We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
At the premiere of their new movie, the actor and actress addressed the media to debunk the rumor that they were dating.
If you guessed that "debunk" has something to do with "bunk," meaning "nonsense," you're correct. We started using "bunk" at the beginning of the 20th century. (It derived, via "bunkum," from a remark made by a congressman from Buncombe county, North Carolina.) A little less than 25 years later, "debunk" was first used in print for the act of taking the "bunk" out of something. There are plenty of synonyms for "debunk," including "disprove," "rebut," "refute," and the somewhat rarer "confute." Even "falsify" can mean "prove something false," in addition to "make something false." "Debunk" itself often suggests that something is not merely untrue, but also a sham; one can simply disprove a myth, but if it is "debunked," the implication is that it was a grossly exaggerated or foolish claim.
“Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth. And it happens every few minutes. The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there.” ~ Kurt Cobain talking in November 1991 about the background behind the song ‘Polly’
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man https://youtu.be/QXqyzjHa8Ac?si=1qX8quwTD9pwo9dr
"In his nine-film career, Wong has perfected the romance noir genre, and these days, he has it all to himself… 2046 stakes out its own territory as a complex, visually rich, pull-out-all-the-stops rumination on memory, regret, relationships and the creative process. While it falls just shy of a masterpiece, Wong's idiosyncratic command of the medium, along with Christopher Doyle's cinematography, William Chang's set and costume design and a veritable Murderers Row of Chinese and Hong Kong actresses make this a rare, sumptuous movie treat. It already feels like a classic." - G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
Bamber, Marilyn. "The Honeymoon Killers."Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["The Pesaro films tended to fall into two easy categories, the typical avant film stressing technique and the hard-core political film stressing ideology. The inclusion of The Honeymoon Killers in mid-festival seemed someone’s idea of a joke, but debate on the film brought out the two tendencies of the festival quite sharply. The avant people read their private fantasies into the grade-B thriller about a fat woman named Martha and a gigilo (sic) who murder several women in the course of trying to fleece them of their life savings. Marguerite Duras thought The Honeymoon Killers was ‘one of the most beautiful love stories I have ever seen.’ A Romanian said that as the murders mounted, the obese Martha became more and more desirable to him. An Italian Leftist stated that Martha was the expression of the proletariat, her lover, the lumpen, and the women they murder, the ruling class. After more exchanges of this sort, the director of the film blew everyone’s mind by saying they were all fools, explaining that his only ideological motive was to tell the story accurately and the main reason the film had been produced was to make money."]
Biagetti, Samuel. "The History of Deportation in America -- pt. 1: Banishment By Another Name."Historiansplaining (July 29, 2025) ["We examine the roots of the American practice of "deportation" -- from colonial banishment of heretics, through the political upheaval over Alien & Sedition Acts, to the age of Chinese Exclusion -- which paved the way for the federal government to exercise virtually unlimited & absolute power over aliens, whom they placed outside the protection of the Constitution. Suggested further reading: Kanstroom, "Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History" Image: East Asian women & children in a holding cell, Angel Island immigration station, Calinfornia, ca. 1920."]
Boumgarden, Peter and Dilawar Syed. "For America’s 35 Million small businesses, tariff uncertainty hits especially hard."The Conversation (August 4, 2025) ["Imagine it’s April 2025 and you’re the owner of a small but fast-growing e-commerce business. Historically, you’ve sourced products from China, but the president just announced tariffs of 145% on these goods. Do you set up operations in Thailand – requiring new investment and a lot of work – or wait until there’s more clarity on trade? What if waiting too long means you miss your chance to pull it off? This isn’t a hypothetical – it’s a real dilemma faced by a real business owner who spoke with one of us over coffee this past spring. And she’s not alone. As of 2023, of those U.S. companies that import goods, more than 97% of them were small businesses. For these companies, tariff uncertainty isn’t just frustrating – it’s paralyzing."]
Boustan, Leigh. "Immigration in America: Data and Myths."Capitalisn't (July 4, 2024) ["If democracy is a social contract, why don’t we allow everybody who is willing to sign it? Why don’t we have open borders for immigration? In their book "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," Princeton University’s Leah Boustan and Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky provide insights from big data to explore how immigration shaped the United States by looking at the economic legacies of immigrants and their children. On this week’s encore episode, hosts Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean talk with Boustan to unpack how immigrants and their progeny have impacted jobs, wages, and housing prices for native-born Americans. Conversely, how do immigrants’ countries of origin overcome obstacles to socioeconomic change when many of their most-motivated citizens leave? Can data move the U.S. immigration debate beyond the current border crisis?"]
Coogler, Ryan, et al. "The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Race, Religion, Culture and the Stories we Tell."The Best of the Left #1710 (May 18, 2025) ["The full quote from today's title is from one of the most celebrated writers of Southern American literature, William Faulkner, who said, "The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” The new film, Sinners, set in the Jim Crow South, attempts to take on some of the subjects that make up that web of history and consequence. The theme of today's episode is an attempt to dig into many of the subjects of the film."]
Crawford, Jarmahl, Peniel Joseph and Isabel Wilkerson. "Stokely Carmichael and Black Power."Radio Open Source (March 6, 2014) ["Stokely Carmichael was a down-home organizer and radical off-beat visionary of racial equality in America 50 years ago, a quicksilver activist, theorist, street hero, preacher and prophet of black revolution in America and the world. He’s in the civil rights pantheon, for sure, but he’s still struggling in spirit with the leadership, especially the example of Martin Luther King; and he’s still a scarecrow in the memory of white America. Stokely Carmichael had some of Malcolm X’s fury and fire, and some of the comedian Richard Pryor’s gift with a punchline, too. “Black power” was his slogan that became a chant, that built his bad-boy celebrity and awakened a political generation but may also have been his undoing in the 1960s. So what does a half-century’s hindsight make of the man and his Pan-African vision? And while we’re at it: what would Stokely Carmichael make of black power today – looking at Hollywood, Hip Hop, the White House, and prisons and poverty?"]
Fisher, Yochi and Loaay Wattad. "On Seeing the Trauma of Others."On Being (May 15, 2025) ["This episode emerged from a private gathering in The Hague in the fall of 2024 with a small group of people who live in Israel — both Jewish and Palestinian, Jews and Palestinians who continue to share life. We’re pleased to invite you now to overhear this particular conversation, with the permission of all involved. It centered around the matter of intergenerational trauma and healing — in a land in which the traumas of two peoples are terribly, inextricably intertwined. Yochi Fischer is a historian. Loaay Wattad is a lecturer, translator, and editor focused on children’s and adolescent literature in Arabic and also in Hebrew. It is a gift to experience the friendship between them, as well as the struggle. This, and the passionate interaction with others in the room that follows, holds complexity and nuance and persistent humanity that news from this part of the world rarely conveys. We were brought together by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "On David Lynch."Weird Studies #184 (February 5, 2025) ["David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the weird. To honor his memory, they decided to devote an episode to Lynch's work as a whole, with special attention paid to Eraserhead—the nightmarish debut that announced his singular vision to the world. A study in dread, desire, and the uncanny, Eraserhead remains one of the most disturbing and mysterious works of American cinema. In this episode, we explore what makes it so powerful and how it connects to Lynch’s larger artistic project."]
Khan, Lina. "Lina Khan's Vision of Capitalism."Capitalisn't (May 15, 2025) ["Lina Khan recently concluded her term as one of the Biden administration’s most controversial leaders. Her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission raised the profile of the relatively obscure antitrust agency charged with protecting competition. Her anti-monopoly outlook and more aggressive enforcement strategies, particularly toward Big Tech market power and protecting workers, earned the ire of the business community and the dedicated vitriol of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Khan began her term as the youngest-ever appointee of the FTC. She initially rose to prominence for her 2017 Yale Law Journal article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which went viral among the antitrust community for its argument that scholars and regulators must look beyond prices to understand what constitutes a harm from a lack of competition, especially in today’s digital economy where many services are nominally provided for free to consumers. Fresh out of law school, Khan appeared on a Capitalisn’t episode in our first season and wrote for our sister publication at the Stigler Center, ProMarket, as far back as 2018. She also delivered two keynote addresses at the Stigler Center’s annual Antitrust and Competition Conferences while FTC chair. On this episode, Khan returns to Capitalisn’t to reflect on her tenure, her vision of capitalism, and how her approach to enforcing existing laws with new thinking may have impacted the everyday lives of Americans. How does she respond to her critics, who include major Democratic business leaders? How does she view the new Trump administration, which is continuing many of her transformative policies, including revised merger guidelines and major lawsuits? As a senator, Vice President JD Vance said she was “one of the few people in the Biden administration actually doing a pretty good job.” Reflecting on her work, Khan also touches upon how conflicts of interest among corporate lawyers and consultants, former bureaucrats, and academics distort policymaking, court rulings, and market outcomes. Finally, she highlights the antitrust issues to pay attention to moving forward, such as algorithmic collusion."]
Leonard, Christopher. "The Meat Racket."Radio West (March 7, 2014) ["Just a handful of companies raise nearly all the meat consumed in America, and among them, Tyson Foods is king. According to the journalist Christopher Leonard, Tyson wrote the blueprint for modern meat production. He says there’s no better way to understand how our food is produced than to know how the company works. In a new book, Leonard explores how Tyson mastered the economics of factory farming to rise to the top, and how it transformed rural America and the middle class economy in the process."]
Lim, Sandra E. "Cinema of Reflexivity: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Logic of Terror in Haneke’s The White Ribbon."Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["Haneke asserts that the film is not solely about the origins of German Fascism, but rather an exploration of “…the roots of all kinds of terrorism – whether politically right, politically left or religious.”1 His framing of violence as universal and recurring opens the door for readings of the film beyond historical accounts. Magdalena Zolkos builds on Haneke’s assertion, offering that The White Ribbon also moves beyond the usual psycho-historical reading of authoritarianism as generational and transmitted through repressive child-rearing. Instead, she suggests that the children internalise the rigid morality and logic of the dominant male figures in the village. If the children are at the root of the terror, as the school teacher suggests, their violent acts do not resist patriarchal rule but instead mutate and turn back on themselves, becoming something more terrifying."]
Misra, Tanvi. "Force Multiplier."The Baffler (May 8, 2025) ["ICE local collaboration agreements ensnare immigrants and citizens alike. ... To assist, the administration has pulled in thousands of agents from other federal law enforcement agencies, who typically go after drug traffickers, child abusers, and bombers, despite their meager training in immigration law. The people disproportionately affected by this reconfiguration of government functions are, of course, immigrants—both with and without documents. But U.S. citizens won’t be immune. Already, some have been caught in the machinery: in Arizona, a citizen was wrongfully arrested by border agents; in Colorado, where drug enforcement agents conducted (and later posted videos of) a splashy raid at an underground nightclub, more may have been scooped up. In another case, ICE and other federal agents raided an Oklahoma City home and traumatized the U.S.-citizen mother and her daughters who lived there."]
Stetler, Pepper. "Trumpian “Common Sense” and the History of IQ Tests."The Los Angeles Review of Books (May 8, 2025) ["In the eighth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Pepper Stetler explores the troubling history of IQ tests and special education."]
Talisse, Robert. "On Civic Solitude."Philosophy Bites (July 30, 2025) ["Democracy is about acting as a group, but, surprisingly, Robert Talisse argues that what it needs to function well is a degree of solitude for citizens. In-group and out-group dynamics mean that individuals become vulnerable to being pushed towards more extreme views than they would otherwise hold. There is, Talisse, maintains, a need to balance times of thinking together with times of thinking alone, at a distance from the fray." Robert Talisse's latest book is Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance: Book description: "An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics. The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What's more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees--a profoundly antidemocratic stance. Drawing on extensive research about polarization and partisanship, Talisse argues that certain core democratic capacities can be cultivated only at a distance from the political fray. If we are to meet the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, we must occasionally step away from our allies and opponents alike. We can perform this self-work only in secluded settings where we can engage in civic reflection that is not prepackaged in the idiom of our political divides, allowing us to contemplate political circumstances that are not our own."]
West, Stephen. "Albert Camus - The Plague."Philosophize This! #225 (March 27, 2025) ["We look at Albert Camus' The Plague. We talk about a common misreading from the Myth of Sisyphus. We talk about different cycles of his work from his earlier individual confrontation with the absurd to a more community focus. We talk about solidarity. Absurd heroes. Empathy and metaphysical rebellion."]
---. "Jürgen Habermas – The Public Sphere."Philosophize This! #143 (May 1, 2020) ["When transnational corporations with very specific ends they’re trying to achieve own major media outlets. When there is so much power in controlling people’s values…Habermas thinks the economic/governmental system colonizes the lifeworld. Where we used to sit around the dinner table and have discussions to determine our thoughts about the world…we now turn on a screen and are sold ways to think about things. The further we got from the origins of the public sphere in those coffee houses back in France …the further we got away from communicative rationality. We got so far away from it we could barely see it anymore…to the point where brilliant thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer wrote an entire book about rationality and didn’t even consider its existence! But for any chains we were supposedly wrapped in by the Enlightenment, Habermas thought the key to get us out of them was built into the Enlightenment all along. We just lost sight of it. The emancipatory potential of reason…reason’s ability to direct us away from treating people as a means to an end…the type of reason grounded in communication… grounded in the pursuit of genuinely trying to understand the other person’s perspective and then working towards agreement…the type of reason that can allow us to make our decisions about things not by buying into an endless sales pitch, but by talking to our fellow citizens in the lifeworld comparing our individual perspeciives… True democracy, to Habermas, is when the lifeworld controls the system. Not the system controlling the lifeworld."]
---. "Religion and Nothingness - Kyoto School pt. 2 - Nishitani."Philosophize This! #217 (December 6, 2024) ["Today we talk about expanding our view of what a religious quest includes. The limits of dualistic thinking. Technological enframing and obsession with utility. Self-emptying. Consciousness, Nihility and Sunyata. Sunyata as immanence."]
Williams, Adrienne, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru. "The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence."NOEMA (October 13, 2024) ["Tech companies that have branded themselves “AI first” depend on heavily surveilled gig workers like data labelers, delivery drivers and content moderators. Startups are even hiring people to impersonate AI systems like chatbots, due to the pressure by venture capitalists to incorporate so-called AI into their products. In fact, London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures surveyed 2,830 AI startups in the EU and found that 40% of them didn’t use AI in a meaningful way. Far from the sophisticated, sentient machines portrayed in media and pop culture, so-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems. In this article, we give examples of the labor exploitation driving so-called AI systems and argue that supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in discussions pertaining to AI ethics."]
Williams, Alex. "The Cruelty of Time: Amour."Senses of Cinema #113 (April 2025) ["In Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), death is smelt before it is seen. The film opens with a shocking discovery: emergency services breach a sealed Parisian apartment following complaints of an odour emanating from within to find, behind taped-shut bedroom doors, the corpse of an elderly woman, the pillow beneath her head covered tenderly in cut flowers. This encounter with the scent and subsequent physical evidence of death doubles as both an end and a beginning from which everything subsequently emanates. The film’s remainder – which chronicles the diminishing faculties of retired piano teacher Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and the effect of this on her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) – is thereby injected with inevitability, the focus shifted from outcome to process. Indeed, all that follows is an amelioration for Michele Aaron’s observation that, compared to the swiftly dispatched corpses littering Hollywood cinema, “the pain or smell of death, the banality of physical, or undignified, decline, the dull ache of mourning, are rarely seen” onscreen."]
Wisnioski, Matthew. "What's Wrong with Innovation?"The MIT Reader (August 22, 2025) ["For more than half a century, innovation was celebrated as a universal good. That consensus has now cracked. While the imperative to innovate continues to drive change worldwide, critics increasingly depict innovation culture as a source of inequality or accuse its champions of woke groupthink. What changed? Matthew Wisnioski is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. He is the author of several books, including “Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America” and “Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life,” from which this article is adapted. An open access edition of the book is available for download here."]
"The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us. Artistic revolt, innovation, experiment should not be met with hostility. They may disturb an established order or an artificial conventionality, but they may rescue us from death in life, from robot life, from boredom, from loss of the self, from enslavement.
When we totally accept a pattern not made by us, not truly our own, we wither and die. People’s conventional structure is often a façade. Under the most rigid conventionality there is often an individual, a human being with original thoughts or inventive fantasy, which he does not dare expose for fear of ridicule, and this is what the writer and artist are willing to do for us. They are guides and map makers to greater sincerity. They are useful, in fact indispensable, to the community. They keep before our eyes the variations which make human beings so interesting." -- Anais Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
Allen, Brittany. "The Defense Department wants to ban hundreds of books. Here are the weirdest titles."Literary Hub (July 16, 2025) ["The Trump administration has moved to ban 596 books from schools that serve military children. This is in addition to all their ongoing support for state book bans. Though it’s uniquely upsetting because military schools can be seen as arms of the government, where free speech protections can be harder to protect. Threatened titles include “children’s biographies of trailblazing transgender public figures. An award-winning novel reflecting on what it is like to be Black in America,” and “a series of graphic novels about the love story between a teenage gay couple.” To meet their apparent quota, Defense Department (DD) censors seem to have applied a control F search to the whole Library of Congress. YA books with “gender,” “trans,” “racist,” “identity,” or any acronym in the title have been scrubbed from school shelves. Counter or contextualizing histories that challenge white supremacy, like Paul Ortiz’s An African American History and Latinx History of the United States, are also on the chopping block. Ditto rhetorical question titles that tease a challenge to hegemony. Like Ronald D. Lankford’s Are America’s Wealthy Too Powerful?"]
Baggini, Julian. "The Philosophy of Food (Part 1 How the World Eats)."The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast #142 (April 20, 2025) ["Food is one of the most universal and essential parts of human life. From gourmet steaks to the everyday, humble, packet of crisps, food consumption is everywhere. But what do we actually know about how our food is grown? How is it processed? And how does it ends up on our supermarket shelves or in our restaurants and takeaways? While we may look back and think traditional food customs are more often in harmony with the natural environment, most of us today rely on a complex global food web of production, distribution, consumption and disposal. But how does it work, and what can philosophy say about food? Joining our discussion on food philosophy today is philosopher Julian Baggini. Baggini is an expert in popular philosophy with Sunday Times best-selling books such as How the World Thinks, How to Think Like a Philosopher and The Pig That Wants to be Eaten. He has served as the academic director of the Royal Institute of philosophy and is a member of the Food Ethics Council. He has written for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, and Prospect Magazine, as well as a plethora of academic journals and think tanks. In his wide-ranging and definitive new book, How the World Eats, Baggini argues that the need for a better understanding of how we feed ourselves has never been more urgent. Baggini delves into the best and worst food practises around the world in a huge array of different societies, past and present-exploring cutting edge technologies, the ethics and health of ultra processed food and the effectiveness of our food governance. His goal: to extract a food philosophy of essential principles, on which to build a food system fit for the 21st century and beyond. What is that food philosophy? Let's tuck in, and find out." Part 2: How the World Eats]
Carroll. Tobias. "Elon Musk Just Doesn’t Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks."Literary Hub (April 30, 2025) ["Before going deeper into Banks’s Culture books, it seems worthwhile to address one point: I don’t mean to argue that Musk’s fondness for Banks is flawed along partisan or ideological lines. I myself have read and enjoyed the work of plenty of authors with whom I disagree politically. Musk’s fondness for Banks’s work feels more dissonant than that. It’s as though he grew so attached to the idea of a utopian spacefaring civilization that he never bothered to look too deeply into the inner workings of that civilization."]
Evans, Claire L. "Living in a Lucid Dream."NOEMA (July 1, 2024) ["Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Edge of Reality: On John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness."Weird Studies #178 (October 23, 2024) ["Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In the Mouth of Madness. Carpenter’s cult classic obliterates the boundary between reality and fiction, madness and revelation—an ideal subject for a Weird Studies conversation. In this episode, recorded before a live audience, the hosts explore the film’s Lovecraftian themes, the porous nature of storytelling, and how art can function as a conduit to unsettling truths."]
---. "Providence of Evil: On Robert Eggers' Nosferatu."Weird Studies #182 (January 8, 2025) ["In this episode, JF and Phil examine the myth of the vampire through the lens of Robert Eggers' latest film, Nosferatu, a reimagining of F. W. Murnau's German Expressionist masterpiece. Topics covered include the nature of vampires, the symbolism of evil, the implicit theology of Eggers' film (compared with that of Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula), the need for shadow work, as well as the power of real introspection and self-sacrifice."]
Gerstle, Gary. "Ideas of Globalisation: Hoover and Smoot-Hawley (and Trump!)."Past Present Future (May 4, 2025) ["David talks to historian Gary Gerstle about the last time the Republican party got caught up in a tariffs disaster and how it changed American politics. The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 brought tariffs back and helped bring down both the Republican Party and the global economy. Why didn’t Hoover stop it? What did the fiasco reveal about the limits of presidential power back then? And what does it suggest about the limits of presidential power today?"]
Gretton, Dan. "Murder by Policy."Against Everyone #128 (October 13, 2020) ["Albert Speer - who was a close conspirator of Hitler’s said of the process of Nazi-fication that, “Each man should only think about his task and not be concerned with that of his neighbor." This was right down to the most menial functions - that each person would carry out their own labor without creating a networked understanding of what was going on. In other words fragmentation and compartmentalization are key for mass atrocity. This is, potentially, bad news for us, as we seem to live more and more fragmented and compartmentalized lives. Fragmentation and compartmentalization is a kind of swaddling that keeps us safe from understanding what we’re doing to others. It shelters us from the harm our lives are doing, and also keeps us from seeing what others are going through. And this sense of safety can breed a sort of calm apathy. Another way of saying this is that we feel safe because we lack compassion. Compassion means, literally, to suffer with. If we were to really enact compassion, if we were to allow our lives to intersect with the suffering of others, could we ever feel safe? How could we bear it? Instead of ignoring the suffering of others, we need to look directly into it. I invited author of I You We Them: Walking Into The World Of The Desk Killer, and cofounder of the artist activist group, Platform, Dan Gretton onto AEWCH. Dan’s book is all about people who murder by policy - people whose participation in compartmentalized and fragmented work have permitted them to engage in murder while feeling safe. And through that safety being permitted a luxurious indifference. You may be one of these people. Or you may become one if you’re not now. How do we commit ourselves to atrocity? Could you do it? Could I?"]
Higgs, Kerryn. "A Brief History of Consumer Culture."The MIT Press Reader (January 11, 2021) ["Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff." Kerryn Higgs is an Australian writer and historian. She is the author of “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet,” from which this article is adapted.]
Huang, Saffron and Sam Manning. "Here’s How To Share AI’s Future Wealth."NOEMA (April 22, 2025) ["Advanced AI threatens to increase inequality and concentrate power, but we can proactively distribute AI’s benefits to foster a just and inclusive economy before it’s too late."]
Kahlenberg, Richard. "Building Real Diversity at Our Colleges." (Posted on Youtube: April 2025) ["Can a new class-based approach to college admissions produce economic and racial diversity alike—and greater fairness? For decades America’s colleges and universities have been working to increase racial diversity. But Richard Kahlenberg argues that they have been using the wrong approach. He makes the case that class disadvantage, rather than race, should be the determining factor for how a broader array of people “get in.” While elite universities claim to be on the side of social justice, the dirty secret of higher education is that the perennial focus on racial diversity has provided cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. Kahlenberg says that by fixing the class bias in college admissions we can begin to rectify America’s skyrocketing economic inequality and class antagonism, giving more people a better place at the table as they move through life and more opportunity to “swim in the river of power.” Kahlenberg, author of the new book Class Matters, has long worked with prominent civil rights leaders on housing and school integration. But his recognition of class inequality in American higher education led to his making a controversial decision to go over to the “other side” and provide research and testimony in cases that helped lead to the controversial Supreme Court decision of 2023 that ended racial preferences. That conservative ruling could, Kahlenberg says, paradoxically have a progressive policy outcome by cutting a new path for economic and racial diversity alike—and greater fairness."]
Lyonhart, Jonathan D. "Peele’s Black Extraterrestrial, Critique of Religion."Journal of Religion & Film (October 2023) ["While Jordan Peele’s films have always held their mysteries close to the chest, they eventually granted their viewers some climactic clarity. Get Out (2017) used an 1980s style orientation video to clear up its neuroscientific twist, while Us (2019) had Lupita Nyongo’s underworld twin narratively spell out the details of the plot. Yet Nope (2022) refuses to show its hand even after the game is over, never illuminating the connection between its opening scene and the broader film, nor a myriad of other questions. As such, critics complained that it stitched together two seemingly incongruent plots without explanation; one where a chimp attacks the crew of a successful Hollywood show, the other where an alien organism haunts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. In this paper, I will argue that a theological interpretation of Nope helps explain some of these mysteries at its center, while revealing Peele’s underlying religious critique and its place within his broader oeuvre."]
Macy, Joanna. "Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us."On Being (July 22, 2025) ["This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translator, she taught and embodied a wild love for the world. What follows is the second and final conversation Krista had with Joanna, together with Joanna’s friend, psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, in 2021. Joanna and Anita had just published a new translation of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. At the turn of the last tumultuous century, Rilke was prescient in realizing that the world as he’d known it was passing away. Joanna’s adventurous life and vision took shape in the crucibles of the history that then unfolded. Relistening to her now is to experience a way of standing before the great, unfolding dramas of our time — ecological, political, intimate. We stand before the possibilities of what Joanna called “A Great Unraveling” or “A Great Turning” towards life-generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of this life-giving conversation."]
Martin, Laura J. "The War on Weeds."NOEMA (May 14, 2024) ["Pesticides and herbicides made from fossil fuels that are freely available to unwitting consumers poison our land, our bodies and life all around."]
Morley, John. "The Economics of Law Firms Resistance to Donald Trump."Capitalisn't (May 1, 2025) ["The rule of law is essential to the flourishing of liberal democracy and capitalism. Yet, it is now under pressure in the United States, and corporate law firms are in the eye of the storm. Over the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has issued executive orders against several prominent law firms that represented his political adversaries and promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Some of these law firms have caved into the administration’s demands to end such practices and provide pro bono services to the government, whereas others are fighting back. To discuss the financial reasons why some firms have capitulated while others have held out, and what the consequences are for the survival of the rule of law, Bethany and Luigi speak to John Morley, Augustus E. Lines Professor of Law at Yale University and an expert on the economics of law. Are Trump’s orders unconstitutional, and if so, why have so many law firms reached a deal with him? How have changes to law firms’ business models left them particularly vulnerable to a moment like this? Why are some firms more vulnerable to political attacks than others? Together, the three discuss the firms’ reciprocal agreements with the administration, the possibilities for a collective-action response, and how this moment may profoundly reshape the future of law, democracy, and capitalism in America."]
Prakash, Inney. "'There Was No Going Around Gaza': Raoul Peck on Cannes 2025 Premiere Orwell: 2+2=5."Filmmaker (May 29, 2025) ["In recent years, the filmmaker has made direct, no-nonsense use of the nonfiction form to address, from various angles, the rot of white supremacy, its historical roots and its unchecked future. Building on I Am Not Your Negro, Silver Dollar Road, the miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes and last year’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Orwell uses the famous writer’s letters, essays and novels to illustrate the clear rise of a new global fascism in the classical mode. 2+2=5 incorporates contemporary archival footage and portraiture from Myanmar and India, countries which played an important role in Orwell’s biography (he was born in the latter and did colonial military service in the former), but also Iraq, Tunisia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, among others—not to mention America, where Trump’s bluster and the events of January 6 feature heavily. Tracking Orwell’s evolution from dutiful imperial subject to concerned global citizen, the film seems to offer hope that even some oppressors among us might awaken to pangs of conscience."]
Rabbani, Mouin. "Israel’s Starvation Campaign in Gaza Explained."Current Affairs (July 22, 2025) ["Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani joins Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza. They examine the illusion of ceasefire negotiations, the weaponization of humanitarian aid through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and the eugenic logic underpinning Israel’s military campaign. They also explore how death tolls are systematically undercounted, how Palestinian voices are censored in Western media, why Israeli hasbara no longer works, and how genocidal logic is rationalized through propaganda. "]
West, Stephen. "Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration."Philosophize This! #232 (July 7, 2025) [MB: We are homo fabulan, and in our immersive world of competing (as well as controlling) narratives, it is important we learn to distinguish between "story telling vs. story selling." Episode Description: "Today we talk about the book The Crisis of Narration by the philosopher Byung Chul Han. We talk about the history of storytelling. Walter Benjamin's distinction between a Paris fire and a revolution in Madrid. The effects of social media on memory. Story telling vs story selling. AI as pure Intelligenz lacking Geist. The ability for stories to give shape to suffering. The importance of boredom for self-discovery."]
---. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera."Philosophize This! #234 (August 13, 2025) ["Today we try to produce a philosophical guide for the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. We talk about Parmenides, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, kitsch as something more than just an aesthetic category, existential codes and his animal test of morality."]
"A collaboration between the living Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick seems appropriate to a project that reflects profoundly on the differences between life and non-life. Kubrick started this picture and came up with the idea that Spielberg should direct it, and after inheriting a 90-page treatment Kubrick had prepared..., Spielberg finished it in so much his own manner that it may be his most personal film, as well as his most thoughtful. It might make you cry; it's just as likely to give you the creeps—which is as it should be. This is a movie people will be arguing about for many years to come." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger of a Single Story."TED Global (2009) ["Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."]
Bliuvaitė, Saulė. "Girls in Pictures."Notebook (July 25, 2025) ["The director of “Toxic” invites us into the scrapbook of influences for her film about the lives of teenage models."]
Hearing, David. "We're All Mad Here."Notes From the End of Cinema (August 10, 2025) ["The children in Weapons are unsettling for their agency – they’re not running away from but towards something. This brings another quote from Minima Moralia to mind, where Adorno talks about the effect of children growing up in a culture that has rescinded the social and economic promises it made to their parents: “Today we are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its reactions insufferably more grown-up than its parents ever were.” Even someone as pessimistic as Adorno didn’t foresee the horror of regular school shootings, and the way in which a lottery-like acceptance of the death of a handful of children every year is considered by the government as an acceptable price to pay for the ownership of assault weapons. It is often remarked that this generation of children carry an existential weight not felt by any since those who served in the World Wars, with the exception that rather than a worldwide monoconflict, what exists instead is a series of overlapping crises that foreclose on the very concept of the future itself. This generation of children do not have a specific conflict to renounce as much as existing in a world amid the convergence of many. In this sense, the running children at the start of Weapons also hint at something paradoxical: that these children are both inexperienced and also existentially careworn in a way beyond those who parent them – they shouldn’t be in the street, but they’re already entangled in danger before they leave the house."]
O'Donoghue, "Raining in the Mountain."Senses of Cinema #113 (February 2025) ["Without proposing Raining in the Mountain as a crude allegory of contemporary geopolitics, one can still claim that the film reflects the world in which it was made. After decades of brutal stasis, the late 1970s saw flux, uncertainty, and possible liberalisation in the region, with the death of Mao and Deng Xiaoping’s introduction of radical social and economic reforms in China; Britain’s preparations for the eventual handover of Hong Kong; and civil rights protests that would eventually lead to democracy in Taiwan. Raining in the Mountain catches something of this social and political uncertainty. It presents a world of apparent impregnability and stability that comes under constant attack from within. The ruling classes are exposed as corrupt. If, however, we are under any illusion that Hu proposes the victorious ‘wise’ Buddhists as benevolent, look again at the dispiriting final scene."]
Polan, Dana. "Come Drink with Me."Senses of Cinema #113 (February 2025) ["As different as the discoveries of studio-fabricated nature and a shift in our understanding of a key character are (along with the un-realism of what that character is shown to be capable of), they both serve to take Come Drink with Me out of everyday reality and suggest how aware the film is of its qualities as cinematic construction. Critics sometimes treat the films of King Hu as having a spiritual or lyrical core (and titles like Xia Nu [A Touch of Zen, 1971] and Kongshan Ling Yu [Raining in the Mountain, 1979] can contribute to that), but it may well be the case that what the films are fundamentally “about” is the filmic experience itself – the narration of world-building and character development made manifest and serving as an intrinsic source of delight."]
Stone, Laurie. "Without Your Love."The Paris Review (August 18, 2025) [On Peter Bogdanovich's 1973 film Paper Moon: "I didn’t know we were in store for a work of art as tender as it is beautiful. It was made in the seventies, during a gallop of creativity in film, and set in the thirties. Watching it now, more than fifty years after it was made, the seventies feel as distant from us as the thirties felt to the makers of the film, and yet none of that is distancing, because great works of art, made specific by their time, are independent of their times. They are paradigms of the way pleasure and freedom, more than anything else, drive the making of art. When you are transported, it’s not back in history—it’s to the glass case holding the Grecian urn. ... Is there a perfect time of receptivity that allows you to enter a movie, or thoughts about the world, or feedback about your life? Does a work of art—or new information—enter you because it mixes with thoughts that have already been laid out, like ingredients for a meal you hadn’t planned to cook? Do I wish receptivity was more available? Maybe. And maybe it feels so good because it interrupts the other parts of life. What are “the other parts of life”? The parts where you are anywhere but in the moment.']
Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Pump It Up: The Substance (2024) Live from Salem Horror Fest."The Faculty of Horror (May 21, 2025) ["Join Andrea and Alex live from Salem Horror Fest for feats of strength (!) and a discussion of the horrors of beauty standards, the weight of celebrity culture, and the algorithms that are out to get us."]
Verstraten, Peter. "'I Will Be Your Preacher Teacher': Babygirl."Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["In interviews Reijn has repeatedly mentioned that Babygirl was inspired by erotic thrillers from the 1980s and early 1990s. Her third feature film is a thorough exploration of the “dark thoughts” of protagonist Romy Mathis (Kidman), and in this article I will delve into the nature of her obscure desires. To a certain extent, Babygirl – the most debated film this year in the Netherlands – is a present-day successor to the so-called woman’s films from the 1940s; but, rather than expressing a “desire to desire”, the more emancipatory Babygirl comes closer to Slavoj Žižek’s call to “enjoy your symptom!”"]
"It will be impossible to ever look at Gone with the Wind the same way after 12 Years a Slave, a brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America’s most shameful institution. You might be able to shrug off even the lurid depiction of slavery in Django Unchained to some extent as a cartoonish Tarantino fantasy. But 12 Years does not flinch from showing the most horrifyingly graphic details of Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) struggle to survive in a hellish pre-Civil War Louisiana, which he documented in a remarkable memoir… Well-meaning films like Lincoln and Lee Daniels’ The Butler merely scratch the surface compared to the deep and painful truths laid bare by 12 Years a Slave. It’s about time, Scarlett O’Hara." - Lou Lumenick, New York Post
There are many works of art about making works of art, but few as absorbing and emotionally arresting as Josephine Decker’s masterwork. All of Decker’s films deserve to be more widely seen, but there’s a singular magic to Madeline’s Madeline. It was the film, and the year, that Helena Howard should have been cemented as a superstar. As the eponymous teenager, Howard is volatile and fragile; split between her complex relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July, breathtaking) and her deceptively exploitative yet affectionate relationship with the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (a tender Molly Parker). Decker has such a gift for haptic, expressionistic filmmaking that demands your active attention and emotion. It’s wildly original and innovative in its technical framework, but never distances the audience—the familiar growing pains of the coming-of-age genre hit hard. A vital, affecting piece of cinema to add into your favorites at haste. - Ella Kemp
"In his nine-film career, Wong has perfected the romance noir genre, and these days, he has it all to himself… 2046 stakes out its own territory as a complex, visually rich, pull-out-all-the-stops rumination on memory, regret, relationships and the creative process. While it falls just shy of a masterpiece, Wong's idiosyncratic command of the medium, along with Christopher Doyle's cinematography, William Chang's set and costume design and a veritable Murderers Row of Chinese and Hong Kong actresses make this a rare, sumptuous movie treat. It already feels like a classic." - G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
"In 25TH HOUR Spike Lee takes the story of a convicted drug dealer's last day of freedom and expands it into a meditation on New York and America in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001… From the opening credits sequence, showing two beams of blue light where the World Trade Center once stood, to the closing moments, which evoke the dream of the wide-open road, Lee takes the spiritual moment and crystallizes it into art. The result is a film of sadness and power, the first great 21st century movie about a 21st century subject… With a slice-of-life film such as 25TH HOUR, there's always the challenge of how to end it. Lee and screenwriter David Benioff bring the film to a place of poetry, with a fantasy of America and open spaces that's slightly funny and mostly stirring and still very much about New York." - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
"Recent American films about families all too often pierce eardrums with unrelenting shrieks of dysfunction and misery. Amid the din, French filmmaker Claire Denis's sublime 35 SHOTS OF RUM stands out all the more for its soothing quiet, conveying the easy, frequently nonverbal intimacy between a widowed father, Lionel (Descas), and his diligent university-student daughter, Joséphine (Diop). An homage to both Yasujiro Ozu's similarly themed LATE SPRING (1949) and her own mother's relationship with her grandfather, 35 SHOTS is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation." - Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice
"How lucky are we that the 21st century has allowed us to witness the fresh and unique filmmaking talent of RaMell Ross? While most recently he’s gotten the deserved recognition for 2024’s Nickel Boys, my pick for our list is his stunning 2018 directorial debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Ross’s documentary depicts slice-of-life moments of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, framed only by intertitles asking “What is the orbit of our dreaming?” or “Whose child is this?” He simply lets his subjects be in their own moments while his experimental kino-eye challenges the documentary genre. It might just be the most profoundly human documentary I’ve personally seen, and I encourage more Letterboxd members to check it out, enter the community of Hale County as a spectator and ruminate on the visual treat Ross has given us." - Shae
"The story of two college girls negotiating the treacherous currents of a drab police state to secure an illegal abortion, 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS is a movie one watches in a state of mounting dread. Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster. Set in 1987, 4 MONTHS moves from the shabby clutter of an overcrowded college dorm, through the dimly lit streets of a provincial city, to a rundown Stalinoid deco hotel… For all its long behavioral takes, 4 MONTHS is remarkably unshowy. The movie is as drained of color as the girls' faces. Daily life is a hellish adventure." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
What began as a rejected television pilot became the defining film of David Lynch’s career, a fearful love letter to movies and other invented narratives, including the stories we tell ourselves.
Movie moment: At the film’s turning point, its heroines, the new-to-Hollywood aspirin actress Betty (Naomi Watts) and the amnesiac Rita (Laura Harring), go to a sparsely attended nightclub called Club Silencio, where they’re told everything they’re about to experience is an illusion, from the sound of the orchestra to the thunderstorm. Both Betty and Rita respond fearfully. When singer Rebekah del Rio takes the stage to perform a heartbreaking rendition of “Llorando,” a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” both are moved to tears (as, perhaps, are those watching the film). When del Rio collapses, the song keeps playing without her, shattering the illusion. But the melody and the emotions it stirs still linger. — KP
Mulholland Dr. (France/USA: David Lynch, 2001: 147 mins)
Ayres, Jedidiah, et al. "Mulholland Dr (2001)."The Projection Booth #296 (November 8, 2016) ["David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) lived a double life as a television pilot and feature film. A neo-noir that plays with themes of identity, roleplaying, and obsession, the film stars Naomi Watts as innocent ingénue Betty Elms and Laura Elena Harring as Rita, a woman with a past hidden from herself. Mike talks to Patrick Fischler and Laura Harring about their roles in Mulholland Drive (and a lot more). Professor Erik Marshall and author Jedidiah Ayres help elucidate the mystery of Mulholland Drive."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "On David Lynch."Weird Studies #184 *February 5, 2025) ["David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the weird. To honor his memory, they decided to devote an episode to Lynch's work as a whole, with special attention paid to Eraserhead—the nightmarish debut that announced his singular vision to the world. A study in dread, desire, and the uncanny, Eraserhead remains one of the most disturbing and mysterious works of American cinema. In this episode, we explore what makes it so powerful and how it connects to Lynch’s larger artistic project."]
McGoff, Jessica. "My Mulholland: On Mulholland Drive."The Cine-Files #15 (Fall 2020) ["The second-most mentioned video essay in the Best Video Essays of 2020 Survey conducted by Sight & Sound Magazine" - it is a reflection on the impact David Lynch's 2001 movie Mulholland Drive had on the author at 13 and now.]
"Memories of Mulholland."Current (October 19, 2015) ["Fourteen years ago today, David Lynch’s haunting masterpiece Mulholland Dr. opened in theaters across the United States. Take a look back at critics’ initial reactions to Lynch’s mystifying “love story in the city of dreams.”]
Toles, George. "Auditioning Betty in Mulholland Dr.." Film Quarterly (Fall 2004): Reprinted in Annual Editions: Film 07/08 191-198 [Available in BCTC Library PN1993 A6285]
"In Hannah Arendt's youthful self-portrait Die Schatten (The Shadows), she described her hunger for experience in the world as being 'trapped in a craving.' What drove her to work from an early age was an insatiable desire to experience and understand life. As she would later come to argue, the work of understanding, unlike the urge to know, requires an active commitment to the activity of thinking; it requires one to always be ready to begin again (9)." - Hill, Samantha Rose. Hannah Arendt. Reaktion Books, 2021.
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There are many works of art about making works of art, but few as absorbing and emotionally arresting as Josephine Decker’s masterwork. All of Decker’s films deserve to be more widely seen, but there’s a singular magic to Madeline’s Madeline. It was the film, and the year, that Helena Howard should have been cemented as a superstar. As the eponymous teenager, Howard is volatile and fragile; split between her complex relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July, breathtaking) and her deceptively exploitative yet affectionate relationship with the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (a tender Molly Parker). Decker has such a gift for haptic, expressionistic filmmaking that demands your active attention and emotion. It’s wildly original and innovative in its technical framework, but never distances the audience—the familiar growing pains of the coming-of-age genre hit hard. A vital, affecting piece of cinema to add into your favorites at haste. - Ella Kemp
AbuNe’meh, Fadi and Sima M. "Enduring Frames: Cinema, Solidarity, Palestinian Resistance."Senses of Cinema #113 (May 2025) ["While writing these words, we are struck by the inadequacy of language in the face of annihilation. In spite of this, we approach this dossier as an attempt to respond to the urgency of our moment—a moment in which the past twenty months have unfolded not only as a moment of unprecedented violence, but as a systemic campaign of erasure. Words fail to convey the horrors endured daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Yet, they remain indispensable weapons in the face of this erasure. As the late Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, murdered by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, declares, “If I must die, let it bring hope—let it be a tale.”1 Palestinians have not retreated in their resistance. In synchrony with allies worldwide, they have harnessed the “strength” of words, from survivor testimonies to the forensic indictments of the International Court of Justice, from protest chants echoing from Yemen to South Africa and the halls of American universities. These voices have forged a new vernacular of global solidarity that loudly opposes the destruction of people in the name of the settler colonial project. As Mohammed El-Kurd has poignantly made visible, the mainstream Western media has pressured Palestinians to adapt to roles of perfect victims, allowing for what he calls “the politics of appeal” as the dominant model for action. However, once we move away from the realm of Main Street in the US, the UK, Germany, and other genocide supporting countries, a quite different constellation of relations becomes legible. From Irish rappers Kneecap’s protest at Coachella, to Greek dock workers blocking arms shipments to Israel, from movements like Film Workers for Palestine to student encampments demanding divestment, all these actors openly reject the legitimacy of appeals to dominant powers. In demanding justice that interrupts atrocities and holds perpetrators accountable, they inevitably de-centre the West and its former colonial metropoles. These politically committed practices have been instantiated from numerous places across the globe. They chart complex geographies, bringing together diverse strategies of resistance that reshape consciousness and collective action. Reinvigorating old images, they are giving birth to new imaginaries of Palestinian liberation. This dossier highlights cinema and film culture’s contribution to this pivotal historical shift of our current global conjuncture. Still, neither words nor images can stand against the onslaught of arms, drones, and bombs. Nor can they prevent the relentless loss of life. While the torture and horrors inflicted by the Zionist apartheid state, through the myriad mechanisms of its settler colonial project, have been taking place since at least the 1948 Nakba, the scale of violence unleashed in the past two years is unprecedented. Faced with these atrocities, the burning urgency to do something has moved countless people across the world. The question of agency and meaningfulness of actions that do not directly change the situation on the ground in Gaza, in Palestine, as well as in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria now, looms large. As critical law and theory scholar Brenna Bhandar observed, “the idea that taking political (and legal) action should in some ways make one feel hopeful that a change in course is possible – particularly as it relates to intensive lethal violence – has been challenged by the brazen performance of impunity by Israeli politicians, soldiers and citizens.”"]
Anderson, Elizabeth S. "What is the Point of Equality?"Ethics 109.2 (1999): 287 - 337. ["What has gone wrong here? I shall argue that these problems stem from a flawed understanding of the point of equality. Recent egalitarian writing has come to be dominated by the view that the fundamental aim of equality is to compensate people for undeserved bad luck-being born with poor native endowments, bad parents, and disagreeable personalities, suffering from accidents and illness, and so forth. I shall argue that in focusing on correcting a supposed cosmic injustice, recent egalitarian writing has lost sight of the distinctively political aims of egalitarianism. The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially imposed. Its proper positive aim is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others."]
Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Cleanliness."Overthink #128 (April 22, 2025) ["How often should you shower to remain ‘clean’? How many times can you re-wear your jeans before they are considered ‘dirty’? In episode 128 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a look at cleanliness. They get into how humans have turned cleanliness into an art, and maybe even an obsession. Why are we so bothered by dirt? What is dirt, anyways? How are notions of dirtiness and cleanliness even into our symbolic systems, including language and religion? And what is up with TikTok’s obsession with the Clean Girl Aesthetic? As they tackle these questions, your hosts also explore the historical weaponisation of the concept of cleanliness against marginalised groups, such as queer people and people of color. In the bonus, Ellie and David discuss cleanliness as a social construct, the link between it and isolation, and Michel Serres’s ‘excremental theory’ of private property."]
Bell, Thomas W. and Michael Smith. "We The People: Canary in the Coal Mine."Throughline (July 24, 2025) ["The Third Amendment. Maybe you've heard it as part of a punchline. It's the one about quartering troops — two words you probably haven't heard side by side since about the late 1700s. At first glance, it might not seem super relevant to modern life. But in fact, the U.S. government has gotten away with violating the Third Amendment several times since its ratification — and every time it's gone largely unnoticed. In a time of escalating political violence, police forces armed with military equipment, and more frequent and devastating natural disasters, why the Third Amendment deserves a closer look."]
Blyth, Mark. "The History of Bad Ideas: Austerity."Past Present Future (June 15, 2025) ["For the first episode in our new series about how bad ideas take hold, David talks to economist Mark Blyth about austerity, the cost-cutting idea that refuses to die. Why is it an article of faith that states need periodic purging to stop them getting too greedy? Why does this so often happen at times when it does most harm, from the 1930s to the financial crisis that began in 2008? And how is the politics of austerity playing out today, in Starmer’s Britain, in Milei’s Argentina and in the DOGE wars happening in Trump’s America?"]
Cook, Katsi. "Women are the First Environment."On Being (April 24, 2025) ["Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence. The public conversation we offer up here was part of a gathering where a fantastic group of young people had come to be nourished, to explore the depths of what community can mean, to become more grounded and whole. They’ve taken to sitting at the feet of this Mohawk wise woman, mother, and grandmother, and you will experience why. Globally renowned in the field of midwifery, Katsi’s practice and teaching is based in ancient ancestral knowledge, and has taken an esteemed place in research and advances in the science of environmental reproductive health. As founder of the National Aboriginal Council of Midwives of Canada, her work is at heart, she says, about the “reclamation of the transformative power of birth.” Katsi is helping our world recover the natural human experience of cross-generational companionship and care. This conversation you’ll hear between her and Krista, sitting in a room of mostly young people, was an exercise in the art of eldering — which Katsi Cook calls nothing more and nothing less than “generational wealth transmission.” Katsi Cook Katsi Cook is an Onkwehonweh traditional midwife, elder, and Executive Director of Spirit Aligned Leadership Program. She is a Wolf Clan member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and resides at the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe in upstate New York. Her groundbreaking environmental research of Mohawk mother's milk revealed the intergenerational impact of industrial chemicals on the health and well-being of an entire community. Katsi leads a movement of matrilineal awareness and rematriation in Native life. Her book discussed in this episode is Worlds Within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders."]
Dripps, Donald and Corinna Barrett Lain. "We the People: The Right to Remain Silent." Throughline (March 27, 2025) ["The Fifth Amendment. You have the right to remain silent when you're being questioned in police custody, thanks to the Fifth's protection against self-incrimination. But most people end up talking to police anyway. Why? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Fifth Amendment, the right to remain silent, and how hard it can be to use it. Guests: Donald Dripps, Professor of Law at the University of San Diego. Corinna Barrett Lain, Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law."]
Dromgoole, Dominic. "The History of Revolutionary Ideas: The Rite of Spring."Past Present Future (April 17, 2025) ['Our third Parisian revolution is another explosive night in the theatre, this time in the world of dance. David talks to Dominic Dromgoole about Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which provoked absolute outrage when it premiered in 1913. Is that what its impresario Diaghilev wanted? How did Nijinsky cope? Did the response foreshadow the trauma to come in 1914? And how did the set designer Roerich end up playing a part in American presidential history? Dominic Dromgoole’s Astonish Me! First Nights that Changed the World.]
Farrell, Maria and Robin Berjon. "We Need to Rewild the Internet."NOEMA (April 16, 2024) ["The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "On Charles Burns' Black Hole and the Medium of Comics."Weird Studies #176 (September 25, 2024) ["Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of modernity. Do that in the context of a discussion on Charles Burns' comic masterpiece Black Hole, and you're guaranteed a memorable Weird Studies episode. Black Hole was serialized over ten years beginning in 1995, and first released as a single volume by Pantheon Books in 2005. Like all masterpieces, it shines both inside and out: it tells a captivating story, a "weirding" of the teenage romance genre, while also revealing something of the inner workings of comics as such. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the singular wonders of a medium that, thanks to artists like Burns, has rightfully ascended from the trash stratum to the coveted empyrean of artistic respectability—without losing its edge."]
Frederick, John. "We the People: Succession of Power."Throughline (March 6, 2025) ["The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for what should happen if a U.S. president was no longer able to serve. On this episode of our ongoing series We the People, the story behind one of the last amendments to the Constitution, and the man who got it done." John Feerick, Norris Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and author of The Twenty-Fifth Amendment - Its Complete History and Applications.]
Graves, Lisa. "Chilling: Wisconsin Gov. Evers Pushes Back After Trump’s Border Czar Threatens to Arrest Him."Democracy Now (May 5, 2025) ["We go to Wisconsin as the state’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers pushes back after Trump border czar Tom Homan says Wisconsin officials could be arrested over local policies that defy Trump’s mass deportation agenda. This comes after FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan. “I think what we’re seeing, in a broader sense, is just an absolute degradation of the rule of law,” says Lisa Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, now the director of the policy research group True North Research and co-host of the podcast Legal AF. Her forthcoming book is Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights."]
Habib, Connor, and Douglas Rushkoff. "All-Together in the Anti-Human Era."Team Human #125 (September 22, 2020) ["Fascists, intense weather, immigration panics, global health crises, authoritarian governments, ideological divisions, conspiracies, fake news and fake experts and fake press conferences, the singularities, the doomsdayers, the white power psychopaths. What do we do? I draw inspiration from my long time pal and this episode's guest: media analyst, prolific author and the Team Human podcast host, Doug Rushkoff! What do we come up with? Well, that being human is the most radical and subversive strategy in an anti-human era. And what does it mean to be human? Finding the others, of course. But also seeing the others, and seeing the other in yourself. This might sound like a simple answer, but getting there is complex. Also? It's exciting and bizarre and intense, In case you've been missing out all this time, Doug is the author of a whole shelf of books; my favorite of which are his latest, Team Human, a manifesto based on his podcast; and Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Doug is always one (or five) steps ahead of everyone else. I'm so happy to have had this conversation with him, and to share it with you. It's warm and full of laughter and connection. ON THIS EPISODE: What is the anti-human agenda, and what does it mean to be human? Why Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins are, uh, a problem, and emergence is stupid. "Systems theory is spirituality for misogynists." Why localism still matters. How (and why?) to organize with oppositional people. The particular failure of straight people in dealing with coronavirus. Drawing on a commonwealth to meet with each other. Whether or not conservative conspiracy theorists are Very Online or not. Why being bullied helps us in later life. How to do judo with QAnon. The benefit of becoming an outsider to every group you're in. The opportunities of the ongoing conflict in the US."]
Lewis, Helen. "The History of Bad Ideas: Genius."Past Present Future (June 19, 2025) ["Today’s bad idea is ‘genius’, the label that has enabled all sorts of terrible behaviour through the ages. Writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis explains how and why the idea of genius gets misapplied to people and things that just aren’t. Why are geniuses meant to be tortured? Why are individual geniuses prized over the collaborations that lie behind most innovations? Why do we think that people who are brilliant at one thing will be good at everything else?" Book Description: You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. In The Genius Myth, Helen Lewis unearths how this one word has shaped (and distorted) our ideas of success and achievement. Ultimately, argues Lewis, the modern idea of genius — a single preternaturally gifted individual, usually white and male, exempt from social niceties and sometimes even the law— has run its course. Braiding deep research with her signature wit and lightness, Lewis dissects past and present models of genius in the West, and reveals a far deeper and more interesting picture of human creativity than conventional wisdom allows. She uncovers a battalion of overlooked wives and collaborators. She asks whether most inventions are inevitable. She wonders if the Beatles would succeed today. And she confronts the vexing puzzle of Elon Musk, the tech disrupter who fancies himself as an ubermensch. Smart, funny, and provocative, The Genius Myth will challenge your assumptions about creativity, productivity, and innovation --- and forever alter your mental image of the so-called “genius.”]
MacFarlane. Robert. "Is a River Alive? – A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane."Emergence Magazine Podcast (May 20, 2025) ["In this conversation, acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane asks the ancient and urgent question: is a river alive? Understanding rivers to be presences, not resources, he immerses us in the ways they “irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories,” and how we might recognize this within our imagination and ethics. He speaks about his latest book, and traces his journeys down the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, the waterways of Chennai in India, and the Mutehekau Shipu in Nitassinan and how each brought him to experience these water bodies as willful, spirited, and sacred beings." Book description: "Hailed in the New York Times as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler,” Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days. Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has."]
Pagels, Elaine. "The Desire for Miracles and Wonder."Pulling the Thread (April 3, 2025) ["For decades, Elaine Pagels’s work has been changing the historical landscape of Christian religion. She’s also changed the way many people, including myself, see the world. Pagels is a religion professor at Princeton University, and the author of seminal, award-winning books like The Gnostic Gospels, and her newest, Miracles and Wonder. We talked about the surprising things she’s learned about Jesus and his followers; what his most radical teaching was; and why Jesus, this essentially unlikely traveling rabbi, emerged as the figure he did in our culture. And why this all still matters today. We talk about Pagels’s own story, her personal spiritual pull; as well as a vortex I went down in boarding school that made me understand how susceptible we all are to constraints that explain the world in overly reductive and simple ways. We reflect on how natural it is for us to want some sense of connection with a transcendent being. And how this has shaped the way Elaine approaches her work: not with the intention of destroying a framework, but looking for ways to expand it."]
Pappe, Ilan. "On Zionist Mythologies."Against the Grain (September 10, 2024) ["Since last autumn, we’ve witnessed an unspeakable crime perpetrated by the state of Israel with our tax dollars. And that crime has been rationalized by much of the U.S. media. Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe says that such justifications rest partly on a distorted view of the history of Palestine/Israel. He suggests that dismantling the mythologies about the formation and nature of the state of Israel is key to fighting for justice."]
Runciman, David. "Politics on Trial: Charles I vs Parliament."Past Present Future (June 12, 2025) ["Today’s political trial is perhaps the most consequential in English history: the trial and execution of King Charles I for treason in January 1649. How could a king commit treason when treason was a crime against the king? How could a court try a king when a king has no peers? How could anyone claim to speak for the people after a civil war when so many people had been on opposite sides? The answers to these questions would cost more than one person his life – but they would also change forever the prospect of holding tyrants to account."]
Verstraten, Peter. "'I Will Be Your Preacher Teacher': Babygirl."Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["In interviews Reijn has repeatedly mentioned that Babygirl was inspired by erotic thrillers from the 1980s and early 1990s. Her third feature film is a thorough exploration of the “dark thoughts” of protagonist Romy Mathis (Kidman), and in this article I will delve into the nature of her obscure desires. To a certain extent, Babygirl – the most debated film this year in the Netherlands – is a present-day successor to the so-called woman’s films from the 1940s; but, rather than expressing a “desire to desire”, the more emancipatory Babygirl comes closer to Slavoj Žižek’s call to “enjoy your symptom!”"]
West, Stephen. "The Late Work of Wittgenstein - Language Games."Philosophize This! #231 (June 28, 2025) ["Today we talk about the late work of Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. We talk about the meaning of words. Augustine's theory. Forms of life. Rules and practices. Grammar. Geometry. Family resemblance. And the role of a philosopher on the other side of accepting this view of language."]
