem from Muslims and claim the holy city for themselves. They won a shocking victory – but it didn't last. A Muslim leader named Saladin raised an army to take the city back. What happened next was one of the most consequential battles of the Middle Ages: A battle that would forever change the course of relations between the Islamic and Christian worlds, Europe and The Middle East. In this episode, we travel back to the front lines of that battle to explore a simple question: What is Jerusalem worth?Guests: Paul Cobb, Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades
Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway University of London and author of The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin
Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion and Middle East Studies at Smith College and author of Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology
Tom Madden, Professor of History and Director of the Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University, and author of The Concise History of the Crusades."]

Cole, Nicki Lisa. "Cultural Hegemony." Thought Co. (August 13, 2024) ["Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldviews, and behaviors of the rest of society. Cultural hegemony functions by framing the worldview of the ruling class, and the social and economic structures that embody it, as just, legitimate, and designed for the benefit of all, even though these structures may only benefit the ruling class. This kind of power is distinct from rule by force, as in a military dictatorship, because it allows the ruling class to exercise authority using the "peaceful" means of ideology and culture."]

Dorian, M.J. "William Blake • On Vision's Wing • Part 2: Innocence & Experience." Creative Codex (September 30, 2024) ["What makes Blake's Songs of Innocence & Experience a work of genius? What is the nature of vision? What is Blake's concept of fourfold vision? Is it even graspable by the intellect? We will make the attempt. Join us for a deep dive into all of this and much more."]

Fontainelle, Earl. "Esoteric Orientalism Part I: Ancient Barbarian Sages." The Secret History of Western Orientalism #8 (October 11, 2017) ["When we talk about the origins of western thought, we are nearly always talking about the classical Greeks. But the Greeks themselves had a curious habit of attributing their own wisdom in the sciences, in philosophy, and in other arts such as magic and astrology, to their neighbors in the Near East. This episode is the first in a series of two podcasts examining the troubled relationship that the Greeks had with what they perceived as their more ancient contemporaries. Concentrating on Mesopotamia and Egypt, we also look at the Indian Brahmans and the Jews, all through the Greek lens which informs the later western esoteric traditions. Along the way, we discuss the influential theory of ‘orientalism’ propounded by Edward Said, considering some of its drawbacks and advantages, Greek chauvinism, which considered all non-Greeks to be ‘barbarians’, alongside the troubled admiration which the Greeks had for other cultures, The process by which esoteric traditions often bolster their claims by constructing an ‘authenticating apparatus’ of ancient wisdom, The ancient sages Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Moses through Greek esoteric eyes, and The concept of ‘Platonic Orientalism’ which has been coined to describe this phenomenon of appropriating ‘barbarian wisdom’ among the Platonists of late antiquity and beyond."]

Jashinsky, Emily. "MAGA Is Not as United as You Think." The Ezra Klein Show (September 27, 2024) ["I’ve been fascinated by the problem Donald Trump faces with Project 2025. Trump has been caught in an awkward position, disavowing the document itself, but unable to fully disavow the people behind it. So I wanted to do an episode not just on Trump, but on the unwieldy coalition that has formed around him — what is sometimes referred to as the “New Right.” Emily Jashinsky is the D.C. correspondent and host of “Undercurrents” for UnHerd, a co-host of “Counter Points” with Ryan Grim, and a former editor at The Federalist, one of the most influential sites among conservatives today. She’s described herself as someone with “a foot in both camps” of the “Old Right” and the “New Right.” So I thought she’d be a great guide to understanding how the conservative movement has changed. In this conversation, we discuss the key differences between the Old Right and the New Right; what the New Right wants; why New Right thinkers are so interested in the concepts of “modernity” and “virtue”; and what influence the New Right might have in a second Trump administration."]

Margulis, Lynn. "Symbiosis is Everything." Against Everyone (November 19, 2019) ["This is the most important episode of AEWCH for me. In it I talk with my friend and intellectual mentor, biologist and geoscientist Lynn Margulis. This is, I believe, the last recorded discussion with Lynn before her death from a stroke on November 22, 2011. Lynn was a profound intellect, and, I believe, the most important thinker in the last 50 years. With James Lovelock, she developed the Gaia theory - that organisms interact with the non-living aspects of the Earth to regulate Earth systems like cloud cover, oceanic salinity, atmospheric gas abundance, and more. She also proved and popularized the notion that organelles in nucleated cells are symbioses of bacterial mergers. Along with her son Dorion Sagan (from her marriage to Carl Sagan), she developed a new theory of evolution, symbiogenesis, which boldly asserts, and with ample evidence, that new species arise out of symbiotic mergers with bacteria, not through random genetic mutation-meets-natural selection. The episode is a wide-ranging exploration of Lynn's work and thought; ... I've started this episode off with my essay, As Above, So Below, which I wrote in the days after her death. The essay appears in the book Lynn Margulis: The Life And Legacy Of A Scientific Rebel. Feel free to skip past the intro if you're familiar with her work, or to listen to it as a primer afterward, to get your bearings in the dizzying array of names and scientific concepts on the episode. "]

Smith, Peter Godfrey. "Understanding Minds." Philosophy Bites (January 2, 2025) ["Peter Godfrey Smith is famous for his work on understanding the minds of other animals, particularly octopuses. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast he discusses animal minds with Nigel Warburton."]

Stanley, Jason. "Erasing History." Converging Dialogues (November 3, 2024) ["... Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Jason Stanley about the importance of preserving history. They talked about why authoritarians attempt to erase history, fascist ideas, nationalism, immigration, book burning, classical education, how to defend history, and many other topics. Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University and was also Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). He has his PhD in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and his BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seven books, which include How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them , and the newest book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future."]

West, Stephen. "Why a meritocracy is corrosive to society. (Michael Sandel)." Philosophize This! #205 (July 1, 2024) ["Today we talk about the dark side of meritocracy, the effects it has on the way people see each other, the dialectic of pride and humility, education reform, and a rethinking of the way we see government officials."]

Wilkerson, Isabel. “We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be.” On Being (March 9, 2023) ["In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson’s eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings “caste” into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but “caste is the bones.” And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that."Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.]

Douglas Rushkoff: Media Theory/Digital Technologies/Techno-Feudalism (Azimuths)

[Team Human is Rushkoff's latest project and title of his new book - he is host of the podcast, starting off each time with a monologue on relevant issues (why the various episodes are listed here), and a participant in all of the episodes]

Douglas Rushkoff's Substack

Rushkoff (His personal website)

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Dewey-Hagborg, Heather and Douglas Rushkoff. "Stranger Visions." Team Human #8 (October 4, 2016) ["... the brilliant and terrifying artist and bio-hacker Heather Dewey- Hagborg. As a transdisciplinary artist, Heather explores the intersection of science, art and biopolitics. Heather recently made the headlines with a project called Stranger Visions, in which she collected random human genetic material left behind in the detritus of public spaces to generate portrait masks of strangers using a process called forensic DNA phenotyping. In another recent project, Radical Love: Chelsea Manning, Heather again used this process of DNA phenotyping to create a series of 3D portraits of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who is not allowed to be photographed while in prison. Radical Love is both subversive and thought-provoking as it calls attention to Manning’s incarceration as well as issues of gender stereotypes and identity."]

Gokey, Thomas and Astra Taylor. "Debt Collective." Team Human #1 (July 29, 2016) ["Joining team human are debt resisters Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey. Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. Her films include the documentaries Zizek! and the Examined Life.Taylor’s recent book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age takes a hard look at the persisting and embedded inequalities in today’s digital media landscape. Thomas Gokey is a visual artist, adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and activist. Gokey’s piece entitled, Total Amount of Money Rendered in Exchange for a Masters of Fine Arts Degree to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper reimagined his own student debt as art. Both Thomas Gokey and Astra Taylor seized the momentum of Occupy Wall Street to help launch a direct action campaign of debt resistance. Working through the collective force of Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee, and the Debt Collective, Gokey and Taylor are fighting back against the economic injustice of debt in America."]

Gorbis, Marina and Douglas Rushkoff. "At PDF 2016." Team Human #7 (September 27, 2016) ["...recorded live on the floor of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum, where we caught up with Marina Gorbis, executive director to the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Marina joins Team Human to help us see how a utilitarian value set has been embedded into our society and its technologies. Together Marina and Douglas discuss those ambiguous and even anomalous qualities of being human, while looking to a future that embraces humanity as something greater than mere data points. This episode also features Rushkoff’s closing talk at the Personal Democracy Forum."]

Horowitz, Mitch. "Occultism and the Fight for Reality." Team Human (December 18, 2024) [MB: This is an interesting discussion around the concept of "collective occultism" as a form of resistance to monologic discourses that deny alternative ways of thinking/perceiving/being.] 

Maxwell, Richard. "Greening the Media." Team Human #2 (January 2016) ["Playing for Team Human today is Professor Richard Maxwell. Richard Maxwell is a political economist of media. His research begins at the intersection of politics and economics to analyze the global media, their social and cultural impact, and the policies that regulate their reach and operations. Richard has published on a wide array of media topics. Recent work includes The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media (Editor) Media and the Ecological Crisis (co-editor) and Greening the Media with Toby Miller. In this episode of Team Human, Professor Maxwell provides an eye opening account of the environmental damage caused by media technology, the myth of a “Post Industrial” society, and what we must do create a world sustainable for people."]

Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coronavirus Is Making Me Believe in the Power of the Internet Again." Medium (March 16, 2020) ["Online resources provide a much better tool for understanding COVID-19 than broadcast news."]

---. "Economics is Not a Natural Science." Edge (August 11, 2009)

---. "The Epidemic of Civic Amnesia Is Spreading to Liberals." Medium (November 14, 2018)

---. "How We All Became Russia's Useful Idiots." Medium (December 5, 2018) ["Nationalism may have started as a side effect of fake news, but it’s quickly becoming the new American way."]

---. "I ditched Facebook in 2013, and it's been fine." CNN (March 21, 2018)

---. "Introduction: They Say." Coercion: Why We Listen To What 'They' Say. Penguin Putnam, 1999 (Excerpt)

---. Merchants of Cool (Frontline: Season 19, Episode 5, 2001)

---. "Merchants of Cool Interview." Frontline (2001)

---. "The only fix for Facebook is a competitor that puts users first." CNN (April 11, 2018)

---. "On the Contradictory Numbers of Contemporary Capitalism." Keen On (March 27, 2020)

---. "Our reptile brains were triggered by MAGA hat video." CNN (January 22, 2019)

---. "Survival of the Richest: The Wealthy are Plotting to Leave Us Behind." One Zero (July 5, 2018)

---. "This Game is Not Reality." (Substack: November 11, 2024) ["The political institutions that seem to be failing us now are just one symptom of a civilization whose many institutions are no longer up to the challenge of contemporary, digital life. Their inconsistencies and compromised value systems simply can’t hold up to the stresses of this time. How can we discuss border policy and immigration when the essential premise of the “nation state” is itself an intrinsically unjust construction? People who live on one side of an imaginary line are entitled to basic human rights that are to be denied those who live on the other side? No amount of policy can correct for the injustices of neoliberalism, nationalism, or colonialism. So we can’t pretend that any political solution is more than duct tape. While a good one percent of us might choose to task ourselves with party politics at this moment, I think it’s ultimately a distraction from the matter at hand. Rather than spend all of our effort at getting the right person in a seat of power, many of us can do things that make it less important who controls the strings of government. I’m not saying it’s not important; I’m just saying that presidential politics may not be our primary means of lessening the decree. Rather than focusing so much on the institutions that are failing us, what if we take on the functions that our institutions are failing to execute? The more engaged we are in mutual aid, the less our impoverished neighbors need to depend on the institutionalized social safety net for their food and shelter. The more we engage our troubled friends in our own and less fortunate communities, the less they will need to turn to welfare, mental health clinics, homeless shelters, and other failing national programs."]

---. "We Were Naive to Think Digital Media Would Be Democratic." Medium (April 16, 2020)

---. "We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros." The Guardian (November 25, 2023) 

---. "Winning Is for Losers: Enspiral and the Politics of Consent." Medium (November 7, 2018) ["How a collective in New Zealand is pointing the way to social change from the bottom up."]

Rushkoff, Douglas interviewed by Seth Godin. "Book Launch: A Live Human Team Conversation." Human Team #117 (January 23, 2019) ["Not the typical book reading, Douglas and Seth use this live event as an opportunity to engage with each other and audience in a spontaneous, free-form Team Human conversation. It’s a talk launched by a question that cuts to the heart of the book itself – How have technologies meant to connect us come to alienate and atomize us instead? Douglas and Seth share why we must reclaim connection and find the others. “It’s not too late! We can retrieve what it means to be human in a digital age.” Join Douglas, Seth and the live Betaworks Studios audience for this invocation of the spirit of community and solidarity so desperately needed in this pivotal moment in the human story."]

Stark, Kio. "Talk to Strangers." Team Human #6 (September 20, 2016) ["Kio’s new book When Strangers Meet explores the transformative power to be found in person-to-person interactions with strangers. Kio describes how even a brief interaction can foster empathy and open up the possibility for meaningful human connection. Kio and Douglas challenge the unwritten rules of social interaction and talk about how basic human connection can spark positive social change."]

Team Human. W.W. Norton & Co., 2019.

Tucker, Ian. "Douglas Rushkoff: 'I’m thinking it may be good to be off social media altogether.'" The Guardian (February 12, 2016) ["The media critic on the malfunctioning tech economy, digital detoxes and why Facebook is unhygienic."]

David Graeber: Anthropology/Economics/History (Azimuths)

  David Graeber (Website on him and his work)

David Graeber Institute ["We believe that a different social narrative has started to emerge which unleashes the political imaginary and reshapes public common sense. It is leading many people throughout the world to challenge the status quo through concrete actions, projects or structures that are making our societies socially and ecologically just and sustainable. The David Graeber Institute (DGI) provides a platform for projects related both directly to David Graeber’s legacy, developing his ideas and for projects that will take on a life of their own, continuing and contributing to his work."]

"There are many mysteries of the academy which would be appropriate objects of ethnographic analysis. One question that never ceases to intrigue me is tenure. How could a system ostensibly designed to give scholars the security to be able to say dangerous things have been transformed into a system so harrowing and psychologically destructive that, by the the time scholars find themselves in a secure position, 99 percent of them have forgotten what it would even mean to have a dangerous idea? (10)" - David Graeber (2017)

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Calhoun, Craig and David Graeber. "The Democracy Project." The London School of Economics and Political Science." (April 30, 2013)

Deloria, Philip, et al. "A New History of Humanity." Open Source (August 11, 2022) ["Giant questions this hour, and a slew of fresh answers: Where do we humans come from? Who are we, after all? Where are we going? Was our pre-history a Garden of Eden, or a nasty war of survival, or some of both? Are we human beings good or evil, by the way? Pretty much the same, the world around, or many different varieties? An anthropologist and an archaeologist walked into a bar, so to speak—into an endless chain of emails, in fact, and produced a bestseller, chock full of Stone Age history and modern science. Their book is titled The Dawn of Everything. A main argument is that we’ve been one free-wheeling, improvisational species for fifty thousand years. A main question might be: when and how did we get to feel so stuck in this 21st century? Make way this hour for the news of our human pre-history. Could it be: that our Stone Age ancestors were just as smart as we are, as playful and strong—if anything more inventive and adaptive than we, as they settled a planet and seeded a great variety of civilizations 10,000 years ago? The questions come from a surprise bestseller, The Dawn of Everything: it’s a 600-page brick of a book by an anthropologist and an archeologist, sharing fresh evidence and best guesses in A New History of Humanity. The sadness in reading it is that the American co-author David Graeber died as he was finishing the great work of his life. The relief is that his writing partner in London, David Wengrow, is still grappling with the puzzles they posed."]

Evans, Ellen and Jon Moses. "Interview with David Graeber." The White Review (December 2011)

Glaser, Eliane. "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber review – the myth of capitalist efficiency." The Guardian (May 25, 2018)

Graeber, David. "America's Kurdish allies risk being wiped out – by NATO." The Guardian (February 1, 2019)

---. "Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges." N + 1 (February 9, 2012)

---. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011 [PDF file of the Book: also available Here]

---. "Debt: The First Five Thousand Years." Mute (February 10, 2009)

---. Direct Action: An Ethnography Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009. [Entire book in PDF format]

---. "I didn't understand how widespread rape was. Then the penny dropped." The Guardian (November 5, 2017)

---. "‘I had to guard an empty room’: The rise of the pointless job." The Guardian (May 4, 2018)

---. "Occupy and anarchism's gift of democracy. The US imagines itself a great democracy, yet most Americans despise its politics. Which is why direct democracy inspires them." The Guardian (November 15, 2011)

---. "Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots: The 'Occupy' movement is one of several in American history to be based on anarchist principles." Al Jazeera (November 30, 2011)

---. "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit." The Baffler #19 (March 2012)

---. "On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time." School of Visual Arts (January 19, 2012)

---. "On Inequality and Human History." Against the Grain (November 21, 2018) ["Open any world history book and you’ll read that the Neolithic Revolution was the key turning point in human history, when hunter gatherers gave up roaming in small egalitarian tribes and settled down to farm. Out of that, civilization was born, with all the benefits and ills connected to it: the rise of cities, the emergence of the state, inequality, and class society. But, according to anthropologist David Graeber, that tale is not based on fact. Graeber interrogates this chronicle of paradise lost — and much more."]

---. "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs." libcom (August 20, 2013)

---. "Roy Bhaskar Obituary." The Guardian (December 4, 2014) ["One of the most influential voices in the philosophy of science and a political revolutionary."]

---. "The Shock of Victory." UK Indymedia (October 15, 2007)

---. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. Fararr, Straus, and Giroux, 2024. ["Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews. "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future—to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time— inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker."]

---. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, 2015.

---. "What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?" The Baffler #24 (2014)

---. "Why are world leaders backing this brutal attack against Kurdish Afrin?" The Guardian (February 23, 2018)

Graeber, David and Astra Taylor. "Democracy May Not Exist, But We Will Miss It When It's Gone." At the Bookshop (December 16, 2019) ["In her latest book, Astra Taylor – ‘a rare public intellectual, utterly committed to asking humanity’s most profound questions yet entirely devoid of pretensions’ (Naomi Klein) – argues that democracy is not just in crisis, but that real democracy, inclusive and egalitarian, has never existed. Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (Verso) aims to re-examine what we mean by democracy, what we want from it, and understand why it is so hard to realize."]

Graeber, David and David Wengrow. "How to Change the Course of Human History (at least, the part that's already happened)." Eurozine (March 2, 2018)

Purves, Miranda. "You’re Not Just Imagining It. Your Job Is Absolute BS." Bloomberg (May 15, 2018)

Robinson, Andrew. "Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power." Cease Fire (September 9, 2011) ["The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change. The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse. This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil. The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.""]

Shaviro, Steven. "Anarchism and Principle of Play: Steven Shaviro reviews David Graeber’s posthumous essay collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World." Los Angeles Review of Books (November 15, 2024) ["The volume’s title comes from an earlier book by Graeber: in The Utopia of Rules, he wrote that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Such rhetoric is typical for Graeber: a phrase that sounds grandiose (“the ultimate, hidden truth”) is brought down to earth, since the “secret” really consists of things that we already do on an everyday basis. Graeber is unusually optimistic for an anti-capitalist activist: he seeks to remind us that we ourselves have ultimately constructed the forms and institutions that oppress us, which means that these structures of social and economic life have no necessity to them but can be reorganized in multiple ways. Some of these ways may in fact be substantially better than anything we have now."]

 Taylor, Astra, et al. "David Graeber, 1961–2020." The New York Review of Books  (September 5, 2020) ["David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died aged fifty-nine on September 2, 2020. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues."]

Velmet, Aro. "An Interview with David Graeber: Anarchism, work and bureaucracy." Eurozine (May 9, 2017)

The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum - Music Mix #37

Fela Kuti; Freak Slug; Salo Panto; New Dreams; Day Dreams; Black Pumas; Kristin Hersh; Mr. Vale's Math Class; TV on the Radio; The Tamed West; King Black Acid; Kim Deal; Jimi Hendrix; Erin Sliney; Robyn Hitchcock; Michael Kiwanuka; Father John Misty; Say Lou Lou; Devendra Barnhardt; Blake Mills, Beverly Glenn-Copeland; Lightning Bug; Benet; Faye Webster; Bill Withers; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Louis Armstrong; Blackalicious; Ben Harper; Camp Saint Helene; Angel Olsen; Jenny Don't and the Spurs; Mobilities; Lo Fives; Culpeppers; Rascal Miles; An Invisible Jet; Robert Wynia; Peter Cornett; Atomic Momma; Camper van Beethoven; Cracker; The Macks; The Black Flash; Time Theft

 The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum - Music Mix #37

Howard Zinn: History/Political Science (Azimuths)

 As a teacher, I'm not interested in just reproducing class after class of graduates who will get out, become successful, and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What we must do--whether we teach or write or make films--is educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world. (15)

---Zinn, Howard. "Stories Hollywood Never Tells." The Sun #343 (July 2004): 12-15.

Biographies/Archives

(August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010)


Zinn Education Project

Democracy Now: Howard Zinn Interviews

Bill Moyers' Journal: Howard Zinn

Voices of a People's History: A Tribute to Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn Digital Collection


Resources by and about Howard Zinn


Arnove, Anthony. "Anthology for Change: Howard Zinn's Impassioned Progressive Speeches Span Four Decades." TruthOut (November 28, 2012)

Arnove, Anthony, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Alice Walker. "Howard Zinn (1922-2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian." Democracy Now (January 28, 2010)

Arnove, Anthony, et al. "Howard Zinn Read-In at Purdue University." We Are Many (November 5, 2013)

Atwan, Helene. "On the Loss of Howard Zinn." (January 28, 2010)

Benton, Michael and Michael Marchman. "So long—it’s been good to know ya: Remembering Howard Zinn." North of Center (February 13, 2010)

Kreisler, Harry. "Howard Zinn." Conversations with History (2001: posted by University of California Television on Youtube on June 12, 2008)

Schell, Jonathan, Marilyn Young and Howard Zinn. "Vietnam War Architect Robert McNamara Dies at 93: A Look at His Legacy." Democracy Now (July 7, 2009)

Vodovnik, Ziga. "An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism: Rebels Against Tyranny." Counterpunch (May 12, 2008)

Whitney, Joel. "A People’s History of Howard Zinn." Guernica (October 27, 2004)

Zinn, Howard. "America's Blinders." Progressive (April 2006)

---. "Anarchism: Rebels Against Tyranny." Revolution by the Book (January 28, 2010)

---. Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology. Harper Perennial, 1990.

---. "Don't Despair About the Supreme Court." The Progressive (November 2005)

---. "Holy Wars." Democracy Now (January 1, 2010)

---. "In Depth with Howard Zinn." C-SPAN (September 1, 2002)

---. "The Myth of American Exceptionalism." MIT Video Productions (Posted on Youtube: July 29, 2019)

---. "The Omissions of U.S. History." The Tavis Smiley Show (November 27, 2003)

---. "On Anarchism and Marxism." An excerpt from the DVD Theory and Practice: Conversations With Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn: posted on YouTube January 29, 2010)

---. "A People's History of Empire." (Video on the Graphic Novel by Zinn posted by the publisher Henry Holt: March 28, 2008)

---. A People's History of the United States History is a Weapon (Entire book posted on the site: No Date)

---. "The Problem is Civil Obedience." (1970) The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories Press; Posted on Third World Traveler)

---. "War and Social Justice." Democracy Now (January 2, 2009)

---. "Why Teach a People's History." (Video of talk given to 2008 National Conference for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference)

---. "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train." Books of Our Time (Posted on Youtube by the The Massachusetts School of Law: May 19, 2010)

The Big Lebowski (USA: Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)

 

The Big Lebowski (USA: Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998: 117 mins)

Ager, Rob. "Greatest Screen Heroes: The Dude in The Big Lebowski." (Posted on Youtube: September 7, 2014)

Beyl, Cameron. "The Coen Brothers." The Directors Series (7 Video Essays: 2017)

Brandt, Jimmy. "Does the Dude Abide by the Tao?: A comparative study of Dudeism and the Tao Te Ching." The Dudespaper (August 3, 2016)

Collins, K. Austin, et al. "Ballad of the Coen Brothers." The Film Comment Podcast (September 26, 2018) ["“In their films—especially Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, and Inside Llewyn Davis—there’s always the sense that the deck is stacked against us and that we’re the authors of our own misery, a doubly discomfiting, Camusian view that perfectly matches their aesthetic approach, an overwhelming omniscience that results in a kind of bravura melancholy,” Michael Koresky writes in his feature about Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in our September/October issue. This week, Koresky, FSLC Editorial and Creative Director, moderates a special Film Comment Podcast featuring three more Coeniacs in conversation about the brothers’ dazzling 30-year-plus body of work, from greatest hits to lesser-known ballads: K. Austin Collins, film critic at Vanity Fair; Aliza Ma, head of programming at Metrograph; and Adam Nayman, Toronto-based critic and author of the new book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together (Abrams)."]

Coughlin, Paul. "Great Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen." Senses of Cinema (May 2003)

Ebert, Roger. "Great Movie: The Big Lebowski." The Chicago Sun-Times (March 10, 2010)

Jacobs, Tom. "Scholars and The Big Lebowski: Deconstructing the Dude." Pacific Standard (July 11, 2011)

Kerr, James. "Psychological Analysis of the Dude." The Dudespaper (August 16, 2009)

Mac, Mark. "That's Fucking Interesting, Man." The Dudespaper (February 16, 2013)

Orr, Christopher. "30 Years of Coens: The Big Lebowski." The Atlantic (September 16, 2014)

Swash, Rosie. "My Favorite Film: The Big Lebowski." The Guardian (November 2, 2011)

Tyree, J.M. and Ben Walters. "The Big Lebowski." The Library of Congress (ND)

Make Love, Not War - Music Mix #36

 Kula Shaker; The Liminanas; Amythyst Kiah; Black Pumas; Taylor Swift;The Coup; Nilufer Yanya; Angel Olsen; Death Cab for Cutie; The XX; The Stone Roses; Fontaines D.C.; Blur; Gnarls Barkley; Karen O.; Danger Mouse; Fleet Foxes; The Beatles; The Flaming Lips; King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard; Pixies; Margo Price; Eivor; The The; The Fur Coasts; The Pool Boys; Blitzen Trapper; Sea Lemon; Soccer Mommy; Lady Blackbird; Crystal Murray; Kit Sebastian; Kelly Finnegan; Aaron Frazer; Jungle; Jack White; Jon Hopkins

Make Love, Not War 

Capitalisn't: Podcast - Economics/Political Economy (Shooting Azimuths)

Part of ENG 102: Concepts, Theories, and Thinkers

 Capitalisn't is a podcast hosted by Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean: "Is capitalism the engine of destruction or the engine of prosperity? On this podcast we talk about the ways capitalism is—or more often isn’t—working in our world today. Hosted by Vanity Fair contributing editor, Bethany McLean and world renowned economics professor Luigi Zingales, we explain how capitalism can go wrong, and what we can do to fix it." 

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Ahmari, Sohrab. "When Capitalism Becomes Tyranny." Capitalisn't (November 2, 2023) ["In his new book, Sohrab Ahmari argues that the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few corporations has created a new form of tyranny in America. "Coercion is far more widespread in supposedly noncoercive societies than we would like to think—provided we pay attention to private power and admit the possibility of private coercion," he writes. Ahmari, founder and editor of Compact magazine, joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his book, "Tyranny Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty--and What to Do About It." In this episode, they discuss the complex relationship between capitalism, personal freedoms, and political power. The conversation sheds light on what classical liberalism ignores, how today's Right is discovering what the Left may have forgotten, and ultimately, where today's political Left and Right may be able to work together."]

Coffee, John C. "How Corporations Get Away With Crime." Capitalisn't (July 22, 2022) ["When it comes to corporate rulebreaking, data from 2002 to 2016 reveals that the US government arranged more than 400 "deferred protection agreements" as a means of deterrence. Under these, a company acknowledges what it did was wrong, pays a fine, promises not to misbehave for a period of time -- and thus is largely let off the hook. Columbia Law School Professor and author of "Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement", John C. Coffee, says these have done little to deter future wrongdoing. Coffee joins Luigi and Bethany, both of whom have also extensively researched and exposed corporate wrongdoing, to discuss how to reform aspects of enforcement, such as self-reporting mechanisms, internal investigations, independent external auditors, whistleblowers, and even shame and humiliation."]

Faux, Zeke. "Crypto: SBF and Beyond." Capitalisn't (November 16, 2023) ["In his new book "Number Go Up," Bloomberg News investigative reporter Zeke Faux takes readers on a wild ride through the world of cryptocurrency, from its origins in the dark corners of the internet, its meteoric rise to mainstream popularity, and finally its equally precipitous fall. A few days after the 'convicted' verdict in the trial of beleaguered crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Faux joins Bethany and Luigi to make a case for why we should judge cryptocurrency by what it has done and not what it can do. They discuss whether it is too soon to write crypto off, what larger commentary it offers about capitalism, and why Luigi, who teaches a popular MBA course on fintech, feels "crypto is money that can only be created by computer scientists who don't understand history.""]

Haidt, Jonathan. "The Economic Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood." Capitalisn't (July 18, 2024) ["In one of this year's bestselling books, "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness," New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that today's childhoods spent under the influence of smartphones and overprotective parenting has led to the reported explosion in cases of teenage anxiety and depression. He calls this process a "three-act play": the diminishment of trust in our communities, the loss of a play-based childhood, and the arrival of a hyper-connected world. Haidt also believes the problem is solvable. On this episode of Capitalisn't, he joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss parenting, learning, adolescence, and in an age where Congress won't act on regulation, his four proposed solutions to break social media's "collective action trap" on children. But are his solutions feasible? How do we weigh their costs, benefits, limitations, risks, and the roadblocks to their implementation? What are the consequences of an anxious generation for our economy — and what can we really do about it?"]

Ahmari, Sohrab. "When Capitalism Becomes Tyranny." Capitalisn't (November 2, 2023) ["In his new book, Sohrab Ahmari argues that the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few corporations has created a new form of tyranny in America. "Coercion is far more widespread in supposedly noncoercive societies than we would like to think—provided we pay attention to private power and admit the possibility of private coercion," he writes. Ahmari, founder and editor of Compact magazine, joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his book, "Tyranny Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty--and What to Do About It." In this episode, they discuss the complex relationship between capitalism, personal freedoms, and political power. The conversation sheds light on what classical liberalism ignores, how today's Right is discovering what the Left may have forgotten, and ultimately, where today's political Left and Right may be able to work together."]

Coffee, John C. "How Corporations Get Away With Crime." Capitalisn't (July 22, 2022) ["When it comes to corporate rulebreaking, data from 2002 to 2016 reveals that the US government arranged more than 400 "deferred protection agreements" as a means of deterrence. Under these, a company acknowledges what it did was wrong, pays a fine, promises not to misbehave for a period of time -- and thus is largely let off the hook. Columbia Law School Professor and author of "Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement", John C. Coffee, says these have done little to deter future wrongdoing. Coffee joins Luigi and Bethany, both of whom have also extensively researched and exposed corporate wrongdoing, to discuss how to reform aspects of enforcement, such as self-reporting mechanisms, internal investigations, independent external auditors, whistleblowers, and even shame and humiliation."]

Faux, Zeke. "Crypto: SBF and Beyond." Capitalisn't (November 16, 2023) ["In his new book "Number Go Up," Bloomberg News investigative reporter Zeke Faux takes readers on a wild ride through the world of cryptocurrency, from its origins in the dark corners of the internet, its meteoric rise to mainstream popularity, and finally its equally precipitous fall. A few days after the 'convicted' verdict in the trial of beleaguered crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Faux joins Bethany and Luigi to make a case for why we should judge cryptocurrency by what it has done and not what it can do. They discuss whether it is too soon to write crypto off, what larger commentary it offers about capitalism, and why Luigi, who teaches a popular MBA course on fintech, feels "crypto is money that can only be created by computer scientists who don't understand history.""]

Mullins, Brody. "How Lobbying Led to Crony Capitalism." Capitalisn't (October 24, 2024) ["Mullins is the co-author (along with his brother Luke, also an investigative reporter) of The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government. Brody joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss how corporations ranging from Genentech to Google participate in the invisible but massively influential lobbying industry to bend government policy toward their favor. Together, the three trace the roots and evolution of political lobbying from the 1970s to now and explore how it penetrates and leverages other spheres of society to abet its operations. How are academia and the media complicit in this ecosystem of influence operations? How has lobbying adapted to the changing attitudes of Americans towards Big Business? How might it change under either a Harris or Trump administration and beyond?"]

Rodrik, Dani. "The New Economics of Industrial Policy." Capitalisn't (August 1, 2024) ["Harvard professor of international political economy Dani Rodrik has long been skeptical of what he calls "hyperglobalization," or an advanced level of interconnectedness between countries and their economies. He first introduced his theory of the "globalization trilemma" in the late 1990s, which states that no country can simultaneously support democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic integration. At the time when he proposed his trilemma, Rodrik was considered an outcast. However, economists and policymakers have come to accept his theory as governments seek to address populism, trade imbalances, and uneven growth through renewed interest in industrial policy, or government efforts to improve the performance of key business sectors. Rodrik joins co-hosts Bethany and Luigi to discuss changing attitudes towards globalization: its distributional effects, how it affects politics, and how it is still searching for a narrative consistent between academic circles and the media. Together, the three of them discuss what role corporate America should play in our world restructured by economic and political populism and if economics is getting too far away from the rest of the social sciences when it comes to shaping industrial policy and creating the jobs of tomorrow."]

Schaake, Marietje. "Can Democracy Coexist with Big Tech." Capitalisn't (September 26, 2024) ["International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at the expense of the public and democratic institutions, Schaake writes. Schaake joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss proposals for reversing this shift of power and maintaining the balance between innovation and regulation in the digital age. If a "tech coup" is really underway, how did we get here? And if so, how can we safeguard democracy and individual rights in an era of algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism? Marietje Schaake’s new book, “The Tech Coup: Saving Democracy From Silicon Valley."]

Ziblatt, Daniel. "How Big Money Changed the Democratic Game." Capitalisn't (January 2, 2024) ["Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, and the co-author (with Steven Levitsky) of several bestselling books, including How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Ziblatt writes from the position that what defines strong democracies is free and fair competition for power, inclusive participation, and a package of civil liberties that make those first two conditions possible. 2024 saw voters in more than 60 countries go to the polls—and deliver difficult outcomes for incumbents and traditional political parties. This week, Ziblatt joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the fate of democracy after 2024. They explore how big money and corporate power have destabilized democracies worldwide by interfering with the conditions for free and fair competition for power. The consequence has been the movement of voters toward political extremes, which in turn can often threaten economic growth, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Nevertheless, should we judge the strength of democracy by process or outcome? Does democracy still thrive when the people vote for undemocratic politicians and parties? Together, Ziblatt and our co-hosts discuss how to curb global democratic decline by realigning government away from the interests of corporations or big money and back to those of the people."]