Dialogic Cinephilia - June 3. 2020

Casta, Laetitia, Lily-Rose Depp, and Louis Garrel. "On A Faithful Man." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (July 18, 2019)

Craven, Jasper. "Veterans of Domestic Wars." The Baffler #51 (April 2020) ["On the home front, vets battle for decent health care."]

Enzo and Eve. "Wakanda Deferred." Hammer & Camera #16 (July 12, 2019) ["Enzo and Eve of the Marxist "propaganda circle" Unity & Struggle to discuss their article, "Black on Both Sides: Grappling with BLM in Movies", and to review the past year of Black cinema. Among the films discussed are Black Panther, Blackkklansman, Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting, and Us."]

Kumanyika, Chenjerai. "Getting Real About the Job of Police: A Letter to Barack Obama." The Intercept (June 3, 2020)

Moss, Candida. "Trump and the Christian Persecution Complex." On the Media (June 3, 2020) ["On Monday, President Trump stood outside St. John's Episcopal Church, which had caught fire the day prior in protests for racial justice. When he brandished a Bible before photographers, Trump knew exactly what message he was sending: Christianity is under siege and the president is the defender of the faith. Never mind the fact that peaceful protesters, clergy among them, were driven from the area minutes before with tear gas to make way for the photoshoot. The narrative of Christianity under attack is a familiar one. Just a few weeks ago, Trump declared that houses of worship should open amid the pandemic on the grounds of religious liberty — despite the public health risk. But it turns out, the myth of Christian persecution can be traced far further back than the Culture Wars. In fact, according to Candida Moss, Christian historians coined the idea that to be persecuted was to be righteous in the 4th Century and they exaggerated claims that Christians were persecuted in the first place. Moss is a professor of theology and religion at Birmingham University in the U.K., and author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. Moss spoke to Bob just after Trump has announced his call for churches to open. In this week's Pod Extra she explains how Christian history has been revised for political means, from the early church to present day."]

Scott, James C. "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States." New Books in Political Science (June 3, 2020) ["We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place. James Scott joins us ... to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication and reproduction, why it was once good to be a barbarian, the art of provocation, the views of critics, and, human and animal species relations and zoonoses in our epidemiological past and pandemic present."]

Sottek, T.C. "Caught on camera, police explode in rage and violence across the US." The Verge (May 31, 2020)

West, Stephen. "Richard Rorty." Philosophize This! 142 (May 1, 2020) ["Some people called Rorty a postmodernist…which would USUALLY place him in staunch opposition to anything that even SOUNDS like the word Enlightenment. Like EXCITEMENT! But let me tell ya…Rorty was a VERY exciting man. He REJECTED the title of postmodernist and most titles for that matter. He operated in a very unique realm for a thinker where like a TYPICAL post-structuralist he didn’t believe in any sort of grand narrative that could explain away the universe…but yet he was STILL…a die hard, card carrying fan…of the PROJECT of the Enlightenment overall. See in a world where there are so many 20th century thinkers hating on the Enlightenment…here is a guy some viewed as a post-structuralist, coming to its defense. Let me explain WHY he would DO something like this."]

---. "Socrates and the Sophists." Philosophize This! #3 (June 23, 2013) ["This week we talk about the prosperity of Athens and how it led to the rise and ideas of a group of philosopher teachers called the Sophists, we tied up some loose ends and helped put all that we've learned in the last two episodes into context with a graph of the Presocratics, and we ended by talking about a man named Socrates."]