Adjetey, Wendell Nii Laryea. "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)." New Books in Intellectual History (August 4, 2023) ["Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa. By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history."]
George Carlin's American Dream: What George Meant To Me (Trailer for HBO Featurette posted May 20, 2022) ["He created the scientific method for comics." Comedians Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Hasan Minhaj, Sam Jay, and many more share how the legendary comic influenced their own work."]
Maass, Peter. "The Day Saddam Hussein's Statue Came Down." On the Media (May 3, 2023) ["On April 9, 2003, a US marine battalion rolled triumphantly into Firdos Square, in the center of Baghdad, two and a half weeks after the US invasion of Iraq began. Hours later, the marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein, amongst what seemed like a roaring, jubilant crowd of Iraqis. It became, perhaps, the most televised image of the Iraq War — and it seared itself into the minds of its viewers. Twenty years later, that image is still circulated, and sometimes celebrated. Peter Maass, then a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, stood at the edge of Firdos Square that day. What he witnessed, was vastly different from what viewers were seeing on their television screens across the world. Years later, Maass reconstructed the chain of events that led to the toppling to see what went wrong. For this week's podcast extra, he speaks with Brooke about how the media subconsciously creates events for itself to cover — and how the rampant misconceptions that followed in the wake of the toppling led to a pernicious view of the Iraq War that we're still trying to divorce from today."]
Maté, Gabor. "The Myth of Normal," Healing in a Toxic Culture & How Capitalism Fuels Addiction." Democracy Now (Posted on Youtube: November 24, 2022) ["In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, "The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture." "The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people," says Maté, who argues in his book that "psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease." He says healing requires a reconnection between the mind and the body, which can be achieved through cultivating a sense of community, meaning, belonging and purpose. Maté also discusses how the healthcare system has harmfully promoted the "mechanization of birth," how the lack of social services for parents has led to "a massive abandonment of infants," and how capitalism has fueled addiction and the rise of youth suicide rates."]
Miéville, China. "The Communist Manifesto Through the Ages." On the Media (July 14, 2023) ["The Communist Manifesto was first penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, a year simmering with revolutionary possibility in Europe. In the years since, the text has served as a refuge, and an inspiration, for those betrayed by the free market. It has ebbed in and out of popularity, its sales rising by 700 percent in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and may be, according to some accounts, the second best-selling book in the world after the Bible. It’s a phantom, always lingering, not quite out of sight. China Miéville writes speculative fiction, but his latest book, “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto," traces the subversive text's place in the world throughout history. This week, he chats with Brooke about why the text refuses to fade from our consciousness, and how best to read it at this moment in time."]
Oreskes, Naomi. "How American Business Taught Us To Love the Free Market." On the Media (July 14, 2023) ["For decades the so-called "free market" has been seen as a fundamental part of American society, often lauded in debates about the success of capitalism. But with wealth inequality in the U.S. at an all-time high, debates about capitalism have ramped up. This week, Brooke sits down with Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the co-author with Erik M. Conway of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, to trace the evolution of what Oreskes calls "free-market fundamentalism" back to a century-old public relations campaign that still impacts American politics."]
Pierrot, Grégory. "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever— Eternal Return of the Afro-Horn." Evergreen Review (Spring/Summer 2023) ["Having completed an initial cycle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney has begun to unleash the first installments in its new ten-year plan. Brace for the onslaught and a new opportunity to wonder how many variations on the same generic plot structure are needed to screw in the neon sign of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a galaxy as full of variety and promise as it is frustrating in its commitment to the generic. It is arguably one of the great frustrations of the Age of Marvel that after it finally figured out the special effects to do justice to the expansiveness of the original comic books, Disney also worked overtime to distill and dilute all that was weird, silly, garish, elating about them into a surefire, hit-making formula. The hero may have a thousand faces and Disney a hefty roster of them at hand, but inside they’re also all made of the same flesh, and a lot of it is twice lab-grown, having gone through comic book assembly lines before reprocessing in Hollywood. In those circumstances, departures from formula become all the more significant. When Ryan Coogler directed Black Panther, he did not just bring fifty years of Black superhero comics to the screen; he was expressly inspired by all the Black writers and artists, from Billy Graham, Christopher Priest, Brian Stelfreeze, and Alitha Martinez to the Hudlin brothers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Roxane Gay, all of whom contributed along the years to turn an often corny cat into a cultural icon. Coogler brought as Black Panther’s main foe Killmonger, a cousin and polar inversion who could have been as cringeworthy as Bizarro, but turned out as existential a nemesis as Poe’s William Wilson, and sharing the same sharp fate. The film managed to simultaneously propose and absorb a notion that Killmonger made something painfully clear: however cool and well-meaning, a monarch—and both these guys were monarchs—can’t be a revolutionary. Still, working within these limits, Coogler made a way out of no way with humor and by sprinkling historical and political Easter eggs for those who would explore."]
Roane, J.T. "The Divine City: On J. T. Roane’s Dark Agoras." The Los Angeles Review of Books (June 15, 2023) ["Dark Agoras (the title is a riff on the Greek agora, meaning public space) provides us with a view of the lives lived and worlds built by Black migrants who made their way from the rural South to Philadelphia across the 20th century. Roane’s entryway into Black working-class life was inspired in part by the groundbreaking work of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro. In that 1899 text, Du Bois identified two social categories associated with Black migrant cultures."]
Rosen, David. "The Great Panic: Trans-Sexuality and the Erosion of Patriarchy." Counterpunch (May 25, 2023) ["We’ve witnessed tragedy play out in the long, long battle to overcome patriarchy’s subordination of women. We saw a less tragic version of it play out in the battle over gay rights. We are now witnessing patriarchy play out as farse in today’s culture wars campaigns to repress transgender identity, suppress challenging reading materials and enforce electoral gerrymandering."]
Seth, Anil. "What Is the Nature of Consciousness?" The Joy of Why (May 31, 2023) ["Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon."]
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