“If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.” - Celine (in Richard Linklater's 1995 film Before Sunrise)
"No one creates a sensorial cinematic experience like Claire Denis. Watching Friday Night is akin to a grounding exercise. How it works its way into your mind and then down into your skin, your flesh, your bones. You feel every sensation these characters do. The amount of attention she gives to close-ups of hands invites us to inhabit that textural rush. Your fingers connecting with the steering wheel of your car, body parts of your lover, cigarette boxes, removed watches, buttons on a blouse, the check at a restaurant, the keys to a hotel room, the knob turning on the radiator. The way your feet feel as they’re grazing between your lover’s legs and the bedsheet. Friday Night lights up with the romanticism of late night in the world—the neon lights of store signs, the way that light shimmers off the wet road as you are rushed by the thrill of a chance encounter with a stranger who can take you on a journey before the sun comes up." -- Mitchell Beaupre on Claire Denis' 2002 film Friday Night
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Asch, Mark. "Jia Zhangke and the Chinese Century." Notebook (June 7, 2025) ["What is cinematic realism when reality itself is so quickly and comprehensively changing?"]
Berzins, Elvira. "Feeling the Child’s Voice: Sobs, Sniffs and Snuffles in Anatomy of a Fall." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["At the release of Justine Triet’s acclaimed film Anatomy of a Fall (2023), child actor Milo Machado-Graner was praised for an exceptionally emotive performance as Daniel, the adolescent son of an accused murderer. His magnetism is largely credited to his ability to convincingly, movingly cry onscreen. But what makes the crying child onscreen so moving? And how might films seek to move us, as spectators, through the child’s distress? Triet’s strong interest in Machado-Graner’s voice suggests that the child’s vocalised distress has a unique claim on spectatorial fascination and affectivity. In the tactile proximity of hiccups, sobs, sniffs and snuffles, we can examine how spectators experience the crying child in film as a particular cinematic body that aims to touch our own. Drawing on Jennifer Barker’s phenomenological concept of the film’s viscera, I posit the crying child as a visceral cinematic body and analyse how sound technologies contribute to the effect of the “real” child’s presence. Keying our ear to the organs of this “real” cinematic body opens up avenues to explore how Triet structures bodily empathy between adult spectator and child, the human and non-human. "]
Bessler, John and Carol Steiker. "We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment." Throughline (January 23, 2025) ["The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and what cruel and unusual really means. John Bessler, law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Author of The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights. Carol Steiker, law professor at Harvard Law School and author of Courting Death: the Supreme Court and Capital Punishment."]
Bettcher, Talia Mae. "Trans Identity." Overthink #125 (March 11, 2025) ["How should we make sense of the Trump administration’s assault on Trans rights? In episode 125 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk to philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher about her new book Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, where she discusses everything from “genderphoria” to her notion of “reality enforcement” (a mechanism of transphobic oppression). In the interview, Dr. Bettcher expresses concerns about certain received views about trans identity, such as the “the wrong body” and “beyond the binary” views, which don’t capture the complexity of trans experiences. How can we move toward a more inclusive culture when it comes to trans identity? And, do we need to reject fundamental philosophical notions such as “person,” “self,” and “subject” in order to understand trans phoria? In the bonus, Ellie and David dive deeper into the idea of the interpersonal object and question whether or not the notion of the self is too far plagued by philosophical baggage and needs to be discarded."]
Butler, Judith. "This Is Wrong - On Executive Order 14168." London Review of Books 47.6 (April 3, 2025) ["It’s not surprising, then, that Executive Order 14168 includes among its dictates the need to correct any ‘misapplications’ of Bostock v. Clayton County. Indeed, the order shifts the basis of ‘an individual’s immutable biological classification’ away from genitalia to gametes: ‘“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell ... “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.’ Why this shift? And what does it mean that the government can change its mind about what is immutable? Is the ‘immutable’ mutable after all? The existence of intersexed people has long posed a problem for sex assignment since they are living evidence that genitalia can be combined or mixed in certain ways. Gametes must have seemed less problematic. There is a larger one and a smaller one: let that be the immutable difference between female and male. There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’ They remind us that ‘sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.’ Interplay, interaction, co-construction are concepts widely used in the biological sciences. And, in turn, the biological sciences have made considerable contributions to gender theory, where Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, has long argued that biology interacts with cultural and historical processes to produce different ways of naming and living gender."]
Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "How Sinners Revives the Vampire." Critics at Large (May 1, 2025) ["The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is no exception. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss what “Sinners,” which fuses historical realism with monster-movie-style horror, illuminates about America in 2025. They trace the archetype from such nineteenth-century texts as “The Vampyre” and “Dracula” to the “Twilight” moment of the aughts, when Edward Cullen, an ethical bloodsucker committed to abstinence, turned the vampire from a predatory outsider into a Y.A. heartthrob. What do he and his ilk have to say today? “The vampire is the one who can unsettle our notions, and maybe give us new notions,” Cunningham says. “The vampire comes in and asks, ‘But have you considered this?’ ”"]
Dabhoiwala, Fara. "The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Free Speech." Past Present Future (April 6, 2025) ["Today’s revolutionary idea is one with a long history, not all of it revolutionary: David talks to the historian Fara Dabhoiwala about the idea of free speech. When did free speech first get articulated as a fundamental right? How has that right been used and abused, from the eighteenth century to the present? And what changed in the history of the idea of free speech with the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty in 1859?" Fara Dabhoiwala's book What is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea.]
Enjeti, Saagar and Emily Kashinsky. "Youth Unemployment Skyrockets as AI Takes Jobs." Breaking Points (Posted on Youtube: August 13, 2025) [MB: If you have young people in your lives (especially JH, HS, and Higher Education age) or work with them in any way (I'm planning on discussing this with my students), you should definitely listen to this latest report on the data on youth unemployment and the prospects for a professional career in certain fields. This is doubly dire as AI is being used to take over entry level positions that traditionally served as launching pads into good jobs. "Saagar and Emily discuss the rise of Youth unemployment and a story about a student graduating with a Computer Engineering degree that couldn't find a job anywhere."]
Hawkins, Lauren and Miles Parsons. "Unk Boop Kwa." Threshold 5.2 (November 26, 2024) ["Beneath the water lies a whole world of sound: snorts, boops, croaks, grunts. Fish, it turns out, have a lot to say, and they’ve been communicating for a long time. In this episode, we take a dive with some of the planet’s oldest vertebrates."]
Hearson, Martin. "The 15% solution part 2: can a global tax make the world fairer?" The Conversation Weekly (June 2, 2025) ["In October 2021, 136 countries agreed to establish new tax rules requiring large multinational companies to pay at least 15% in corporate tax. Nearly four years later, this ambitious agreement is finally being implemented around the world, but its success faces big challenges. In the second part of The 15% solution, we examine progress towards implementing the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's global tax framework. Featuring Martin Hearson, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK."]
Kettler, Mark T. "A Death of Despair in Wisborg." Senses of Cinema #114 (July 2025) ["Film is a sequence of photographs. Any two individual cells in a reel may resemble each other. But when shown in rapid sequence, they reveal movement. This past Christmas, director Robert Eggers released a new telling of the now familiar vampire myth, Nosferatu (2024). It is an adaptation of an adaptation: a retelling of Fritz Murnau’s classic 1922 Nosferatu, itself a famously unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. These stories are cells in a sequence. They share a fundamental architecture. In each version an ambitious real estate agent travels to distant Transylvania to conclude the sale of local property to a reclusive count. The buyer, a vampire, preys upon the young agent before traveling across the ocean to his hometown, where he hunts the local population until his eventual demise. But these structural similarities camouflage deep differences in plot, character, and tone. Each iteration of the story offers a snapshot of the moment of its creation. Intentionally or not, they reflect back on their authors, on the societies that produce them. They reveal the anxieties that preoccupy their makers, the quiet assumptions that inform and structure their worldview. The rough similarity of these stories throws their differences into stark relief. Aspects of Eggers’ film that may seem incidental, are revealed to be artistic choices laden with meaning. By flipping rapidly through these cells, we can also perform a crude sort of animation, revealing tectonic transformations in fundamental assumptions about gender, familiarity and otherness – even authority and trust. Dracula celebrated the triumph of Western modernity. Murnau’s film despaired at the horror of the First World War and the folly of Germany’s leaders. By contrast, the dominant themes of Eggers’ new film are terrifying loneliness and exploitation, reflecting our own contemporary exhaustion with atomized, increasingly meaningless, and often predatory, interpersonal relationships."]
King, Stephanie, Laura Palmer, Erica Sousaari. "The Slime of Life." Threshold 5.1 (November 2024) ["For most of our planet’s existence, the Earth was quiet. The boisterous sounds of life we know today are a recent development, one that the growing field of bioacoustics is helping us understand and interpret. In this episode, we travel to Australia to listen to dolphins and meet the microbes that helped usher in life on the planet."]
Larsen, Jonathan. "On the Future of the News." Team Human (March 31, 2025) ["Jonathan Larsen, Founder of The Fucking News, proves there's still a path forward for the fourth estate. Jonathan has been innovating news media formats for decades, from creating Anderson Cooper 360° to helping transform MSNBC both at Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Up w/ Chris Hayes. He oversaw original reporting at TYT, the world's biggest online news program. He is now an independent journalist, with strong ideas about the future of news."]
Pugh, Allison. "Relationships 2.0: The Price of Disconnection." Hidden Brain (March 31, 2025) ["All of us want to "seen" by the people around us. We want to be recognized as unique individuals. Yet the experience of being seen in this way can be dispiritingly rare. This week, we kick off our "Relationships 2.0" series by talking with researcher Allison Pugh about the psychological benefits of what she calls "connective labor." She explains why this labor is often overlooked, and how to cultivate the superpower of making other people feel seen."]
Runciman, David. "Politics on Trial: Mary Queen of Scots vs the Secret State." Past Present Future (June 1, 2025) ["In today’s episode an extraordinary political trial that culminated in the execution of one queen at the behest of another: Mary Queen of Scots, convicted of treason in 1586 and beheaded in 1587. But who really wanted her dead, Queen Elizabeth or Elizabeth’s powerful political servants? Why did Mary demand to be tried before parliament rather than a court of noblemen? How did she attempt to defend herself in the face of apparently overwhelming incriminating evidence against her? And who was the only person who voted for her acquittal?"]
Span, Christopher, Michael Steudeman, and Jonathan Zimmerman. "The First Department of Education." Throughline (June 12, 2025) ["Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken country. A year later, it was basically shut down. But the story of that first department's birth – and death – set the stage for everything that's come since."]
West, Stephen. "Albert Camus - The Rebel." Philosophize This! #226 (April 4, 2025) ["Today we talk about Camus’ concept of rebellion and how it offers a powerful alternative to abstract ideologies. We talk about solidarity as the foundation for justice without systems. We talk about the death penalty as a symbol of premeditated murder disguised as virtue. We talk about rebellion as something closer to art than politics—an act rooted in experience, defined by limits, and carried out with sincerity."]
---. "Albert Camus - The Stranger." Philosophize This! #224 (March 16, 2025) ["Today we talk about the book The Stranger by Albert Camus. We talk about why Camus saw himself as an artist and not a philosopher. We talk about happiness. The absurd and it's full implications. The Mediterranean lifestyle. The sun as a symbol of immanence. Revolt against the absurd as a descriptive claim-- not a normative one."]
---. "Susan Sontag - Do You Speak the Language of Images and Videos." Philosophize This! #177 (March 22, 2023) ["This episode opens with Susan Sontag’s early encounter with Holocaust photographs—an experience she described as a turning point in her life. From there, it explores her argument that modern people have a complicated and often uncritical relationship with images. Sontag urges us to recognize how photographs and videos can both reveal and distort reality, shaping emotion, memory, and even moral response. She challenges the idea that simply seeing images is equivalent to understanding or action, warning instead of a culture trapped in passive consumption and nostalgia."]
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."]
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