"Disgust is learned: it is not present in infants until the time of toilet training. But it is ubiquitous, and very likely it has to some extent an evolutionary utility. This is the first level of disgust, what I call primary object disgust. In and of itself this revulsion already does harm, because self-hatred always does harm, and it is even worse when it leads to a recoil from close contact with others.
But there is worse to come. In all known societies, with or without Plato, there is a second level, what I call projective disgust, in which properties of disgust are projected onto a social group that is stereotyped as the animal in opposition to the dominant group’s pure soulness. They are said to be dirty, to smell bad. One must not share water or food with them, or, heaven forbid, have sex with them — or at least not without punishing them for it afterwards. Sometimes the subordinated group is a racial minority, sometimes a “deviant” sexual group, sometimes people with disabilities, sometimes aging people, sometimes just women, who always seem to represent the body to aspiring males by contrast to the intellect and the spirit. I once directed a cross-cultural project with a group of scholars in India, and while we found fascinating nuances of difference (between, for example, the role of disgust in the caste hierarchy and its role in racism against African-Americans), the underlying reality was basically the same. An elite constructs a group that constitutes its surrogate body, in order to keep spirit all to itself, and the surrogate body is regarded as repugnant and punished severely for being an “animal reminder” to the creatures of spirit.
Projective disgust is ubiquitous, but it is socially transmitted, and it can be resisted. (13-14)" - Nussbaum, Martha. "On Not Hating the Body." Liberties 2.2 (Winter 2022)
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"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
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"Floodwaters overwhelm floundering swimmers helplessly whirled in the sea's chaos around a rocklike ark, its doors closed on the last possibilities of salvation. Earlier even than the Biblical legend, there is a Sumerian version of the great deluge, the Epic of Atrahasis, which describes casualties of flood strewn about the rivers like dragonflies. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero Utnapishtim rides out a cosmic flood with his family and animals until coming to rest, as Noah does, on a solitary mountaintop.
Flood not only evokes mythic but true-to-life images of terrifying devastation - water in gigantic force as torrential rains, overflowing sea levels, massive tidal waves - breaking through all the barriers we have set against such inundation. Houses, unmoored, are carried away in the furious currents with survivors clinging to the rooftops; lives are indifferently tossed into the vortex, trees swept away and cultivation level, returning some portion of the world to its original elements. Nature's autonomy in the mingled flood-frenzy of the heavens and the deep has often been depicted in myth as angry, punishing deities, or merely the impersonal activity of the gods.
Floods are especially frightening because they intimate unpredictable forces of like nature within ourselves. Times of great stress and change, when consciousness can be submerged by flooding anxieties and affects. Incursions from the unconscious that can penetrate defenses and swamp a hard-pressed ego, uprooting its foothold in reality. Collective flooding where members of a group, caught up in waves of numinous emotions of ideas, lose touch with solidifying ideas. Myths tell us that survival of a flood may depend on foresight, guile or luck, attention to warnings that come from unusual sources like visions or dreams and shelter in vessels of isolating containment. In many stories a single human family starts life again, or a small group of animals that when the storm is over fish up a clod of earth, reminding us that rebirth begins with the nurturing of the smallest bit of matter.
Floods are not only destructive. The moon's gravity draws the waters of the seas encompassing the earth, creating tidal movements that cyclically floods coastal areas, fostering lush vegetative growth and protects fertile feeding and breeding grounds for hosts of creatures. In some myths, a deluge routinely marks the end of immense intervals of time. The waters have no form in themselves, but give birth to multiple forms, which, once separated, from the sources, are vulnerable, to aging, change and decay and in time must be renewed; thus the flood represents cosmic ablution and a new beginning. Each yearly occurrence of the flooding of the Nile in ancient Egypt was a repetition of the moment of creation, but also recalled the primeval waters of nothingness "out of which matter emerged but in which the world hangs in delicate balance." And, in the seeding of the dark, rich silt left by the floodwaters in the fields, was the promise of new life. Alchemy intuited in the image of flood the dissolution of psychic structures that no longer serve the integrity of the self, and the self's ark-like preservation of those that do. We can be flooded in ways that link us with mythic inundation and transformation. We can also be flooded by simpler forms of excess, which our ancestors, too, must have known - overwhelming feelings of love, the sheer joy of existence, erotic passion and religious longing, or, like Dylan Thomas, the ebullience of the creative moment (50)." - The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010)
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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."]
Akkad, Omar El. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Knopf, 2025. [“In fiction, El Akkad is posing consistent questions: What would it take to render a horror ‘over there’ equally real to one ‘over here?’ How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity in El Akkad’s first work of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It is a muscular broadside against the Western machinery, both narrative and literal, that keeps the killing of innocent Palestinians seen as a distant, clinical news story instead of an intolerable and unending cascade of death. ‘It may seem now like it’s someone else’s children,’ El Akkad writes, ‘but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.’ … “It would be more accurate to say that One Day is something of an archaeological dig. El Akkad is trying to unearth a truth: that beneath the seductive mirage of the West’s ‘rules-based order’—that collection of assertions, images, stories, moralities and wars—lies a ‘completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice, but the preservation of existing power.’"]
Allen, Arthur, Elena Conis, and Paul Offit. "The Anti-Vaccine Movement." Throughline (February 13, 2025) ["The alleged link between vaccines and autism was first published in 1998, in a since-retracted study in medical journal The Lancet. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that vaccines and autism are related. But by the mid-2000s, the myth was out there, and its power was growing, fueled by distrust of government, misinformation, and high-profile boosters like Jim Carrey and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In this episode: the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and of the fears that still fuel it – from a botched polio vaccine, to the discredited autism study, to today."]
Beinart, Peter. "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza." Current Affairs (April 4, 2025) ['Peter Beinart is one of the most important Jewish intellectuals writing about Israel today. A professor, journalist, and former liberal Zionist, Beinart has undergone a profound personal and political transformation over the course of his career. In this episode, he joins Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss his new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Together, they explore the religious, political, and moral narratives that have shaped Jewish identity in relation to Zionism, and why Beinart now believes that Jewish safety cannot be built on Palestinian dispossession. “There’s a fundamental flaw in thinking that you can make yourself safe by making the people who live next door to you radically unsafe.” —Peter Beinart"]
Benton, Michael D. "The Power of Stories." The Personal Success Podcast (September 4, 2023) ["Michael Benton is an associate professor of humanities and film studies at Bluegrass Community and technical College in Lexington, Kentucky. Narrative Psychology focuses on how we perceive the events of our lives through stories. One of the most powerful ways we can experience transformation is by changing our stories. This can be done in many ways."]
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."]
Bregman, Rutger, Malik Rahim, and Rebecca Solnit. "When Things Fall Apart." Throughline (April 10, 2025) ["Climate disaster, political unrest, random violence: Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls "a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness." But is that actually true — or the way it has to be? Today on the show, what really happens when things fall apart." Guests: Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind: A Hopeful History; Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Relief]
Dorian, M.J. "H.R. Giger: A Beautiful Darkness." Creative Codex #9 (September 2, 2019) ["H.R. Giger is considered by many to be the most evil artist in history. Join us as we take a deep dive into the abyss where Giger's strange ideas are born. In this episode we also explore: how did Giger create a style so distinct that people see it as 'out of this world'?"]
Falk, Emily. "The Neuroscience of Choice and Change." Converging Dialogues (April 6, 2025) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Emily Falk about the neuroscience of choice and change. They discuss studying values, strengths and limits of fMRIs, value system in the brain, reward system, making choices, the self, making future choices, values with others, and many more topics. Emily Falk is professor of Communication, Psychology, Marketing, and OID (Operations, Information, and Decisions) at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab, the vice dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, and the director of the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. She has a bachelors in Neuroscience from Brown University and PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research uses tools from psychology, neuroscience, and communication to examine what makes messages persuasive, why and how ideas spread, and what helps people get on the same page when communicating. Her research has been recognized by numerous awards, including early career awards from the International Communication Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Attitudes Division, a Fulbright grant, Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. She was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. She is the author of the latest book, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change."]
Frumkin, Edward. "When Winnipeg Met Tehran: An Interview with Matthew Rankin about Universal Language." Cineaste (Summer 2025) ["Matthew Rankin’s sophomore feature, Universal Language, is a seismic departure from the Winnipeg auteur’s previous oeuvre. His earlier films, such as his short Tesla World Light (2017) and debut feature The Twentieth Century (2019), deployed maximal formalism that is reminiscent of his hometown’s cinema icon Guy Maddin. While Rankin continues his signature absurdist and fanciful elements in Universal Language, he would not label it as minimalism. “My brain is not wired for minimalism. So, it became sort of a maximalist film in a minimalist form,” Rankin told Cineaste over a Zoom call. Turkeys and tour guide Massoud (portrayed by coscreenwriter Pirouz Nemati) connect the film’s bifurcated narrative. The first storyline consists of schoolmates Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) searching for ways to retrieve money stuck in frozen ice. The second tale consists of a fictional version of Rankin returning to Winnipeg and discovering the state of his family home. Channeling the Iranian cinema luminaries Abbas Kiastroiami, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, and Jafar Panahi, Rankin and cowriters Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi imbue a humanist lens that unites the denizens together with a surreal touch. Though Rankin asserts that the film has no political intent, traces of the affordable housing crisis and mass immigration stemming from the Justin Trudeau administration are present for those familiar with Canada’s sociopolitics. Nevertheless, Rankin discerns that the geopolitical background in Canada provides an entry point to the story and a sigh of relief over the issues that divide communities."]
Gladstone, Brian. "'Housing Hunger Games' Private Equity's WAR on Workers." Breaking Points (April 16, 2025) ["Brian Gladstone is the author of There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America: "The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one. In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless. Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem. By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right."]
Glied, Sherry and Paul Starr. "Health Insurance in America." Throughline (February 27, 2025) ["Millions of Americans depend on their jobs for health insurance. But that's not the case in many other wealthy countries. How did the U.S. end up with a system that's so expensive, yet leaves so many people vulnerable? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem." Guests: Sherry Glied, Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University; Paul Starr, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University."]
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."]
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. Harper Collins, 2010.
[MB - I have, for a while, been immersed in deep research into diverse philosophical and religious beliefs across time and places as part of a broader project of seeking to overcome deep polarization along various lines in our society. Having been an adherent of religious fundamentalism in my youth, followed by radical skepticism and critical theory fads in college, I was marked by their solipsistic extremism in which human existence shall be understood in only one way and all other perceptions/understandings are wrong (mistaken/foolish/dumb/ignorant/dangerous, etc.). In my research into ancient and contemporary philosophical and religious movements across the globe, although I have huge gaps regionally/culturally that I am doggedly seeking to fill, I have come to the conclusion that religion sans philosophical insights/methodology is on the level of a brand/fad, if not outright dangerous, and philosophy without religious perspective, not necessarily a belief in deities, misses out on one of the key aspects of the human condition and veers toward a dangerous fundamentalist atheism. I set this up to give an understanding of why I value my recent reading of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History which sets out to provide us a grounding in this subject through various thinkers, rebels, movements, divisions, conflicts, and repression. This book has made two profound impacts on me. A mapping of the history of those that were called out to question/challenge, often at the risk of their lives, in opposition to dogmatic, controlling, hierarchical belief-systems. Strangely, perhaps perversely, this history at the same time brought me closer to the religious impulse and opened up new avenues of research into thinkers/movements that intrigued me. Whatever you believe, or don't, I hope in looking at our current sociopolitical condition that you might agree that our society faces an epidemic of toxic certainty and that we need to cultivate and value the ability to critically doubt. Book description: "In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists."]
Mehrotra, Dhruv. "How WIRED Analyzed the Epstein Video." Uncanny Valley (July 17, 2025) ["Last week, the DOJ released what they described as raw footage from the night of Jeffrey Epstein's death in 2019. WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra went through the metadata and found that it had been, in fact, modified. In today’s episode, we dive into what Dhruv found and what it means. Articles mentioned in this episode: The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out | WIRED
Metadata Shows the FBI’s ‘Raw’ Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Was Likely Modified | WIRED ."]
Runciman, David. "Politics on Trial: Galileo vs the Inquisition." Past Present Future (June 8, 2025) ["Today’s trial is one of the most notorious in history but also one of the most misremembered. Galileo’s epic confrontation with the Catholic Church over the question of whether the earth moves round the sun – culminating with his interrogation and condemnation in Rome in 1633 – was not just a matter of truth vs ignorance or science vs superstition. It was also twenty-year long struggle on the part of both sides to find a way to co-exist. Did they succeed? Not exactly, but it wasn’t for want of trying. Then – and perhaps now – science and religion needed each other."]
Ward, Alie. "The U.S. Constitution: Let's Read it Together." Ologies (June 14, 2025) ["Have you ever read every word of The U.S. Constitution? You don't have to, because I read it with my mouth into your brain in this weird but vital episode on civil liberties. And of course, there are little sidenotes to make sure we both understand it. There has never been a better time to know what your legal protections are. This episode is a follow up to Nomology (CONSTITUTIONAL LAW) with the legendary law scholar Franita Tolson, the Dean and Carl Mason Franklin Chair in Law USC’s Gould School of Law. Start there for the basics and learn why knowing your rights and using your voice can change the future."]
West, Stephen. "Hope as an Existentialism (Ernst Bloch)." Philosophize This! #230 (June 14, 2025) ["Today we talk about the early work of Ernst Bloch. Hope as anticipatory consciousness. The darkness of the lived moment. Educated hope vs false hope. Music as an experiential metaphysics and gateway to the Not-Yet."]
Yassa, Michael. "Mnemonology (MEMORY)." Ologies (December 4, 2024) ["How are memories made? Where are they stored? Where do they go? What was I just talking about? Neurobiologist, professor, researcher, and Director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Dr. Michael Yassa, joins us for a two-parter deep diving into our memories. Get to know the cells that run your life while he also busts flim-flam, and talks about movie myths, aging and memory loss, childbirth amnesia, what happens when you cram for a test, hormones and memory, that thing where you can’t remember a word, how to let go of the past, and more."]
Zingales, Luigi and Bethany McLean. "Is Silicon Valley Turning Fascist?" Capitalisn't (April 3, 2025) ["Silicon Valley’s traditionally Democratic tech leaders are turning toward President Donald Trump, but are the reasons as straightforward as lower taxes and favorable regulations? Perhaps not, if we consider the influence of a convoluted political philosophy called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Washington and Silicon Valley power players, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, have all cited the philosophy’s ideas and one of its leading developers, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin was reportedly present at Trump’s inaugural gala as an informal guest of honor. In a nutshell, Dark Enlightenment rejects liberal democracy as an outdated software system incompatible with freedom and progress. Instead, it argues for breaking up the nation-state into smaller authoritarian city-states, which Yarvin calls “patchworks.” These patchworks will be controlled by tech corporations and run by CEOs. The theory is attached to another idea called accelerationism, which harnesses capitalism and technology to induce radical social change. In fact, Yarvin proposed a plan he called “RAGE”—or “Retire All Government Employees”—as far back as 2012. So, how did this obscure and oxymoronically named philosophy reach the highest echelons of business and political power? Bethany and Luigi trace the theory from its origins to its practical manifestations in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Silicon Valley’s race to develop artificial intelligence, and the growing push for “Freedom Cities” unfettered from federal regulations. Are the people embracing Dark Enlightenment espousing its ideas because they genuinely believe it is the way forward for humanity? Or do they believe it because it's a way for them to make money? What does it mean for capitalism and democracy if the administration runs the federal government like a tech company?"]
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