The Worst Person in the World (Norway: Joachim Trier, 2021)

 

“People talk about the death of cinema, and they talk about the death of the novel. The novel has reinvented itself and changed form and been experimental and, therefore, has survived. I think movies should be inspired by that — the spirit of the possibility of the dramaturgy not being one thing. The dramaturgy or the structure of your telling is up for grabs, and it’s personal.” – Joachim Trier, Seventh Row Louder than Bombs Interview Part 1

“How to show thinking in cinema, it’s something I’m really interested in. I get so pissed when people say, “Oh, thinking, that’s for the novel. Cinema is about the exterior”. I disagree. Film can be incredibly subjective.” – Joachim Trier, Louder Than Bombs Interview Part 2

 The Worst Person in the World (Norway: Joachim Trier, 2021: 128 mins)

"About Joachim Trier." The Seventh Row (Ongoing Archive)

Carrassco, Salvador. "Anatomy of a Breakup or Her Life to Fix: The Worst Person in the World." Senses of Cinema #103 (October 2022)

Gruder, Susannah. "The Worst Person in the World." Reverse Shot (February 3, 2022)

Kemp, Ella. "Cool World: Norway’s Capital Through the Eyes of the Oslo Trilogy." Cinemascope (March 27, 2022)

Lie, Anders Danielson, Renate Reinsve, and Joachim Trier. "The Worst Person in the World." Film at Lincoln Center #384 (February 2022) ["As proven in such exacting stories of lives on the edge as Reprise and Oslo, August 31, Norwegian director Joachim Trier is singularly adept at giving an invigorating modern twist to classically constructed character portraits. Trier catapults the viewer into the world of his most spellbinding protagonist yet: Julie, played by Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve, who’s the magnetic center of nearly every scene. After dropping out of pre-med, Julie must find new professional and romantic avenues as she navigates her late-twenties, juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie and engaging newcomer Herbert Nordrum). Fluidly told in 12 discrete chapters, Trier’s film elegantly depicts the precarity of identity and the mutability of happiness in our runaway contemporary world."]

O'Malley, Sheila. "The Worst Person in the World: Lost and Found." Current (June 28, 2022) ["Idleness” is a grave sin, perhaps the gravest, in a world where the answer to “What do you do?” is more important than the answer to “How are you?” Whatever it is that you “do” must fit into the appropriate container for your age and life phase. Everyone agrees you need ambition, goals, a plan. But what happens if your timeline doesn’t match up with expectations? What if you want to keep your options open? What if you are baffled at the idea of having to make a choice and stick to it for all time? What if you legitimately do not know what you want? Julie (Renate Reinsve), the woman on the cusp of thirty who stumbles and cavorts her way through Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021), experiences all these questions, sometimes simultaneously. Saying “I don’t know”—as she often does—is seen as fickle, indecisive, but maybe Julie’s idleness is creating a clear enough surface for the “submerged truth” that Virginia Woolf describes, however eccentric it may be, to rise. It’s the rare film that allows a character to just be, loosing her from the constraints of plot, giving her a huge playground—here, the city of Oslo—in which to think, question, make mistakes, behave poorly, course-correct, all while having no idea what she’s doing or why."]

Pugh, Lindsay. "Renate Reinsve: ‘I wanted her to be strong in the chaos.'" Seventh Row (January 19, 2022)

Power, Nina, et al. "The Worst Person in the World." The Lack (October 25, 2023) 

Staab, Laura. "The End Of Joachim Trier’s 'Oslo Trilogy'; The End Of Art And Community." Another Gaze (March 28, 2022)

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #10

The waterfall has been imagined as a stream feeding the dark realms of the underworld and circling up to issue again from craggy heights. It has suggested the descent of the immutable into an ever-dividing stream that defies capture, cannot be contained, is eternal movement, eternal change, generating life and death. One can be broken in the tonnage of the waters; "Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts all your waves and billows have gone over me," cries the Psalmist to his god. In Chinese tradition, the waterfall represents the autumnal, yin aspect of the dragon's water power; it plunges into the water, its claws are the spouts of foam.
    Human beings have learned to exploit the waterfall's hydroelectric power in order to drive technology, but in so doing they destroy the waterfall and devastate the land to which it belongs and contributes ecologically. The waterfall itself is an emblem of balance. Chinese landscape paintings portray the waterfall in contrast to the upward movement of the rock face over which it descends, and the dynamic movement of its rushing waters with the stillness of the rock (48). -  The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010) 

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Lewison, Rebecca. "Hippopotomology (Hippos)." Ologies (February 5, 2025) ["Do they sweat blood? Will one kill you? What are cocaine hippos? Is Moo Deng… okay? Actual real life Hippopotomologist Dr. Rebecca Lewison explains how hippos have some of the best – and worst – PR. We chat about pet hippos, subspecies, daily diets, the current state of hippo conservation, the absolute chaotic affection we have for pygmy hippos, their role as ecosystem engineers, what’s up with their nostrils, and how to keep a hippo in your pocket."]

McKay, Adam. "How Don't Look Up Explains Our Times." Current Affairs #367 (February 8, 2025) ["Adam McKay is a writer and film director who has made some of the most successful comedy films of our century, including Anchorman (No. 6 on Time Out's top 100 comedy films of all time), Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys. In the last decade, his more dramatic and political films like Vice and The Big Short have attracted critical acclaim and been nominated for multiple Academy Awards. He joins us today to discuss the film he released in 2021, Don't Look Up, a satirical look at the climate catastrophe that uses the analogy of an approaching deadly comet to expose how the media, corporations, and the political system are incapable of addressing a major crisis. When Don't Look Up came out, it quickly became one of the most popular movies in Netflix's history, but many critics assailed it as "heavy-handed." In Current Affairs, Nathan wrote an article arguing that these critics were missing much of the penetrating leftist analysis that makes the film a remarkably astute piece of satirical fiction."]

Mulainathan, Sendhil. "Can AI Even Be Regulated?" Capitalisn't (February 13, 2025) ["This week, Elon Musk—amidst his other duties of gutting United States federal government agencies as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)—announced a hostile bid alongside a consortium of buyers to purchase control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vehemently replied that his company is not for sale. The artificial intelligence landscape is shifting rapidly. The week prior, American tech stocks plummeted in response to claims from Chinese company DeepSeek AI that its model had matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost. Days before that, President Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank would partner on an infrastructure project to power AI in the U.S. with an initial $100 billion investment. Altman himself is trying to pull off a much-touted plan to convert the nonprofit OpenAI into a for-profit entity, a development at the heart of his spat with Musk, who co-founded the startup. Bethany and Luigi discuss the implications of this changing landscape by reflecting on a prior Capitalisn’t conversation with Luigi’s former colleague Sendhil Mullainathan (now at MIT), who forecasted over a year ago that there would be no barriers to entry in AI. Does DeepSeek’s success prove him right? How does the U.S. government’s swift move to ban DeepSeek from government devices reflect how we should weigh national interests at the risk of hindering innovation and competition? Musk has the ear of Trump and a history of animosity with Altman over the direction of OpenAI. Does Musk’s proposed hostile takeover signal that personal interests and relationships with American leadership will determine how AI develops in the U.S. from here on out? What does regulating AI in the collective interest look like, and can we escape a future where technology is consolidated in the hands of the wealthy few when billions of dollars in capital are required for its progress?"]

Nussbaum, Martha C. Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. Simon & Schuster, 2023. ["A “brilliant” (Chicago Review of Books), “elegantly written, and compelling” (National Review) new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day. The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world’s most renowned philosophers and humanists, Martha C. Nussbaum, provides “the most important book on animal ethics written to date” (Thomas I. White, author of In Defense of Dolphins). From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before."]

 Proctor, Robert. "Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Updated Encore." Ologies (February 12, 2025) ["Yes, there is an -ology for that. And yes, we’re airing this episode -– with a ton of 2025 updates -– because it’s never felt more relevant. Dr. Robert Proctor is a Stanford professor of the History of Science and co-edited the book “Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance,” having coined the word 30 years ago. We chat about everything from tobacco marketing, to the sugar lobby, to racial injustice, horse vision, the psychology of the Flat Earther movement, which countries have the highest rates of climate denial, empathy, how to navigate difficult conversations and why it's critical to dismantle the systems of willful ignorance, starting locally. Dr. Robert Proctor’s book: "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance" His 2021 book: Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted."]

Rubsam, Robert. "The Empire of Ugliness." Liberties (December 2024) [This is a review of the film Red Rooms: "So what are we doing here, really? One cannot imbibe such diverse, daily horrors and not be made coarser. It has been argued that this presentation dulls us to violent images by making them seem less real, but I think we are experiencing something more akin to a levelling, in which images of violence are made to seem just as banal as all the other images or thoughts we see online, both disarming the violence and infecting the mundane with a violent energy, a tincturing which degrades both at the same time. ... We can see these forces everywhere, in the fossil fuel CEOs who consciously destroy our planet, the tech VC billionaires who commit their fortunes to end democracy, the president-elect who promises to make public life hell for all manner of minorities. These are vicious, vindictive people, obsessed with their IQs, who preen over their supposed genetic superiority, yet must purchase a prominence they cannot earn. Leys found them not only in the realm of aesthetics, but even more in ethics: “The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature.” They can destroy whatever is good and beautiful in society, can attack it in others, can push their technologies to the edge, yet they are totally incapable of producing anything but ugliness themselves. It should disturb us that so many identify with and celebrate them. Their empire is everywhere, and we are all stakeholders."]

Sanchez, Lily. "US Transit is Abysmal and Unacceptable." Current Affairs (February 7, 2025) ["America’s air safety crisis, our automobile-congested cities, and our lack of high-speed rail and other options make getting places a real (and dangerous) pain in the ass. We desperately need safe, efficient, and enjoyable public transit."]

Skopic, Alex. "Who Are the Real Vampires in ‘Nosferatu’?" Current Affairs (January 18, 2025) ["Eggers isn’t the first filmmaker to revisit the silent Nosferatu. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 with Klaus Kinski in the lead role, and the prolific character actor Doug Jones starred in a low-budget independent version in 2023. There’s also Shadow of the Vampire, the metafictional horror movie from 2000 that imagines an actual monster stalking Murnau’s set. But more than any previous retelling, Eggers’s Nosferatu holds fascinating—and disturbing—historic echoes of the German original. Murnau and his crew made their silent film in the wake of the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918-19, as fascism was beginning to emerge as a hideous threat across Europe. More than a century later, Eggers made his version as the COVID pandemic continues to ravage the planet, and as neo-fascism is emerging in the United States and elsewhere. As a result of their historical context, both films are preoccupied with themes of plague and contagion, and with their respective societies’ fears about race and immigration. They can be seen as violently xenophobic films, portraying Count Orlok as an immigrant figure who is also a demonic spreader of plague and decay and has to be exterminated by the protagonists. But that would be a superficial reading, and ultimately a flawed one. Dig a little deeper into the vampire’s tomb, and you begin to realize that it’s not the ethnic or cultural other that’s really the looming threat at Nosferatu’s heart. It’s the economic elite."]

Stiglitz, Joseph. "Visions of a New Progressive Capitalism." Capitalisn't  (June 24, 2024) ["In the last 60 years, few economists have contributed more to exposing the failures of capitalism than Joseph Stiglitz. Formerly the chief economist of the World Bank and chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for his work showing that the possibility of having different information can lead to inefficient market outcomes. On this episode of Capitalisn't, Stiglitz joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his latest book, "The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society" (W.W. Norton, 2024). The book, as Bethany describes it, is a "full frontal attack on neoliberalism" that provides a prospective roadmap towards a more progressive form of capitalism. Together, the three discuss the role of mis- and disinformation in producing market inefficiencies, the importance of regulation, institutional accountability, and collective action in correcting market failures, and the role of neoliberalism in today's global populist uprising. In the process, they underscore the close link between economic and political freedom."]

Szaniawski, Jeremi. "Trick or Treat? Genre Trouble." Senses of Cinema #112 (January 2025) ["Concurrently, we have seen enough horror films to know that they are one of the best places to investigate mild societal shifts before they occur in full swing in mainstream culture. And this holds true even as they have vastly abandoned the ghetto of independent production and become reified objects of the film industry in their own right, at least as far as their modes of production and distribution are concerned. So it is that, in the fall of 2024, besides the grotesque spectacle of the US presidential election, which may constitute its darkest comedy, and the wars and invasions unfolding in various corners of the globe, marked by mind-boggling numbers of civilian casualties (unarguably, the most intolerable horror of all) something is afoot. The return of the thriller/horror genre, is at one and the same time some sort of conclusion that yet also constitutes a new beginning. Not that any of these films, taken individually, is exceptional: rather, they coalesce into an interesting whole, and they are, each in their own way, compelling. "]

Judas and the Black Messiah (USA: Shaka King, 2021)

 

 Judas and the Black Messiah (USA: Shaka King, 2021: 126 mins)

Bourland, Ian. "Judas and the Black Messiah: Captures the Complexities of Revolutionary Death." Frieze (February 16, 2021)

Eggert, Brian. "Judas and the Black Messiah." Deep Focus Review (February 18, 2021)

Fishback, Dominique, et al. "A Conversation About Judas and the Black Messiah." TIFF Originals (March 7, 2021)

Francis, Leslie. "Judas and the Black Messiah." Philoso?hy Talk (March 8, 2021)

Henderson, Odie. "Judas and the Black Messiah." Roger Ebert (February 12, 2021)

Jones, Okla. "Judas and the Black Messiah Puts a Nostalgic Lens On a Modern-Day Struggle." Consequence Film (February 12, 2021)

"Judas and the Black Panther: Education Guide." Participant Media, 2021.

"Judas and the Black Messiah, Explained - Self-Preservation Won't Save You." The Take (Posted on Youtube 2021)

King, Shaka. "Judas and the Black Messiah: Director Shaka King on Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers & COINTELPRO." Democracy Now (February 1, 2021) ["A highly anticipated new feature film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” tells the story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O’Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated the Illinois Black Panther Party to collect information that ultimately led to Hampton’s killing in 1969 by law enforcement officers. The film is premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and stars Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton, LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal and Martin Sheen as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Shaka King, the film’s director and co-writer, says focusing on Hampton and O’Neal was a way “to make 'The Departed' inside the world of COINTELPRO,” referring to the decades-long illegal FBI program to undermine Black and radical political organizations. “I just thought that that was a very clever vessel and intelligent way to Trojan-horse a Fred Hampton biopic.”"]

---. "On the Making of Judas and the Black Messiah." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (February 18, 2021) ["This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Shaka King, co-writer, producer, and director of Judas and the Black Messiah, moderated by Eugene Hernandez, Film at Lincoln Center’s Deputy Executive Director of Programs. Fred Hampton, a young, charismatic activist, becomes Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party — putting him directly in the crosshairs of the government, the FBI, and the Chicago Police. But to destroy the revolution, the authorities are going to need a man on the inside, enter William O’Neal. Judas and the Black Messiah stars Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback, Ashton Sanders, and Martin Sheen."]

McGovern, Joe. "Judas and the Black Panther Cinematographer on Why He Shot Black Panther and FBI Scenes in Different Colors." The Wrap (February 10, 2021)

Murch, Donna, et al.  "The Real Black Panthers." Throughline (April 15, 2021) ["The Black Panther Party's battles for social justice and economic equality are the centerpiece of the Oscar-nominated film 'Judas and The Black Messiah.' In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party "without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country." And with that declaration he used United States federal law enforcement to wage war on the group. But why did Hoover's FBI target the Black Panther Party more severely than any other Black power organization? Historian Donna Murch says the answer lies in the Panthers' political agenda and a strategy that challenged the very foundations of American society."]

Scott, A.O. "Judas and the Black Messiah: I Was a Panther for the F.B.I." The New York Times (April 25, 2021)

Smith, Kaitlin. "The Complexity of Black Agency in Judas and the Black Messiah." Facing Today (February 19, 2021)

Wilkinson, Alissa, et al. "How Best Picture nominee Judas and the Black Messiah questions the meaning of freedom." Vox (April 22, 2021)

Robert N. Proctor: History of Science/Ignorance & Knowledge/Medicine/Rhetoric (Shooting Azimuths)

Kournay, Janet A. and Martin Carrier. Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted. MIT Press, 2020. ["An introduction to the new area of ignorance studies that examines how science produces ignorance—both actively and passively, intentionally and unintentionally. We may think of science as our foremost producer of knowledge, but for the past decade, science has also been studied as an important source of ignorance. The historian of science Robert Proctor has coined the term agnotology to refer to the study of ignorance, and much of the ignorance studied in this new area is produced by science. Whether an active or passive construct, intended or unintended, this ignorance is, in Proctor's words, “made, maintained, and manipulated” by science. This volume examines forms of scientific ignorance and their consequences. A dialogue between Proctor and Peter Galison offers historical context, presenting the concerns and motivations of pioneers in the field. Essays by leading historians and philosophers of science examine the active construction of ignorance by biased design and interpretation of experiments and empirical studies, as seen in the “false advertising” by climate change deniers; the “virtuous” construction of ignorance—for example, by curtailing research on race- and gender-related cognitive differences; and ignorance as the unintended by-product of choices made in the research process, when rules, incentives, and methods encourage an emphasis on the beneficial and commercial effects of industrial chemicals, and when certain concepts and even certain groups' interests are inaccessible in a given conceptual framework."]

Cross, Gary S. and Robert N. Proctor. Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire. University of Chicago Press, 2014. ["From the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned, condensed, and distilled, unleashing new and intensified surges of pleasure, delight, thrill—and addiction. In Packaged Pleasures, Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor delve into an uncharted chapter of American history, shedding new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience. In the space of only a few decades, junk foods, cigarettes, movies, recorded sound, and thrill rides brought about a revolution in what it means to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. New techniques of boxing, labeling, and tubing gave consumers virtually unlimited access to pleasures they could simply unwrap and enjoy. Manufacturers generated a seemingly endless stream of sugar-filled, high-fat foods that were delicious but detrimental to health. Mechanically rolled cigarettes entered the market and quickly addicted millions. And many other packaged pleasures dulled or displaced natural and social delights. Yet many of these same new technologies also offered convenient and effective medicines, unprecedented opportunities to enjoy music and the visual arts, and more hygienic, varied, and nutritious food and drink. For better or for worse, sensation became mechanized, commercialized, and, to a large extent, democratized by being made cheap and accessible. Cross and Proctor have delivered an ingeniously constructed history of consumerism and consumer technology that will make us all rethink some of our favorite things."]

Proctor, Robert N. "Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Updated Encore." Ologies (February 12, 2025) ["Yes, there is an -ology for that. And yes, we’re airing this episode -– with a ton of 2025 updates -– because it’s never felt more relevant. Dr. Robert Proctor is a Stanford professor of the History of Science and co-edited the book “Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance,” having coined the word 30 years ago. We chat about everything from tobacco marketing, to the sugar lobby, to racial injustice, horse vision, the psychology of the Flat Earther movement, which countries have the highest rates of climate denial, empathy, how to navigate difficult conversations and why it's critical to dismantle the systems of willful ignorance, starting locally. Dr. Robert Proctor’s book: "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance" His 2021 book: Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted."]

---. "Fisher in the 21st Century." Gonville and Caius College (Posted on Youtube: 2024) ["“Why did Big Tobacco love (and fund) eugenicists like R.A. Fisher?” Robert Proctor (via Zoom), Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Medicine, Department of History, Stanford University. In 1957, Sir Ronald ridiculed the idea of cigarettes causing cancer as “a catastrophic and conspicuous howler.” Cigarette makers loved his “itch in the lung hypothesis,” the idea that cancer gives its victims an “itch” that only smoking can scratch, confounding cause and effect. Fisher became a recruiter for the industry, and Big Nicotine ended up funding thousands of scholars, including at least 25 who went on to win the Nobel Prize. Here we explore the scope of this deadly collaboration, focusing on why eugenicists were so willing to shill for the industry."]

---. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press, 2012. ["The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes."]

---. "NAZI Science and Ideology."  Lex Fridman Podcast (March 6, 2022) [Michael Benton: This should actually be titled "Science and Ideology" as it is a wide-ranging discussion, and the NAZI application of science is only an initial jumping off point. Very important as we see mindless rejection "and" acceptance of science become the polarized standards of society going into and coming out of the COVID pandemic. I know a lot of people that will go nuts if I say we shouldn't just say "accept the science" (even knowing full well that I am pro-science), I believe we need to ask questions about practices & consequences and think like scientists realizing that science changes over time. "Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford University"]

---. The NAZI War on Cancer. Princeton University Press, 2000. ["Collaboration in the Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The “euthanasia” of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of “the unfit.” Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler’s warped quest to create a German master race. Robert Proctor recently made the explosive discovery, however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling, Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores the controversial and troubling questions that such findings raise: Were the Nazis more complex morally than we thought? Can good science come from an evil regime? What might this reveal about health activism in our own society? Proctor argues that we must view Hitler’s Germany more subtly than we have in the past. But he also concludes that the Nazis’ forward-looking health activism ultimately came from the same twisted root as their medical crimes: the ideal of a sanitary racial utopia reserved exclusively for pure and healthy Germans. Author of an earlier groundbreaking work on Nazi medical horrors, Proctor began this book after discovering documents showing that the Nazis conducted the most aggressive antismoking campaign in modern history. Further research revealed that Hitler’s government passed a wide range of public health measures, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides, and food dyes. Nazi health officials introduced strict occupational health and safety standards, and promoted such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. These policies went hand in hand with health propaganda that, for example, idealized the Führer’s body and his nonsmoking, vegetarian lifestyle. Proctor shows that cancer also became an important social metaphor, as the Nazis portrayed Jews and other “enemies of the Volk” as tumors that must be eliminated from the German body politic. This is a disturbing and profoundly important book. It is only by appreciating the connections between the “normal” and the “monstrous” aspects of Nazi science and policy, Proctor reveals, that we can fully understand not just the horror of fascism, but also its deep and seductive appeal even to otherwise right-thinking Germans."]

Procter, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger, eds.  Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press, 2008. ["What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible."]

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #9

Beaver, David and Jason Stanley. "Attunements in Political Communication." (Excerpted from The Politics of Language. Princeton University Press, 2023: 66-68) ["In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualizing the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language—from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality. At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest."]

Dorian, M.J. "Salvador Dali (Saint of Delusion)." Creative Codex #7 (July 3, 2019) ["Salvador Dali is one of the most successful artists of all time. Join us as we find the origin of his unmistakable style, discover the secret to his creative process, and unravel the lies of the enigmatic: Dali."]

Eisinger, Jesse, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel. "The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax." Pro Publica (June 8, 2021) ["ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing."]

Frank, Thomas. "Why Democrats Fear Populism (and Keep Losing)." Current Affairs (January 31, 2025) ["Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures. “The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.” — Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal.]

Haiven, Max, et al. "Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Imagination." Darts and Letters (October 11, 2023) ["This episode of Darts and Letters examines the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing. There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics, exemplified by the enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and others. However, this misses autonomous and anarchist-inflected (and sometimes, explicitly anarchist) social movements that have brought enormous energy, and enormous change–from the movement for black lives, to organizing for Indigenous sovereignty, and so much more. In this episode, we look at the Kurdish movement, and mutual aid experiments across North America. First, we look at the work of the late libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin broke with Marxism, and later anarchism, and eventually developed an idiosyncratic ecological and revolutionary theory that said radical democracy could be achieved at the municipal level. This Vermont-based theorist has been enormously influential, including in an area formerly known as Rojava. There, the Kurdish people are making these ideas their own, and developing a radical feminist democracy–while fighting to survive. We speak with Elif Genc about these ideas, and about how the Kurdish diaspora implements them within Canada. Next, what is mutual aid? Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factory of Evolution (1902) examines how cooperation and reciprocity are core to nature. To anarchists, this should be generalized to a radical political program, and a radically new way of living. Darts and Letters producer Marc Apollonio speaks to Payton McDonald about how the theory and practice of mutual aid drives many social movements across North America. Payton is co-directing a four-part documentary series called the Elements of Mutual Aid: Experiments Towards Liberation. Finally, how do social movement scholars understand (or misunderstand) autonomous social movements? There’s a tendency to dismiss movements that do not make clear tangible demands, and deliver pragmatic policy victories (see: Occupy). However, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish say that this misses something key to radical social movements: their radical imagination. These movements do not want to just improve this system, they want to imagine, and create (or prefigure), a different system. We discuss their book the Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, the blind spots of social movement theory, and whether there might be a new style of organizing emerging that is somewhere between the the statist and the anti-statist."]

Hall, Anna. "In the Shadow of 'Citizens United.'" Sojourners (January 27, 2014) ["Last week marked the fourth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a 5-4 ruling, the court ruled that corporations are entitled to the same free speech rights as individual humans as guaranteed under the First Amendment. The political repercussions of Citizens United include the rise of “Super PACs” — political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, independent of direct campaign contributions, to influence politics. The power yielded to such corporations, as well as indiscriminate spending allowance, has deleterious effects upon our democracy."]

Higgins, Eoin. "The Tech Oligarchy's Campaign Against the Media." Tech Won't Save Us (February 13, 2024) ["Paris Marx is joined by Eoin Higgins to discuss how tech billionaires set out to change the media ecosystem and made it profitable for influential voices to shift to the political right. Eoin Higgins is a journalist and the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left."]

Hirshman, Dan and Dirk Philipsen. "Simon Kuznets and the Invention of the Economy: On the GDP and its Alternatives." Darts and Letters (October 27, 2024) ["Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast’s new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It’s a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.’ Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It’s a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world."]

Jacobson, Lisa Sheryl. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition." New Books in History (December 25, 2024) ["In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024), alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Dr. Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens."]

Kerr, Deborah, et al. "Donald Trump is Rewriting the Past. Plus, the Christian Groups Vying for Political Power." On the Media (February 14, 2025) ["The new administration is purging data from government websites and databases, such as the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency. On this week's On the Media, a historian shares the political playbook for rewriting the past in order to control the future. Plus, meet the different Christian groups vying for power at the White House."]

David Beaver and Jason Stanley: Attunements in Political Communication

2.1. You Must Remember This

Think of a favorite movie. Why does it resonate with you? Do you have a favorite line? Why does that line work? What ties it to its context? Conversely, what makes it . . .  timeless?

If you’re into old classics, you might think of the line “Play it, Sam!” from Casablanca, which was filmed eighty years ago, in the midst of the Second World War. The movie is seen by some as the greatest of all time. A version of the line (“Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake”) is uttered first by Ilsa (Ingrid Bergmann). It carries mystery. The audience has seen the conversation from its start, and no referent has been provided for the pronoun “it.” Despite Sam’s protestations (“don’t know what you mean, Miss Ilsa”), it quickly becomes evident that Ilsa and Sam are very much on the same wavelength. To put this in the standard language of semantic theory, interpretation of the pronoun depends on common ground, and we infer that there is much common ground between Ilsa and Sam. The line is repeated by different characters, echoing in our minds, just as the referent of it, namely the song “As Time Goes By,” provides a musical leitmotif. Together, they strengthen resonances across scenes, picking out dots between which we draw lines.

The second time we hear “Play it,” the line is delivered by Ilsa’s slick saloon-owning ex-lover, Rick (Humphrey Bogart). Rick’s rendition is the best known, though typically misquoted as “Play it again, Sam.” Although there is again no explicit antecedent for the pronoun, by this point we are well enough attuned to the characters that we know the referent immediately. But constant it is not: the referent changes: when Ilsa’s husband, anti-Nazi resistance fighter Victor (Paul Henried) says, “Play it!” he is referring not to “As Time Goes By,” but to “La Marseillaise,” presented as a stirring symbol of free French resistance. Still, the resonances with the earlier occurrences of the line are strong. “As Time Goes By” has already been tied sentimentally to France with extensive flashback montages, and if Victor is not singing from quite the same score as Ilsa and Rick, he is nonetheless hitting shared themes. Despite their different nationalities (Norwegian, Czech, and “Drunkard,” as Rick famously muses), we see the common ground of the movie’s love triangle stars as much in their common use of language as in their common ideals, and in the united front they present against the evil of their day.

To watch the movie is, in part, to understand the attunements between the characters. But perhaps more important to our current project is the question of how viewers’ attunements change as they watch the movie. How can we understand the way that the viewer is drawn in, and why?

Casablanca is not a pill that people swallow, or a box containing a set of propositions. That’s not how it works. It works by engaging existing attunements and providing a path for people to focus their energies and emotions, through a process of what we will term harmonization. Casablanca has many resonances, and those resonances helped shape collective attunements both during the war and afterward, attunements to an ideology in which Americans are plucky yet indefatigable capitalists representing freedom in the face of authoritarianism, all in this together, everybody doing their bit, sometimes it’s dirty work but the ends justify the means, and in which even one of the most intensely romantic loves must be sacrificed for the greater cause of country and freedom from oppression.

It is relevant here that the effects the movie has on the viewer are not mere random happenstance, for the movie was made with a quite explicit goal of drawing in a broad range of people and helping them see the world in a certain light. It is a movie that was made in the wake of the formation of the US Office of War Information under the directorship of Elmer Davis, which had issued a call for patriotic support of the war effort from the movie industry, and which was charged with overseeing a wide range of media production, including the output of Hollywood studios. Here’s why Davis saw movies as an important part of the war effort: “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize they are being propagandized.”

An overarching concept of interest throughout this book is attunement to ideology. We seek to describe a model of attunement that is relevant both for the strong resonances between the characters in a story, and for the ways in which something like a movie, which does not tell us what to believe or why, can be a powerful vehicle for ideological transmission. It is crucial here that attunements can change gradually. This may result from repeated exposure to propaganda or from exposure to a changed world; it is a well-worked theme in literature, history, and psychology that people may gradually become inured to events that were previously unimaginable but have become commonplace, and can adaptively develop ways of living in circumstances that they would have thought unsustainable. The gradualness of these processes implies, we think, that attunement is not an all-or-nothing thing, but that people can be attuned to something by degrees. We will be interested in this chapter and the next in the mechanisms by which degrees of attunement change.  There are various sources of change in attunement, including reflective reasoning and random drift. Our interest is specifically in communication as a factor in creating, strengthening, maintaining, and destabilizing such attunements.

An ideology could creep upon an entire society gradually, without anyone in particular, even the elites, fully understanding the system they build and the ideology they propagate. At some point a country might find itself in peril, with no explicit theory of how it got there. In our view, what happens in such cases is this: the strong resonances of messaging it was exposed to (or exposed itself to) lead to it slowly becoming attuned to an ideology it cannot survive. But this is not to say that the effects of strongly resonant messaging are always so dire. Casablanca, in combination with a much larger collection of wartime messaging and educational policies, had positive effects for the war effort and for the country, effects of bringing people together, of developing common attunements. (66-68)

Beaver, David and Jason Stanley. The Politics of Language. Princeton University Press, 2023.

    

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ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #8

" I would say that life understood is life lived. But, the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me, and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion." - Timothy "Speed" Levitch in Richard Linklater's 2002 film Waking Life

"A waterfall is a cataract, a "breaking" or "downrushing" of water over a precipice. We hear the ceaseless thundering of the waterfall before we see its seething, perpendicular rapids and the enveloping mists born of torrential, continuous downpour uniting highest and lowest. In its natural setting of rainforest, woods and mountains, the force and beauty of a waterfall seem sublime and sacred. 'Amid the waters, under the high cliff ... even the sluggish soul can rise to the noblest concerns,' wrote the fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch of his favorite haunt, a waterfall in Vaucluse, Provence, the source of the river Sorgue.(48)" - The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010) 

"What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love." - Lord Byron, from the epic poem Don Juan, 1824

“Point of view is usually only conspicuous when it is oppositional. The dominant, prevailing point of view remains invisible or apparently neutral and objective” (14) -- Sally Potter in "The Prospects for Political Cinema Today" Cineaste 37.1 (2011): 6-17.

There is only one holistic system of systems. One . . . interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multinational dominion of dollars. . . . It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic—and subatomic—and galactic structure of things today. . . . There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and IT&T and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. . . . The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. -- Arthur Jensen in Sydney Lumet's 1976 film Network (cited in "The World is a Business." )

"There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit. The assertion of dogma closes the mind and turns a nation, a civilization into a regiment of ghosts — obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts." -- Jacob Bronowski, Ascent of Man (1973)

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Brivanlou, Ali and David Sinclair. "Is Aging a Disease?" Scientific Controversies (January 25, 2025) ["Are decaying, aging, and dying truly scientifically predestined? And could there be a cure? With advances in biology and genetics, could scientists pause, or even reverse, the process? Would a cure for aging indefinitely stave off death? And what would the implications be for 8 billion people on this planet if we cease to die? To learn more, PW Director of Sciences Janna Levin hosted two brilliant biologists in conversation: Professor David Sinclair of Harvard—a researcher committed to aging in reverse—and Professor Ali Brivanlou of Rockefeller University—an explorer of human embryonic stem cells, and impassioned defender of whiskey, cigarettes, and meat."]

Christianson, Amy and Gavin Jones. "Fire Ecology (Wildfires & Indigenous Fire Management)." Ologies (January 10, 2024) ["As wildfires burn across L.A. — and my neighborhood evacuates — we thought it would be a good time to encore these Fire Ecology episodes so I can literally catch my breath. First Dr. Gavin Jones brings the heat talking about what fire is, how hot it burns, fire trends, tinderboxes, lots and lots of forest fire flim-flam, tolerant wombats, Angelina Jolie Movies, cunning pine cones, thick bark, Indigenous fire stewardship and more. After the break, co-host of the podcast Good Fire, Dr. Amy Christianson, talks about how cultural burns and prescribed blazes can create healthy forests. She also discusses Indigenous history, collaborations between Western science & First Nations elders, Aboriginal thoughts on cultural burns, more flim-flam, evacuations, snowmelt, hunting strategies, land stewardship, happy trees, climate strategies, and the social science behind wildfire education. Also learning from Native wildfire fighters."]

Critchley, Simon and Cornel West. "On Mysticism." Pioneer Works (February 6, 2025) ["How can we find meaning in an apparently meaningless cosmos? This fall, we were thrilled to host the launch of Simon Critchley’s latest book, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy, with a special dialogue between the author and Dr. Cornel West. The longtime friends discussed nihilism, the boundaries of divinity and reason, and the “funky” stuff of mystical experience. As the barbarism of our times reaches a fever pitch, Dr. West reminds us: “This is nothing new. We are a wretched species, no matter our color, gender, sexual orientation, or nation. And yet, we’re also wonderful.”"]

Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "The Substance and the New Horror of the Modified Body." Critics at Large (October 3, 2024) ["In “The Substance,” a darkly satirical horror movie directed by Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore plays an aging Hollywood actress who strikes a tech-infused Faustian bargain to unleash a younger, “more perfect” version of herself. Gruesome side effects ensue. Fargeat’s film plays on the fact that female aging is often seen as its own brand of horror—and that we’ve devised increasingly extreme methods of combating it. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss “The Substance” and “A Different Man,” another new release that questions our culture’s obsession with perfecting our physical forms. In recent years, the smorgasbord of products and procedures promising to enhance our bodies and preserve our youth has only grown; social media has us looking at ourselves more than ever before. No wonder, then, that horror as a genre has been increasingly preoccupied with our uneasy relationship to our own exteriors. “We are embodied. It is a struggle. It is beautiful. It’s something to wrestle with forever. Just as you think that you’ve caught up to your current embodiment, something changes,” Schwartz says. “And so how do we make our peace with it?”"]

Donner, Fred. "On the History of Early Islām." The Secret History of Western Esotericism (February 7, 2025) ["In this interview, Professor Fred Donner gives us a superb introduction to the earliest decades of the movement which would become known as Islām. We begin our discussion with the sīra literature, what it is (a body of written accounts of the life and times of the prophet Muḥammad, starting from a century or so after his death and continuing thereafter) and how reliable it is as historical documentation (not very – that ever-elusive grain of truth has got to be in there, but it’s finding exactly where it is that’s the problem). We then ask similar questions of the Qur’ān, and get a more positive answer; for Donner, the Qur’ān is a genuinely-early document, although there are open questions as to how long a period of development it underwent, what exactly happened when ‘Uthman decided to standardize the ‘text’, and a host of other matters. Nevertheless, this is one place to look for solid evidence of what the early Believers were believing. The other place to look is a fascinating text known as the ‘Constitution of Medinah’ or ‘Umma Document’, a treaty, preserved in multiple, slightly-different forms among the sīra and other works, between Muḥammad, his followers, and the various groups present at Yathrīb, better known as Medina. This work really is a window onto the earliest political manifestation of the Believers’ movement. We then turn to the first few decades of the ‘Islamic’ or ‘Arab conquests’ (neither term seems to be quite right), discussing the weird silence in our sources about what went on, precisely, and how we can interpret around these sources."]

Turfah, Mary. "The Most Moral Army." Los Angeles Review of Books (October 1, 2024) ["Mary Turfah examines Israeli officials’ weaponization of language, particularly that of medicine, in an attempt to reframe their genocide in Gaza."]

Miller, Ian. "Self-Esteem: An American History." New Books in Intellectual History (November 17, 2024) ["By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was being published and, before long, devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, however, few people think much about the concept of self-esteem—but perhaps we should. Self-Esteem: An American History (Polity, 2024) by Dr. Ian Miller is the first historical study to explore the emotional politics of self-esteem in modern America. Written with verve and insight, Dr. Miller’s expert analysis looks at the critiques of self-help that accuse it of propping up conservative agendas by encouraging us to look solely inside ourselves to resolve life’s problems. At the same time, he reveals how African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist activists have endeavoured to build positive collective identities based on self-esteem, pride, and self-respect. This revelatory book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of mental health and well-being, and in how the politics of self-esteem is played out in today’s US society and culture."]

Pierson, Paul and Eric Schickler."Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era." New Books in Public Policy (December 17, 2024) ["American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local. In Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (U Chicago Press, 2024), political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design."]

Sharma, Ruchir. "America's Addiction to Easy Money." Capitalisn't (December 19, 2024) ["Are bailouts the new “trickle-down” economics? Have government debt and deficits caused capitalism’s collapse—thus ending the American Dream? Ruchir Sharma is a well-known columnist for the Financial Times, the author of bestselling books Breakout Nations and The Rise and Fall of Nations, and an investment banker who worked as Morgan Stanley’s head of emerging markets for 25 years. His new book, What Went Wrong With Capitalism, traces the roots of current disaffection with our capitalist economy to unabashed stimulus and too much government intervention. Take an example: Sharma writes that the United States federal government has introduced 3,000 new regulations in the last twenty years, and withdrawn just 20 over the same span. He likens the Federal Reserve’s constant bailouts—under chairs appointed by presidents from both parties—to the opioid crisis, in which the solution created more problems than the pain it was designed to treat. Sharma joins Bethany and Luigi to explain how constant government intervention leads to inefficient “zombie” firms, higher property prices, housing shortages, massive inequality, and a historic government debt and deficit crisis. Together, they discuss the first step to a cure—a correct diagnosis of the problem—and how to approach the treatment without exacerbating the problems. In the process, they leave us with a renewed understanding of how “pro-business is not the same as pro-capitalism,” a distinction that Sharma says “continues to elude us.”"]

West, Stephen. "Nietzsche and Critchley on the tragic perspective. (Amor Fati pt. 2)." Philosophize This! #212 (September 30, 2024) ["Today we begin by talking about Nietzsche's concept of life-affirmation. Contrasting it with the renunciative, rational traditions of Western thought. The episode then delves into Greek tragedy through the lens of Simon Critchley's work; making a case for how these ancient plays offer a life-affirming perspective by embracing the ambiguity of human existence."]

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."]

These Things I Know - Music Mix #40

 Billy Strings; Chumbawamba; T-Pain; Morphine; Pixies; My Morning Jacket; Goose; Seun Kuti; Egypt 80; The Budos Band; Creature Society; Ethereal Sea; Morrison Graves; Beyond Abbey; Kristin Hersh; Throwing Muses; Cymande; The Weeknd; Justice; Erasmos Carlos; Serge Gainsbourg; Jane Birkin; Freckle; L.S. Dunes; .moe; Eddie Chacon; Penny and Sparrow; Pussy Riot; chlothegod; Amayo; Rilo Kiley; David Gray; Talia Rae; Delivery;  Ex-Void; Led Zeppelin; The Teardrop Explodes; Julian Cope; Sharon van Etten; Heartworms; Nadia Reid; Squid; Biig Piig; The Bird Calls; The Cowboy Junkies; Guided by Voices; Helen Ganya

These Things I Know - Music Mix #40

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #7

“Is it possible to change people and the world we live in? You tell me. Can we change ourselves? That’s why Aristophanes wrote {Lysistrata}. To get things moving, to make people care… to stop us sitting around, believing we can do nothing… We have to talk! Stop being so embarrassed and critical. People have to be able to talk. Don’t you understand that it’s we who make the world what it is?” – Flickorna (The Girls, 1968)

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Dorian, M.J. "The Origin of Art." Creative Codex #1 (August 18, 2018) ["Travel back 40,000 years to the first known art made by human hands. How did creativity begin? Why does 'art' exist?"]

Duff, Brian, et al. "Forest / Tree." Future Ecologies 6.1 (October 30, 2024) ["Season 6 kicks off in the deep dark woods: the simplified, post-industrial forests of the world — the only forests that many of us have ever known. Join us as we meet foresters in British Columbia, Vermont, and Scotland, all working to embrace the messy art of ecological forestry. Because if we want our forests to be old growth-ier, we might not be able to just wait and leave them alone. It might mean challenging some assumptions and getting out of our comfort zone, but that's what it'll take to see the forest for the trees."]

Gore, Gareth. "Gareth Gore Investigates: Opus Dei, Dark Money, and Global Deception." The Michael Shermer Show (December 3, 2024) ["Banco Popular, once a top global bank, collapsed unexpectedly in 2017. Investigative journalist Gareth Gore initially expected to find another case of capitalist greed, but instead uncovered a web of deception orchestrated by men linked to Opus Dei. Gore’s investigation revealed decades of hidden corruption, with Opus Dei using its control over the bank to amass wealth and spread its influence. Using access to insider accounts and bank records, Gore exposed how Opus Dei recruited vulnerable individuals—often children—into lives of servitude. His findings also unveiled Opus Dei’s financial ties to far-right movements, including its role in overturning Roe v. Wade, raising important questions about the forces shaping modern society. Shermer and Gore discuss Opus Dei’s role in the collapse of Banco Popular, its influence in politics, and the group’s history. They explore Opus Dei’s abusive practices, financial power, and efforts to spread its agenda, including through human trafficking and infiltration of institutions. Gore also explains its ties to the erosion of democracy and its influence on U.S. policies, from reproductive rights to LGBTQ+ issues."]

Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. "The Substance is a Documentary." Film International (September 3, 2024) ["As far as emotional fidelity is concerned, The Substance is a documentary. No other film I have ever seen so perfectly captures my subjective experience of the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age."]

Katz, Jonathan. "What the U.S. Did to Haiti." Current Affairs #354 (November 4, 2024) ["Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have recently been pushing vicious racist fake news about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are stealing and eating people's pets and destroying the town. But why are there Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio in the first place? What role has U.S. foreign policy played in driving Haitians from Haiti? Today, we are joined by Jonathan Katz, one of the leading journalists writing about U.S. imperialism and a specialist in Haiti. Katz tells us about the history of U.S. relations with Haiti, common misconceptions about the country, and the deeper meaning of the Springfield pet-eating scare, and how it fits with longstanding racialized narratives about threatening Haitians. The former Port-au-Prince bureau chief for the Associated Press, Katz is the author of the books The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. His newsletter can be found here. It is not a matter of whether the United States should get involved in Haiti following the first presidential assassination there in more than a century. The United States is already deeply involved. The questions are how that involvement helped, at a minimum, to set the stage for the crisis now enveloping a nation of 11.5 million people and what to do with that reality from here on out...Ever since Haiti won its independence from France in a slave revolution that culminated in 1804, the mere idea of a republic run by self-liberated Black people has sent shivers through the white world. -Jonathan Katz, "U.S. Intervention in Haiti Would Be a Disaster—Again," Foreign Policy (2021)."]

Khalil, Osamah. "Why America Perceives a 'World of Enemies.'" Current Affairs #356 (November 8, 2024) ["Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden, a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) conjured a "world of enemies" in which force was preferable to diplomacy. A cast of rotating villains (from Ho Chi Minh to Saddam Hussein to Hamas) are treated as existential threats to freedom and democracy, and because they are monstrous they cannot be negotiated with and can only be destroyed. Prof. Khalil joins today to discuss his work, which argues that our militaristic attitude toward the rest of the world has also come to characterize domestic political discourse. "American militarism has not been limited to foreign battlefields. Politicians and policymakers have insisted that Americans are engaged in an existential struggle against foes seen and unseen, foreign and domestic. Thus, militarism has seeped into everyday American life as the United States has not settled for defeat or victory but for war as a permanent state." - Osamah F. Khalil"]

Kitty, Alexandra. "Objectivity in Journalism: Should We Be Skeptical?" Skeptic (November 7, 2013) ["The problem with assuming that emotional detachment somehow leads an observer to find the Truth, is that not all truths are built to last for eternity. Clifford Christians, a research professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana, notes “there isn’t an objective world that’s static, that exists outside of us” (Christians, 1997). Walter Harrington, a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana, book author and long-time staff writer for the Washington Post magazine, adds, “We have a physical world that exists out there. We have a number of what the Dow is and to report the Dow constantly and uncritically is to not stop and explain to people how the Dow is constructed, how it has been changed over the years, how its alteration shapes its outcome and how the Dow parses with other measures. When we accept something as a piece of objective fact, usually it’s time to start saying ‘Well, wait a minute, it’s time to start looking at that.’ Because once anything is accepted as being a fact that we no longer question, doubt or evaluate, I think that you’re going into dangerous territory” (Harrington, 1997)."]

Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd.  "Tower of Babel." The Ancients (November 23, 2024) ["The Tower of Babel story is iconic. Featured in the Book of Genesis, it explains how different languages came to be across the world. But what are its origins? Join Tristan Hughes and Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in this special episode of The Ancients - recorded live at the London Podcast Festival - as they delve into the biblical roots of the myth and uncover the real archeological remains that inspired the fable. They explore how ancient ziggurats influenced depictions of the tower, discuss the intersection between history and faith and discover how age-old texts and modern archaeology combine to unravel the mysteries behind the story of the Tower of Babel."]

Maclay, Willow Catelyn. "Cracked Actor: Cary Grant." Metrograph (ND) ["Unraveling the coded queerness that animates the exuberant actor’s performances."]

Marx, Paris. "Data Vampires: Fighting for Control." Tech Won't Save Us (October 28, 2024) ["Tech billionaires are embracing extreme right-wing politics. It’s not just to enhance their power, but to try to realize a harmful vision for humanity’s future that could see humans merging with machines and possibly even living in computer simulations. Will we allow them to put our collective resources behind their science fiction dreams, or fight for a better future and a different kind of technology to go along with it?"]

Winter, Tim. "The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Islam." Past Present Future #153 (January 24, 2024) ["Today’s episode in our history of revolutionary ideas explores the world-altering impact of Islam from the seventh century onwards. David talks to the leading Islamic scholar Tim Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad) about what changed – and what didn’t – with the appearance of Islamic law, Islamic culture and Islamic ideas of community. Was Islam really egalitarian? How could a universalist religion encompass so much variety? Why did it spread so fast? And what caused it to split so soon?"]

Red Rooms (Canada: Pascal Plante, 2024)

 Red Rooms (Canada: Pascal Plante, 2024: 118 mins)

Keogan, Natalie. "“There Is a Bombardment of Violent Images in Our Lives”: Director Pascal Plante on His High-Tech Serial Killer Drama Red Rooms." Filmmaker (October 9, 2024)

Lazer, Kit. "Red Rooms." Letterboxd (September 30, 2024) ["An indictment of the voyeurism and loneliness of our chronically online existence. Our empathy as a species is inversely proportional to our internet speed. We wake up, log on to millions of people around the world, likely succumb to misanthropy or self-loathing, log out. "]

Logan, Kyle. "Red Rooms Interview, Part 1: Pascal Plante Talks the Craft of Making a Thriller." Screen Anarchy (September 3, 2024) 

---. "Red Rooms Interview, Part 2: Pascal Plante Talks the Music and Ethics of His Thriller." Screen Anarchy (September 4, 2024)

Rubsam, Robert. "The Empire of Ugliness." Liberties (December 2024) ["So what are we doing here, really? One cannot imbibe such diverse, daily horrors and not be made coarser. It has been argued that this presentation dulls us to violent images by making them seem less real, but I think we are experiencing something more akin to a levelling, in which images of violence are made to seem just as banal as all the other images or thoughts we see online, both disarming the violence and infecting the mundane with a violent energy, a tincturing which degrades both at the same time.
...
We can see these forces everywhere, in the fossil fuel CEOs who consciously destroy our planet, the tech VC billionaires who commit their fortunes to end democracy, the president-elect who promises to make public life hell for all manner of minorities. These are vicious, vindictive people, obsessed with their IQs, who preen over their supposed genetic superiority, yet must purchase a prominence they cannot earn. Leys found them not only in the realm of aesthetics, but even more in ethics: “The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature.” They can destroy whatever is good and beautiful in society, can attack it in others, can push their technologies to the edge, yet they are totally incapable of producing anything but ugliness themselves. It should disturb us that so many identify with and celebrate them. Their empire is everywhere, and we are all stakeholders."]

---. "On Red Rooms and Our Depravity." Required Reading from Liberties (February 3, 2024) 

Shaffer, Marshall. "Pascal Plante on Subverting True Crime Tropes with Red Rooms." Slant (October 4, 2024) ["Plante discusses whether online culture encourages people to hide themselves in society."]

Snow, Philippa. "A Gallery of Severed Hands and Whatnot." Notebook (January 21, 2025) ["Reflections on the adolescent drive to seek out graphic imagery, from early-’00s shock sites to the films of the New French Extremity."]

Spilde, Coleman. "Red Rooms Want to Make You Sick." Top Shelf Low Brow (September 12, 2024)

Thomas, Ande. "Pascal Plante's Red Rooms Challenges Our Fascination with True Crime." What Sleeps Beneath (September 2, 2024)