ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #19

debunk \dee-BUNK\

verb: to expose the sham or falseness of

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.

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“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’

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“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

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"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

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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."]