"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
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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."]
Engel, Greg. "Could plants unlock quantum medicine’s potential?" Big Brains (August 21, 2025) ["By exploring the mechanics of photosynthesis, scientists could better understand disease."]
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."]
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