ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #7

Bedsaul, Ryan. "I Recognize That Assassin." Los Angeles Review of Books (July 12, 2025) ["
Ryan Bedsaul writes on The Phoenician Scheme and Wes Anderson’s late style."]

 Hudson, David. "Up Three Mountains with Robert Redford." Current (September 18, 2025) ["In a 2017 Esquire profile, Robert Redford told Michael Hainey that “to climb up the mountain is the fun, not standing at the top. There’s nowhere to go. But climbing up, that struggle, that to me is where the fun is.” Having appeared in his thirties in a string of hits—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973)—Redford was as big as any movie star gets. Mountain topped.
He turned to directing and won the Oscar for Best Director right out of the gate. Ordinary People (1980) won three more Oscars as well, including Best Picture. And another climb was already underway. In 1978, he cofounded the Utah/US Film Festival and launched the Sundance Institute the following year. With the Sundance Film Festival (officially renamed in 1991), Redford “played the role of mentor, patron, champion of the small and scrappy, benevolent godfather of independent cinema,” writes Adrian Horton in the Guardian. “It’s through Sundance, rather than his films, that Redford became, as the Black List founder Franklin Leonard put it on X, ‘arguably the film industry’s most consequential American over the last fifty years.’”"]

Peppiat, Rich. "Kneecap — Rich Peppiatt on politics and partying." MUBI Podcast (July 24, 2025) ["Our full interview with the writer/director of the Northern Irish indie phenomenon KNEECAP. Host Rico Gagliano visits Rich at his Belfast pad, to talk about wrangling the movie's titular hard-partying provocateurs, the rise of Northern Ireland's film industry, and why he briefly resented a Quiet Girl."]

Reichardt, Kelly, et al. "On The Mastermind." Film at Lincoln Center #610 (September 29, 2025) ["We were delighted to welcome Kelly Reichardt, Bill Camp, Hope Davis, Gaby Hoffman, and John Magaro to the 63rd New York Film Festival to discuss The Mastermind in a conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Reichardt’s restrained and often funny anti-thriller is set against a Nixon-era backdrop of alienation and disillusionment, following a taciturn family man (Josh O’Connor) who makes the rash, largely inscrutable decision to orchestrate a heist at the local art museum."]

Reijn, Halina. "Smashing in the doors of Amsterdam cinema." MUBI Podcast (July 10, 2025) ["The Netherlands isn't known for tons of great movies... but its capital city of Amsterdam is packed with tons of great movie theaters. Rico takes us on a tour of his favorite town, to learn why. (Spoiler alert: Breaking into buildings played a role). Guests include director/actor Halina Reijn (BABYGIRL, BLACK BOOK), NY Times contributor Nina Siegal, and more."]

Victor, Eva. "Sorry, Baby." IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit (July 1, 2025) ["The writer, director, and star of the Sundance hit and new A24 release joins IndieWire's Chris O'Falt to break down their directorial debut. Eva was forthright about the challenges of learning how to direct (including a graduate level film class of sorts supervised by Barry Jenkins) and also explored how she balanced a gentle tonal approach to a tough subject."]

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"A film like “The Sugarland Express” is proof that some legends are just built different. Directing his first theatrically released film at 28 years old, Steven Spielberg practically emerged from the womb with all of the characteristics that would make him the biggest Hollywood director of the next half century: the effortless command of spectacle that always knows when to take a backseat to storytelling, the buttery smooth camera movements that seamlessly shift focus without ever letting viewers know it’s happening, and his unapologetic sincerity and deep belief in the dreams of brighter days that Hollywood has always sold us.

Many a modern viewer has watched “The Sugarland Express” expecting a trail of breadcrumbs that point to the development of a more mature Spielberg who directed his best films, but its pleasures are more immediate than that — “The Sugarland Express” is one of his best films, full stop. In Goldie Hawn’s Lou Jean, a young mom who will stop at nothing to get her baby out of the foster system, Spielberg found one of his most endearing protagonists. Her endless love, refusal to accept defeat, and good humor about the ridiculousness of riding in a cop convoy while holding an officer at gunpoint makes the character impossible to root against, and Spielberg is often happy to sit back and let Hawn’s charisma do all the hard work for him.

“The Sugarland Express” is Spielberg at his funniest and most sincere, complete with stellar car chase sequences that foreshadow his blockbuster dominance, and beautiful shots of characters watching “Looney Tunes” that may well have laid the foundation for Sammy Fabelman’s eventual trips to the movies. Its legacy has been overshadowed by the colossal movies its director has made in the subsequent decades, but the film would be just as deserving of a spot on this list if Spielberg had never stepped behind the camera again." —CZ

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"Talking with Scott Tobias at the Reveal, Kittredge, an editor and one of the producers of the 2022 Shudder series Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror, argues that The Heretic belongs in the company of two other films from 1977 that were once shunned and have since come in for more positive reevaluation: Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York and Friedkin’s own Sorcerer. Friedkin’s The Exorcist is “basically a conservative treatise about how secularism is never the answer,” says Kittredge. “The Heretic is an extremely progressive, extremely feminist film. And I think that was also one of the reasons it was so completely rejected in 1977.”

“Attempts to reclaim once-vilified movies as misunderstood masterpieces can seem like special pleading,” writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Guardian. “Even so, Kittredge makes a strong case for admitting The Heretic into the canon. There is astonishing Steadicam work from Garrett Brown (later to work on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining); Ennio Morricone’s mesmerizing score; Richard Macdonald’s stylized production design; buzzy mind-bending shots from a locust-eye point of view; a rip-roaring race back to Georgetown to confront the evil one; and, above all, the sheer, crazy ambition of Boorman’s storytelling.”" - David Hudson

ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #6

Bernal, Gael García. "Amores Perros Shakes Up Mexico City." MUBI Podcast (July 17, 2025) ["Superstar Gael García Bernal (THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES) and legendary set designer Eugenio Caballero (PAN’S LABYRINTH) help take host Rico Gagliano on a tour of Mexico City’s streets and its cinema — from the golden era of “ranchera” musicals to the making of Alejandro Inarittu’s tectonic breakthrough AMORES PERROS."]

Coppola, Francis Ford. "Director Francis Ford Coppola Keeps His Dream Alive." Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso (September 21, 2025) ["Director Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t just want to make movies. He wants to change them. This was true in 1969 when he co-founded Zoetrope Studios with George Lucas, and it remains true today. We return to our talk with Coppola upon the anniversary of his modern-day Roman epic fable Megalopolis, discussing his decades-long process developing the film (6:16) and the inspiration he’s taken from Georges Méliès (17:00) and Jacques Tati (19:07). Then, he reflects on the origin of how he became ‘Francis Ford Coppola’ (23:07), the irrepressible spirit he forged in childhood (26:34), and where he sees himself in films like The Godfather (33:17), Apocalypse Now (35:51), and Gardens of Stone (36:10). On the back-half, we unpack the parallels between the titular city of Megalopolis and Zoetrope Studios (42:35), his capacity to keep dreaming, even in the face of financial ruin (43:30), where he believes America is headed (49:04), and the lasting memory of his late wife, Eleanor (58:08)."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Sounding the Otherworld: On Bryn Chainey's Rabbit Trap. Weird Studies #197 (September 17, 2025) ["Bryn Chainey’s (new movie) Rabbit Trap is psychological horror in the tradition of Repulsion, Jacob’s Ladder, and Angel Heart. But it is more: a metaphysical film exploring the mystery of sound and the Otherworld of Faerie—an excursion into that weird country, so deftly explored by Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where wonder and terror perform their eldritch duets.']

Frost, Mark. "Mark Frost Founds Twin Peaks." MUBI Podcast (September 18, 2025) ["“These girls are jam packed with secrets,” said David Lynch about the women of TWIN PEAKS. Why did characters such as Audrey Horne and Shelly Johnson get viewers so hot and bothered? TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost explains. LADIES OF LYNCH explores the subversive female characters created by the late David Lynch, and the singular women who helped shape them. Season 9’s guests include celebrated actor and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini; Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch; his producer of more than 30 years, Sabrina Sutherland; TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost; and the award-winning novelist Deborah Levy."]

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"AMOUR is an accessible story of great simplicity… Haneke has cast two legends of the French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, as Georges and Anne, an octogenarian couple, former music teachers, living in happy, companionable retirement. But one day Anne suffers a stroke… she declines into dementia, and we follow Georges's increasingly unbearable task of caring for his wife in their apartment… The power and intelligence of this film really is a marvel; it is superbly acted and directed, with the edge of cold steel that audiences have come to expect from Haneke but with something else: a tenderness, gentleness and compassion." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

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There are many Denzel struts—the ones that make you straighten up in your own seat (see Malcolm X), the ones so chilly they leave frost in his footprints (see American Gangster), the ones that prompt all sorts of hollers to all sorts of lawds (see Mississippi Masala or Inside Man). None of them, though, are quite as mean-spirited, houndish, or just plain predacious as Alonzo Harris’s Training Day stride. A dastardly pattern of movement, innately and meticulously constructed, each step translates, roughly, to a challenge: Try me.
For most of the film, no one does. You understand why, without a word. So, yes, there’s more to the sculpting of Denzel’s most villainous turn—the bravado, the frightfulness, the comedic acrobatics, the sheer irrepressible charisma—but it’s all synthesized, here, within this gait. Before “King Kong ain’t got shit on me” and unconsenting sherm hits, there was one foot in front of the other, and another after that. The secret, in this way, to Denzel’s greatest 21st-century performance is that he walked so that he could run. How else would you know where the threat was coming from? —Pryor

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"Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner play academics enlisted by the military to make contact when alien spacecraft land on Earth in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama… How refreshing to watch an alien contact movie in which no cities are destroyed or monuments toppled, and no adversarial squabbling distracts the human team from the challenges of their complex interspecies encounter. Anchored by an internalized performance from Amy Adams rich in emotional depth, this is a grownup sci-fi drama that sustains fear and tension while striking affecting chords on love and loss… ARRIVAL boldly snubs the standard alien-invasion vernacular of contemporary movies to explore a mood and language of its own. It may be a touch too subdued for the mainstream, but the movie has brains and originality, qualities these days too seldom valued in the genre." - David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

 

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"The first film in eight years from the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien is an immaculate treasure box of light, texture and movement – though just when you think you’ve pinned it down, it slips your grasp as nimbly as its lead character darting through a silver birch grove. For the first time in his estimable 35-year career, Hou has made a wuxia, or period martial-arts film… If you’ve seen swordsmen and/or women bouncing through a bamboo forest, you’ve seen wuxia – yet you’ve almost certainly never seen it carried off with this degree of delicacy and refinement. There’s a little forest-bouncing here, but the fight scenes are few and far between." - Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

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"I didn’t expect to be as taken as I was. [Michael] Fried’s books are sometimes obsessively focused on quite esoteric propositions about a specific painting or photograph, but perhaps because of that are often spellbinding. I never thought I’d sit through 45 minutes of silent footage of Zidane running across a soccer field and come away enthralled, or find myself standing in front of a wall for hours thinking about the direction a figure is facing in a seventeenth-century painting or a 21st-century photograph. Fried can get carried away: once you see the absorption-theatricality distinction, it becomes tempting to see it everywhere. But even if it is not everywhere, it is in a lot of places. And once I started rereading Houellebecq, it was there too.

Fried’s basic insight is as follows: If you look at the tradition of high European art painting (he then expands to photography and novels), you will notice that many paintings seek to show figures as if they were not aware of being looked at by an audience. This could come through absorption in work, such as artisanal craftsmanship, or immersion in sociality with others. But in any case, the figures are oriented away from the audience, and pulled into the distinct world of the painting. This “pulling in” is crucial, since it sets up the painting as somehow standing outside and beyond our own wishes, with its own inner solidity. Because it pulls them away from us and into it, the figures and their world become objects that we look at and learn from, not mere projections of our desires.

And yet, they are inescapably there to be looked at by us. This fact means that in one way or another the painting must acknowledge that its scenes were created to be part of a scene, and therefore the figures are never fully independent of some kind of performance for their imagined audience. The independence they gain through being pulled into the inner world of the painting is taken back through being drawn back to their dependence for their existence on the desires of their audience. In Fried’s interpretation, this dependence shows up in subtle indications, such as a playing card turned outward toward the viewer, or one figure who breaks the spell of the absorbing scene to look out of the painting’s scene into the eye of the beholder.

What makes this relationship between theatricality and absorption especially potent is that it is not only descriptive but dynamic. It is an engine that drives artistic creativity, and much of Fried’s criticism is devoted to examining escalating attempts to deal with it. The most important dynamic involves various efforts to defeat the threat of theatricality and mannerism. This can happen in many ways, and no doubt many more will be discovered. One variant involves representations of figures caught up in war and violence: What could be more absorbing than that? There is no time to look away in the midst of battle. This is Fried’s interpretation of Jacques-Louis David, for example. Another variant is depictions of simple peasants, lost in everyday activities such as picking crops, oblivious to anything else but the task at hand. This is Fried’s interpretation of Millet’s The Gleaners.

But that very escalating depiction of violence or simplicity is unstable, in Fried’s reading. They inevitably become cliché and overdone, oscillating between shock for shock’s sake as the demands for the intensity of violence become greater on the one hand, and the brutalization and oversimplification of uneducated lower classes or nonintellectuals becomes too overt to ignore. In this and similar cases, the artist’s independence is the one threatened by theatricality. The peasants or soldiers may be absorbed in their work in the fields or bloody battles, but only an attention-seeking artist would put them in large-format canvases in front of crowds of the bourgeois public as a surefire way to gain their applause.

The dialectic begins anew, and artists begin finding ways to defeat the impression that they are painting in order to be seen painting but are themselves absorbed in the world of the painting as it unfolds, as if on its own, beyond their will. Fried takes this thought very far and in many directions, but his book on Courbet develops it directly. Courbet, in his view, hits on a very potent technique, which involves dispersing his own artistic consciousness throughout the painting, creating an impression that he is everywhere in it, and therefore somehow has merged with each and every aspect of it. In that way, the audience sees the painting and the painter immersed in it all at once.

This too ultimately proves unstable, in ways I will not get into now, eventually leading to the undoing from within of this line of painting in Manet. The last point I do want to emphasize is that while Fried often highlights painterly concerns around how to represent absorbed figures and defeat the impression of mannerism, this concern has roots in a conviction that the desire for some kind of absorption is present in the culture. Here too he has a point. Think of Charlie Kaufman films, such as Adaptation. These are animated by the sense that “we” have lost the ability to have intense, unmediated direct experience, that we are always somehow, even in the most seemingly intimate moments, acting with a view to how it will look to somebody else: how it will play on your feed, in the article you might write, in the story you might tell at a party.

Taken far enough, this thought leads to a kind of lament with language itself and a corresponding desire for prelinguistic immersion in instincts. But we don’t have to go so far to get the point. Just think of moments when you have felt like the line between you and the world disappeared: running down a hill so fast you can’t think but just must react; working on an essay and looking up two hours later as if it were no time at all; laughing with family and friends as each says exactly the right next thing that everybody understands without having to make any inferences; escaping or inflicting violence; and, yes, orgasm. The larger point behind Fried’s project is twofold: that painters try to depict absorption because this is how to absorb audiences who crave that very absorption, but that this very act creates the self-reinforcing oscillation between victories for theatricality and momentary reclamations of absorption." - Dan Silver 

Being John Malkovich (USA: Spike Jonze, 1999)

Have you ever wanted to be someone else? Or, more specifically, have you ever wanted to crawl through a portal hidden in an anonymous office building and thereby enter the cerebral cortex of John Malkovich for fifteen minutes, before being spat out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike? Then director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman have the movie for you. Melancholy marionettes, office drudgery, a frizzy-haired Cameron Diaz—but that’s not all! Surrealism, possession, John Cusack, a domesticated primate, Freud, Catherine Keener, non sequiturs, and absolutely no romance! But wait: get your Being John Malkovich now and we’ll throw in emasculation, slapstick, Abelard and Heloise, and extra Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich! - Criterion

Being John Malkovich (USA: Spike Jonze, 1999: 112 mins)

Chang, Chris. "Head Wide Open: Being John Malkovich." Film Comment (September-October, 1999)

Galibert-Laîné, Chloé. "The Human, the Machine and Spike Jonze." Keyframe (July 11, 2015) ["Tracking the evolution of technology and humankind in Spike Jonze films."]

Holland, Norman N. "Being John Malkovich (1999)." A Sharper Focus (ND)

Jones, Spike and Perkus Tooth. "The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head." Current (May 15, 2012)

McGlone, Neil. "From Pen to Screen: An Interview with Charlie Kaufman." Current (August 9, 2016)

Meacham, Brian. "Being John Malkovich." Yale Film Archive (September 18, 2015)

Three Reasons: Being John Malkovich Current (April 25, 2012)

Tobias, Scott. "Being John Malkovich at 20: why the surrealist comedy demands a rewatch." The Guardian (October 29, 2019) 

Michel Foucault: Philosophy/History of Ideas/Social Theorist/Discourse/Power/Knowledge (Azimuths)

 

I can't help but dream about a type of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. - Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84). Trans. John Johnston. Semiotext(e), 1989: 193 - 202.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Vintage Books, 1965)

Egan, Jessi. "Abusing Foucault: How Conservatives and Liberals Misunderstand 'Social Construct' Sexuality." Slate (March 4, 2014)

Foucault Info (Website on/about Michel Foucault)

Foucault, Michel.  “Introduction.” Archaeology Of Knowledge. ed. A. M. Sherida Smith. Vintage, 1982: 3-20.

---. “Madness, the absence of an œuvre.” In History of Madness, edited by J. Khalfa, 541-549. Routledge, 2006.

---. "Of Other Spaces." (This text, entitled "Des Espace Autres," and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967.)

---. “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Vol. II. ed. S. McMurrin. Univ. of Utah Press, 1981: 225 - 254.

---. “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations.” (Interview by Paul Rabinow, May 1984). Essential Works of Foucault. Vol. 1. The New Press, 1998.

---. “The Subject and Power.” Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. ed. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. The University of Chicago Press, 1983: 208-226.

---.  “Technologies of the Self.” (Lectures at University of Vermont Oct. 1982) Technologies of the Self. University of Massachusets Press, 1988: 16-49.

---. "Truth, Power, Self.” (Interview by R. Martin recorded on October 25th, 1982). Technologies of the Self. ed. L. Martin, et al. University of Massachusetts Press, 1988: 9-13.

Gutting, Gary and Johanna Oksala. "Michel Foucault." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (May 22, 2018)

Hovey, Jed. "The Spectacle of the Scaffold – Foucault, Corporal Punishment, and the Digital Age." Blue Labyrinths (January 6, 2016)

Kelly, Mark. "Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984)." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ND)

Koopman, Colin. "The Power Thinker." Aeon (March 15, 2017) ["One need not be locked away in a prison cell to be subject to its designs of disciplinary dressage. The most chilling line in Discipline and Punish is the final sentence of the section entitled ‘Panopticism’, where Foucault wryly asks: ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’ If Foucault is right, we are subject to the power of correct training whenever we are tied to our school desks, our positions on the assembly line or, perhaps most of all in our time, our meticulously curated cubicles and open-plan offices so popular as working spaces today. To be sure, disciplinary training is not sovereign violence. But it is power. Classically, power took the form of force or coercion and was considered to be at its purest in acts of physical violence. Discipline acts otherwise. It gets a hold of us differently. It does not seize our bodies to destroy them, as Leviathan always threatened to do. Discipline rather trains them, drills them and (to use Foucault’s favoured word) ‘normalises’ them. All of this amounts to, Foucault saw, a distinctly subtle and relentless form of power. To refuse to recognise such disciplining as a form of power is a denial of how human life has come to be shaped and lived. If the only form of power we are willing to recognise is sovereign violence, we are in a poor position to understand the stakes of power today. If we are unable to see power in its other forms, we become impotent to resist all the other ways in which power brings itself to bear in forming us."]

Lennard, Natasha. "On Non-Fascist Life." Politics Theory Other (August 14, 2019) ["Natasha Lennard joins me to discuss her book, 'Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life'. We spoke about whether or not Donald Trump and the movement that has coalesced around him ought to be characterised as fascist, we also talked about the contributions of Wilhelm Reich, Michel Foucault, and other figures in the anti-psychiatry movement to theorising fascism. We discussed the legitimacy and history of anti-fascist violence and its treatment by the media, and finally we spoke about Natasha's writing on suicide and how the act of suicide brings into question capitalism's positing of the idea of the sovereign individual."]

Manokha, Ivan. "New Means of Workplace Surveillance: From the Gaze of the Supervisor to the Digitalization of Employees." Monthly Review (February 1, 2019)

Sennett, Richard. "Sexuality and Solitude." The London Review of Books 3.9 (May 21, 1981) [Discussion of a seminar Sennett and Foucault did together.]

Sluga, Hans. "On the Life and Work of Michel Foucault." Entitled Opinions (April 18, 2012)

Smith, Victoria L. "The Heterotopias of Todd Haynes: Creating Space for Same Sex Desire in Carol." Film Criticism 42.1 (March 2018) ["Using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (an “other space”), this essay contends space is key to understanding Haynes’s Carol. It examines how Haynes, through his meticulous attention to framings, textures, color, and spatial relations, creates a queer counter space, time, and look—a rejection of early 1950s social and sexual propriety."]

West, Stephen. "Michel Foucault (Part 1)." Philosophize This (August 15, 2018) ["This episode introduces Michel Foucault through his book Discipline and Punish, exploring how societies shifted from public executions to controlling people through discipline and routine. Foucault argues that modern punishment isn't about justice—it's about maintaining power. He explains how systems like prisons, schools, and workplaces use surveillance, rules, and constant evaluation to shape behavior. Inspired by the panopticon—a design where prisoners never know when they’re being watched—Foucault shows how this logic now runs through all of modern life. We internalize these systems, watching and judging ourselves to fit into what society tells us is “normal.” Power, he says, doesn’t just come from governments or wealth, but from the knowledge that defines who we are and how we live." Further Reading: The Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord (1967); The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction – Michel Foucault (1976); Punishment and Social Structure – Georg Rusche & Otto Kirchheimer (1939)]

---. "Michel Foucault Pt. 2 - The Order of Things." Philosophize This! #122 (September 24, 2018) ["This episode continues the exploration of Michel Foucault by examining how scientific knowledge is shaped not just by discovery, but by deep, often invisible cultural assumptions. Living in a time of great faith in science, Foucault challenged the idea that progress in fields like physics or biology leads to objective truth. Instead, he focused on epistemes—unconscious frameworks that shape what societies consider knowable or valid. Through works like The Order of Things and The Birth of the Clinic, he showed how institutions such as hospitals and prisons are influenced by shifting language and norms, not just function. Foucault distinguishes between repressive power (force) and normalizing power (internalized expectations), arguing that modern societies maintain control by shaping how people see themselves. Ultimately, he urges us to question the dominant narratives we take for granted, revealing them as historically contingent systems grounded in power." Further Reading: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault (1970)​; The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction by Michel Foucault (1978)​; Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (1998).]

---. "Michel Foucault Pt. 3 - Power." Philosophize This (September 24, 2018) ["This episode continues the series on Michel Foucault by exploring how he challenged the idea that truth is universal and progress is rational. Building on earlier discussions of Kant, science, and criminal justice, it focuses on Madness and Civilization, where Foucault argues that modern approaches to mental illness are not more humane, but part of a broader system that objectifies and controls people under the guise of care. His method evolves from “archaeology,” which uncovers forgotten ways of thinking, to “genealogy,” which traces how ideas develop through power. Foucault reveals that modern power is no longer top-down and repressive, but diffuse and productive, shaping norms, behaviors, and identities through what he calls biopower. Rather than silencing us, power invites confession, self-surveillance, and conformity to scientific discourse. The episode closes by emphasizing that Foucault’s aim isn’t to replace dominant narratives, but to question them—revealing how they shape our lives and asking what might lie beyond them. Further Reading: Foucault: A Very Short Introduction by Gary Gutting (2005)​; The Philosophy of Foucault by Todd May (2006)​; Biopower: Foucault and Beyond edited by Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar (2015)."]

Yarmuth, Aaron.   "Rethinking the police: no traffic stops, no-knock warrants." LEO Weekly (June 4, 2020)  [MB - For nearly two months during the pandemic police in my area were virtually absent/invisible. Chaos did not erupt, crime did not go up, and Darwinian struggles between my neighbors over resources did not take place. It pushed me to re-visit the realization/thought of why does a large part of our society believe we need to flood the streets/our-neighborhoods with police and have them poking into ever aspects of our lives/interactions? How have many of us have been conditioned to believe we are not safe without police and what does that say about the instillation of our own unconscious police inside our own heads? It reminds me of reading Michel Foucault's history Discipline and Punish where he remarks on a "secret history of the police" where greater attention is paid to investigating and arresting criminals, than the essential aspects of public health, social welfare and regulating the marketplace. Is this what we want? Should we change this aspect of our civil society?]

Zamore, Daniel. "Can We Criticize Foucault." trans. Seth Ackerman. Jacobin (December 10, 2014)

Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death] by Simeon Wade

MB: I read this on a lazy, warm (but not oppressively hot), Sunday; drifting in and out of the narrative, searching out long forgotten philosophers/books mentioned, remembering my own trips in remote Western desert wonderlands, nostalgic for when I was so electrified when dining/partying with visiting intellectuals/artists at my universities and recognizing the stifling culture of a repressive academic environment that is unable to completely contain the wild flowering of jouissance amongst those fervently committed to its 'ecstative cultivation' (my conception: ecstative, for me, is imaginative discourse that does not stop and builds to an explosive point of multiple moments of discovery/wonder).

Do not approach this slim volume as if it may be the great lost Foucauldian codex that holds great secrets of the life and transformation of Foucault, an impulse he dismisses as pointless throughout this portrayal of him on this trip (and verified in many interviews). This impulse toward certainty reminds me of the stifled/arrogant academics that assault Foucault with banal questions after his productive open-ended discussions with the students near the end. Instead, the book is about Foucault accepting an invitation to hang out with some scholars (which just happens to include an acid trip in the desert) and having a series of open discussions about whatever was on their minds (as we do in those informal settings). It is not a guidebook to Foucault's thinking, instead it is a glimpse into/of Foucault as experienced/remembered by a young scholar.

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ENG 281: Fall 2025 Resources #5

Anderson, Paul Thomas and Leonardo DiCaprio. "Leonardo DiCaprio Unfiltered." Esquire (August 13, 2025) [The two are discussing their upcoming film One Battle After Another. "How do you get the actor talking? Put him in a room with Paul Thomas Anderson. During hours of conversation, two era-defining men—on the record together for the first time—went deep. They cracked some jokes, too."]

"A Serious Man." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (November 17, 2024) ["A Serious Man (2009) may seem much different from the Coens’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which they released two years earlier. But they both concern a likable man who finds himself posing questions that the universe–or any of its wisest men–cannot answer. And even if there are glimpses of answers to the question “What does Hashem, or God, want,” neither late-thirties Larry or late-sixties Sheriff Bell can read the writing on the wall (or, in the case of A Serious Man, the writing on the teeth). The film begins with a quotation from Rumi, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Join us for a conversation about one of the Coens’ best films and a terrific look at people to whom things happen and are forced to receive the will of a God who never tips His hand about His intentions."]

Aster, Ari and Adam Curtis. "‘Nobody believes in the future any more’: Adam Curtis and Ari Aster on how to wake up from the post-truth nightmare." The Guardian (August 8, 2025) ["Paranoia is exploited to control us. Movies are groomed to flatter us. And trauma has been twisted to make us blame ourselves. How can we make sense of our lives? The two film-makers try to navigate the chaos."]

Hering, David. "Bringing Bodies Together: On David Cronenberg and The Shrouds." Notes From the End of Cinema (April 22, 2025) ["Much of Cronenberg’s reputation as a horror director derives, of course, from association with his biggest hit, The Fly (1986). This reputation obtains, even though nearly half of Cronenberg’s filmography has no supernatural or horror element at its centre. If you want to find a constant in Cronenberg’s oeuvre, it’s not horror but technology. The description of Cronenberg’s work as ‘chilly’ is, I think, a perspective that develops from expecting horror – a visceral, affective response – only to find fascination in its place. Cronenberg’s work has a prevailingly scientific eye, one that doesn’t shrink from observing the changing and degenerating things that happen to bodies. In his latest – and he has suggested, possibly final – film, The Shrouds (2024), this viewing position is at the heart of the story. Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a rich businessman, desolate following his wife’s death, invents a technology, a shroud in which the dead are wrapped, that allows the bereaved to view an accurate computer-generated image of their loved one’s decomposing body."]

Hudson, David. "Alexander Horwath's Henry Fonda for President." Current (September 11, 2025) ["Fonda “personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and—thanks to his rebellious children—the 1960s generation gap,” writes J. Hoberman for Artforum. “Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, Henry Fonda for President, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life.”"]

---. "Chloe Zhao's Hamnet." Current (September 9, 2025) ["A quote from Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt opens both Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloé Zhao’s adaptation: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” In Zhao’s film, cowritten with O’Farrell, young Will Shakespeare writes his immortal play about a Danish prince hurled into an existential crisis by the loss of his father and a smoldering desire for revenge as a way to mourn the loss of his eleven-year-old son. He was also reaching out to his wife with an urge to have her understand that he shares her fathomless grief. For Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Hamnet is “devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years,” and most early reviews find critics on the same page. There are, however, a few detractors."]

Hudson, David. "Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice." Current (September 10, 2025) ["Known around the world as the Front Man in Squid Game, Lee Byung-hun is most famous in South Korea for starring in films directed by Kim Jee-woon such as A Bittersweet Life (2005), The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), and I Saw the Devil (2010). He broke through, though, playing a South Korean soldier who befriends a couple of North Korean border guards in Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (2000). Lee stars in Park’s No Other Choice as Man-soo, a paper factory manager with a loving wife, two kids, two handsome golden retrievers, and a painstakingly (and expensively) renovated home, and he “undoubtedly delivers one of the year’s great leading performances as a desperate corporate crumb,” writes Luke Georgiades for A Rabbit’s Foot. After twenty-five years at the company, the Americans are taking over, and higher-ups pass along word to Man-soo that they have “no other choice” but to let him go."]

Kaye, Jenni, et al. "Dog Day Deep Cuts: a starter pack of twenty underseen summer horror films." Cinemascope (August 6, 2025) ["For those who have already worked their way through the summer horror classics like Jaws and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jenni Kaye has packed a cooler full of twenty underseen sweaty thrillers, campy romps, and slow burn screams for your watchlist."]

Murthi, Vikram. "“Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington." Filmmaker (July 31, 2025) ["Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history."]

Rife, Katie. "Monstrous Feminine: Twenty feminist horror films to explore the subversive genre." Cinemascope (July 29, 2025) ["From final girls to monstrous liberation, horror has long been an avenue to unpack and subvert misogynist tropes—Katie Rife dives in, sharing a starter pack of twenty feminist horror films that’ll rock your world."]

Vis, Dave. "Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films."  Letterboxd (Ongoing) ["Letterboxd's Top 250 movies, based on the average weighted rating of all Letterboxd users. I removed all stand-up specials, stage plays, concert films, documentaries, shorts, 'collection listings' and other 'rarities', so only feature length narrative movies are listed here. Films should have a minimum of 15,000 ratings to be eligible to enter the list."]

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Lydia Tár (née Linda Tarr) is a germophobe. We see the stress that touching other humans gives her; we watch as she tries and fails to scrub herself adequately clean in the apartment she keeps in Berlin, its tasteful clutter arranged just so. The implication—that someone who cultivates a sense of the exotic, who claims to speak on behalf of Indigenous groups to the white elite, cannot handle any intrusion into her body—is at direct odds with the steely public persona the character has created for herself. Cate Blanchett, at turns terrifying and terrified, has never been better. See especially the scene when she has lunch with a cellist who hopes to play in Tár’s orchestra: Whether the allegations of sexual impropriety are true or not, Lydia here is a predator resting patiently on her haunches. —Thompson

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"AMERICAN HONEY will make you feel dirty. Not because it features several scenes of barely clothed young people grinding up against each other (though they are designed to arouse, successfully) but because director Andrea Arnold is so fascinated with the sheer amount of grime, filth and decay that, in her vision at least, constitute the American South. It's there that the British filmmaker chronicles the exploits of Star (Sasha Lane), orphan to a meth-head mother, and her merry band of youthful delinquents (including Shia LaBeouf, at his rattiest) who eke out a living selling – of all things – magazine subscriptions… It's bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head." - Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail

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Some actors chew scenery. In his Oscar-winning performance in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, Javier Badem quietly liquefies it with his mere presence on-screen. As Anton Chigurh, Bardem gave us a villain more terrifying than his mop top. Within mere weeks—maybe even days—of the film’s release in November 2007, Chigurh became an iconic movie villain on par with Hannibal Lecter and Nurse Ratched. Bardem is measured but unfiltered; he kills coolly and calmly but has a warm smile. His silhouette, a captive bolt pistol by his side, increases heart rates and sweat production. Bardem channels the menace of Chigurh through an absence of anything recognizably human behind his unprepossessing brown eyes. He doesn’t play evil with a wink. Instead, Bardem’s performance is completely absent of exaggeration. It’s mechanical and weirdly polite, as exemplified by the coin toss with Kelly Macdonald (“I got here the same way the coin did”) and the calm way he asks for the coin toss in the gas station (“Call it, Friend-O”). In a film full of silence and stark and striking landscapes, Bardem fills the space with a dread so thick that you could choke on it. It’s a performance that stalks you. Seventeen years later, we’re still scared to call heads. —Wittmer

 

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"AMORES PERROS, was a foreign- film Oscar nominee, but it didn't stand a chance. Blood actually sizzles on a grill in it, and the stench of its Mexico City is stronger than that of the average art house's popcorn… Inarritu doesn't give you a Mexico City that's a vista-laden window on exotic locales. Written by Guillermo Arriaga, the film is a side-streety, rat's-eye view of a city undergoing economic upheaval… This is hard core, and it ain't pretty. His movie doesn't have to be falsely gorgeous, though 2 1/2 hours after it begins, it finds the human beauty that spills out of the knife wounds." - Wesley Morris, San Francisco Chronicle

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In 2025, it’s easy to forget how nervous—or outraged, even—Batman fans were about the casting of Heath Ledger in the role of the Joker in 2006. Until that point, the Australian actor was best known for being a heartthrob in romantic comedies, from 10 Things I Hate About You to A Knight’s Tale, and for his Oscar-nominated turn in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain. Bat-stans couldn’t fathom Ledger becoming the iconic villain who had existed in comics, TV, and film dating back to the 1940s, with memorable on-screen performances from the likes of Jack Nicholson and (the voice of) Mark Hamill. Yet, these days, Ledger’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight is widely considered the definitive portrayal of the Clown Prince of Crime. Ledger’s transformation in The Dark Knight is so convincing that it’s hard to believe that—somewhere beneath all of that messy clown makeup—the actor who serenaded Julia Stiles on those high school stadium steps could be the same guy performing magic tricks for Gotham’s mob bosses. Ledger is terrifying, hilarious, and mesmerizing as Batman’s archnemesis, stealing every scene he’s in while serving as the primary engine for the greatest superhero movie ever made. It’s fitting, then, that he became the first actor to earn an Oscar for a role in a superhero flick, with Ledger posthumously honored as the Best Supporting Actor at the 2009 Academy Awards following his death the previous year. He would remain the only actor to achieve the feat for a full decade, until Joaquin Phoenix stepped into the same role for 2019’s Joker—and it feels safe to say that the billion-dollar film would have never existed if Ledger hadn’t redefined the villain in The Dark Knight. —Chin

 

Amelie (France/Germany: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

 

"Paris: city of light, city for lovers swept up by the air of romance. It’s the perfect setting for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s wonderful AMÉLIE, a film with a golden, glowing heart. This massive hit at the French box office is the very dictionary definition of ‘feel-good’ — its irresistible charms will dispel the heaviest clouds hanging over the head of the gloomiest misanthrope. Freed from the darker imagination of Marc Caro (with whom he collaborated on DELICATESSEN and THE CITY OF THE LOST CHILDREN) and the restraints Hollywood thrust upon him during ALIEN RESURRECTION, Jeunet has created one of the most joyous films of recent years. With its gallery of affectionately drawn grotesques and eccentrics, AMÉLIE is filled with sunshine." - Alan Morrison, Empire

Amelie (France/Germany: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001: 121 mins)

Aytemiz, Pelin. "Looking Through 'Her' Eyes: Productive Look in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain." (Posted on Academia.edu: May 24, 2004)

Ebert, Roger. "Amelie." Chicago Sun-Times (November 9, 2001)

Gaggi, Silvio. "Navigating Chaos." New Punk Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2006: 113-125. [In BCTC Library]

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #21

[Doubt] alone can provide true repose and security of our spirits. Have all the greatest and most noble philosophers and wise men who have professed doubt been in a state of anxiety and suffering? But they say: to doubt, to consider both points of view, to put off a decision, is this not painful? I reply, it is indeed for fools, but not for wise men. It is painful for people who cannot stand freedom, for those who are presumptuous, partisan, passionate and who, obstinately attached to their opinions, arrogantly condemn all others. ... Such people, in truth, know nothing. They do not even know what it is to know something. - Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom  (Originally published 1601: keep in mind that publishing ideas like this during this era in Europe could get you called into an Inquisition hearing and risk execution for heresy/atheism)

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"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

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Close your eyes and think about the cult leaders you’ve seen portrayed in movies—the David Koresh stand-ins with long hair, spewing pseudo-intellectual musings with their questionable charisma. Then think of the challenge Philip Seymour Hoffman had in The Master—how he had to be radiantly respectable on the surface, rotten to the core beneath, presenting a veneer that masked deep-seated insidiousness. Truth is, we could’ve gone with any number of PSH’s performances in the 21st century—it greatly pains us to leave his work in Doubt, Capote, Charlie Wilson’s War, Along Came Polly, and especially Synecdoche, New York on the cutting-room floor—but it ultimately felt right to go with the role that captured him at his loudest and quietest, his most charming and most villainous. The processing interrogation in the bowels of the boat—where Hoffman’s L. Ron Hubbard avatar, Lancaster Dodd, and Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell volley back and forth—is on the short list for best-acted scenes of the century, but there are plenty of indelible moments to choose from: the hand job, the unexpected motorcycle send-off, the volcanic detonation of “pig fuck.” The Master is also PSH’s final major work outside of the Hunger Games franchise, which conjures a heartbreaking question: If he had lived past the age of 46, would he have had another role that surpassed this? —Sayles

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Bayoumi, Moustafa, Timothy Brennan, and Mariam Said. "Edward Said and the Question of Palestine." Throughline (July 17, 2025) ["Edward Said brought the question of Palestine into the American mainstream. He taught at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, and today, more than two decades after his death, pro-Palestine student protesters on that campus and others have invoked his name. Meanwhile, his interviews circulate on social media and his books are taught at universities around the world. On this episode: the story of the man who pushed for recognition of the Palestinian perspective, the pushback he faced, and the dangers he foresaw."]

Blight, David W. "What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?" The New Republic (August 7, 2025) ["We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion."]

Davis, Rob. "How the Rapid Spread of Misinformation Pushed Oregon Lawmakers to Kill the State’s Wildfire Risk Map." Pro Publica (August 7, 2025) ["This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact.
A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes. Around the same time, insurance companies start dropping Oregon homeowners’ policies and raising premiums to limit future losses, much as they have done in other disaster-prone states. Insurers have their own sophisticated risk maps to guide them, but some brokers instead tell homeowners the blame lies with the map the state produced. The belief gets treated as fact both on social media and in mainstream news — even though insurers and regulators say it’s not true. The anger quickly spreads. Not only is Oregon’s map seen as at fault for higher insurance premiums, one conservative talk radio host calls it an attempt to “depopulate rural areas.” People in an anti-map Facebook group start musing about “Agenda 21,” a conspiracy theory implicating the United Nations in an effort to force people into cities so they can be more easily controlled."]

DeNicola, Daniel R. "Plato's Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance." The MIT Press Reader (September 12, 2024) ["Are we like these cave dwellers? Is this gloomy cave the image of the womb from which we were all thrust unknowing into the light? But do we not then quickly overcome this primal oblivion — or do we all still dwell in a place of such abysmal ignorance? To think this through, I want to reverse Plato’s approach: Rather than describing how we may know the truth, let us consider how we recognize ignorance."]

Diamond, Adele. "The Science of Attention." On Being (2014) ["What Adele Diamond is learning about the brain challenges basic assumptions in modern education. Her work is scientifically illustrating the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization, and reflection. What nourishes the human spirit, the whole person, it turns out, also hones our minds."]

Dorian, M.J. "Hilma af Klint • Painting the Unseen • Part 1: Life & Death & Art." Creative Codex #52 (July 2, 2025) ["What makes Hilma af Klint's artwork so groundbreaking? Did she really create her art with the aid of higher beings? And why did it take a century for the art world to catchup with her vision and finally recognize her genius?"]

Enelow, Shonni. "Open and Shut: Acting and Attachment in Good One." Reverse Shot (June 10, 2024) ["A few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend from acting school who has had substantial roles in major movies and told him about some of my recent writing about film acting and visual art. I mentioned the art history terms absorption and theatricality, both coined by Michael Fried to describe a transformation of painting sometime in the 18th century, as artists started to get anxious about over-performing for their viewers (about theatricality) and instead began to paint works that projected their self-enclosure and disinterest in their audiences (often images in which figures are absorbed in their represented activities). Hearing this, he started talking about attachment theory, which traces adult neuroses to the child’s secure or insecure attachment to their parents. The film actor, he told me, must not project insecure attachment. You cannot be needy. The audience will be repelled. You also cannot be avoidant. The audience will get bored. Instead, you need to project a security that the audience will come to you––even if you don’t actually feel it. That’s what good film acting is"]

Grandin, Greg. "America, América." Open Source (August 14, 2025) ["We’re grappling with the prize historian Greg Grandin’s take on the making of the modern world. There’s a 600-page version in hard covers, but also a two-word version in his title, America, América, code for his main point: that the story of global USA today has Latin America woven all through it. It’s a history of brutal conquest, some discovered ideals and values through five centuries, and maybe an exceptional all-American hybrid, after all, into today. In the roots, of course, were two colonial empires, Spanish and British, rivals and partners, reenacting over the decades their past far into the future."]

Hardy, Alyssa. "Exposing the Dark Side of the Fashion Industry." Current Affairs (September 22, 2023) ["Journalist Alyssa Hardy on how we can appreciate and enjoy clothes while still being determined to change the ways they are made and marketed."]

Hedges, Chris. "The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk." Counterpunch (September 12, 2025) ["The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration."]

Hiemstra, Nancy and Dierdre Conlon. "The Political Economy of Immigrant Detention." This is Hell! (September 3, 2025) ["Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon join us to discuss their new book, Immigration Detention, Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants from Pluto Press."]

Hudson, David. "Guillermo del Toro and Frankenstein." Current (September 4, 2025) ["Whether or not Frankenstein will ultimately be deemed to be “del Toro’s finest work, it is the purest, most sincere distillation of all his dreams and nightmares, turned into two and a half hours of exhilarating passion for old school filmmaking,” writes Max Borg at the Film Verdict. Del Toro argues that it is “extremely important for me to keep the reality of film craft alive. I want real sets. I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old-fashioned craftsmanship. I want people painting, building, hammering, plastering. I go in and paint props myself. I supervise the construction of the sets. There is an operatic beauty when you build everything by hand.”"]

Mann, Itamar and Lihi Yona. "Defending Jews From the Definition of Antisemitism." UCLA Law Review (December 23, 2024) ["The 2023 Israel-Gaza conflict has ignited an intense legal and ethical debate over the definition of antisemitism, leaving deep scars on communities and college campuses. This debate clashes over one major question: does sharp criticism of Israel amount to antisemitic speech? Through various legal instruments, U.S. law has accepted this premise. This Article argues against such stretching of the definition of antisemitism and develops a novel legal framework to challenge it. Existing scholarship has shown that antisemitism is often weaponized against Palestinians and their liberation struggle. Widening the scope of this critique, we theorize an additional layer of harm imposed upon American Jews. We argue that the broadening of the definition of antisemitism has resulted in a narrowing of Jewish identity and a delegitimization of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish communities. Constructing Jewish identity along rigid and fixed lines, the contemporary legal definition of antisemitism imposes upon Jews a straitjacket of Zionism. This Article begins by explaining the peculiar positionality of Jews within the U.S. liberal legal order, examining how Jewish communities have often articulated political commitments through religious vocabularies. As such, Jewish identity presents a challenge for American liberal ideas regarding religion. The redefinition of antisemitism to protect the state of Israel reflects a failed attempt to respond to this challenge. It favors one specific version of Jewish identity (Zionist) while suppressing others. The Article then moves on to track the evolution of the legal definition of antisemitism vis-à-vis the state of Israel, from post-WWII cases, to what we dub as the “IHRA- era.” The codification of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism has stigmatized anti-Zionists and other critics of Israel as antisemites. Following a detailed account of the harms to pro-Palestinian actors, we advance to the heart of our argument, arguing that IHRA-type rules discipline Jewish identity and diminish the richness of Jewish political traditions. To combat this harm, the Article develops two legal arguments. First, we argue that for many American Jews, criticizing Israel is a way to exercise their religious freedom. Further, we argue, the redefinition of antisemitism should be seen as a governmental interference in religion, deciding the content of Jewish identity, in violation of the Establishment Clause. Second, we argue that antidiscrimination laws should protect Jews who are targeted as Jews due to their political position. We recognize two types of discriminatory dynamics: (1) discrimination based on association and solidarity with Palestinians; and (2) discrimination based on stereotypes regarding how Jews ought to perform their identity."]

Mughal, Alisha. "It Can't Rain All the Time: The Crow." New Books in Film (August 13, 2025) ["Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance. A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.” In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable. Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Mughal brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope."]

Odell, Jenny and David Rooney. "Deep Time: The Tyranny of Time." To the Best of Our Knowledge (June 3, 2023) ["When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of time that sustain life. What would it be like to live more in tune with nature’s clocks? Lately it’s been feeling like time is speeding up. Whether it’s the news cycle, social media, the information economy or global warming, the pace of life is accelerating beyond what many of us can handle. Jenny Odell blames the clock. Clocks control us – but who controls clocks? David Rooney gives us a brief political history of clocks. And a look at their future."]

Sachdev, Shaan. "The Gaza Generation." Los Angeles Review of Books (August 9, 2025) ["Inflamed by the first vivid global atrocities in their lifetimes, the young protesters of Gaza’s cleansing were met not just with arrests and defenestrations but also, and more revealingly, with accusations of hysteria. The excesses of the 2020 protests and their aftermath, distilled by critics as “wokeness” and “DEI,” were, in the minds of such critics, comparable, if not equally frivolous, to a campaign against genocide. The on-campus rage and rigidity that met mass slaughter, mass maiming, mass starvation, and mass displacement—broadcast in real time and financed by American taxpayers—were dismissed as little more than pugnacious overreactions to a political inevitability. Thinly enshrouded in the critics’ purportedly cultural distaste was a devastating political truth: Palestinians, even more so than the Iraqis before them, were ontological featherweights, scarcely important enough to matter, even in bulk, even in totality. Palestinian children, too, were somehow tainted, guilty by association from birth, and thus less intrinsically human than Israeli children. The murder of more than 50,000 people, two-thirds of them estimated to be women and children—in apartments, in schools, in hospitals, in cars, in tents—and the displacement of millions more were not, then, taken at face value by those who sneered at the hysterical generation. The murders were contextualized. They were qualified. Israeli officials and American Zionists could justify the violence by pointing to the Israelis killed on October 7, while Palestinians and their supporters were disgustedly forsworn as apologists of terrorism if they pointed to the 616 Palestinians killed between 2006 and 2007, the 165 Palestinians killed in 2012, the 2,203 Palestinians killed in 2014, the 256 Palestinians killed in 2021, or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, mutilated, disabled, or expelled between 1948 and 1981, all before October 7, 2023."] 

Schaake, Marietje. "Can Democracy Coexist with Big Tech." Capitalisn't (September 26, 2024) ["International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at the expense of the public and democratic institutions, Schaake writes. Schaake joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss proposals for reversing this shift of power and maintaining the balance between innovation and regulation in the digital age. If a "tech coup" is really underway, how did we get here? And if so, how can we safeguard democracy and individual rights in an era of algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism? Marietje Schaake’s new book, “The Tech Coup: Saving Democracy From Silicon Valley."]

Seymour, Richard. "The Debt to David Graeber." The LRB Podcast (September 3, 2025) ["When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Following the publication of a new collection of Graeber’s essays, Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey his thought, ranging from the theories of power Graeber developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) challenging the orthodox view of how egalitarian and hierarchical societies developed over the past thirty thousand years. Richard Seymour is a writer and theorist whose books include Disaster Nationalism and The Twittering Machine."]

Song, Lisa. "The Trump Administration Is Promoting Its Anti-Trans Agenda Globally at the United Nations." Pro Publica (August 5, 2025)  ["The delegates included federal civil service employees and the associate director of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s policies, who now works for the State Department. They delivered these statements during U.N. forums on topics as varied as women’s rights, science and technology, global health, toxic pollution and chemical waste. Even a resolution meant to reaffirm cooperation between the U.N. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became an opportunity to bring up the issue. Insisting that everyone’s gender is determined biologically at birth leaves no room for the existence of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who face discrimination and violence around the world. Intersex people have variations in chromosomes, hormone levels or anatomy that differ from what’s considered typical for male and female bodies. A federal report published in January just before President Donald Trump took office, estimated there are more than 5 million intersex Americans. ... At the U.N., the administration has promoted other aspects of its domestic agenda. For example, U.S. delegates have demanded the removal of references to tackling climate change and voted against an International Day of Hope because the text contained references to diversity, equity and inclusion. (The two-page document encouraged a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth” and welcomed “respect for diversity.”)"]

West, Stephen. "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism." Philosophize This! #235 (September 3, 2025) ["Today we talk about one of Han's earlier books where he offers an alternative to classic western ideas about subjectivity. We talk about Zen as a religion without God. Substance and emptiness. Alternatives to the reified self. Dwelling nowhere. Original friendliness. And death as an event we desperately try to control."]