Molly Crabapple: Activism/Art/History (Azimuths)

 Crabapple, Molly. "The Bund: Fighting Fascism, Fighting Zionism." Know Your Enemy (April 10, 2026) ["In 1897, a small group of Jewish Marxists on the outskirts of the Russian empire founded the General Jewish Labour Bund. The Bundists were revolutionary socialists, unapologetic internationalists, champions of the Yiddish language, and implacable foes of nationalism of every stripe, including (especially) Zionism. Bundists helped found the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, organized militias to defend Jews against pogroms, fought on the frontlines of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, fought fascists wherever they found them, and helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The history of the Bund is largely forgotten today—in part because Bundists were such early and prescient critics of Zionism. As one of its leaders said in 1933, “If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.” Thankfully, Molly Crabapple spent the last seven years rediscovering the Bund’s fascinating history for her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. It was thrilling to have her on to discuss it. “For leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult,” Crabapple says, “the Bund is a model.” Further Reading: Sam Adler-Bell, ‘For leftist Jews, the Bund is a model’: the radical history behind one of Europe’s biggest socialist movements, The Guardian (2026); Max Strasser, What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism? New York Times (2026)"]

---. "Here Where We Live Is Our Country." Open Source Radio (May 28, 2026) ["We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old Bund as forgotten but not gone in the wider world today. The question may be whether the Bund’s humane ideals will have another chance against the lawlessness and cruelty of the 2020s. We know Molly Crabapple as a one-off writer and artist, pens and paintbrushes at the ready, a sort of global muckraker in the rough places of the world. Last time she was here, she was just back from civil war in Syria. This time, she’s just back from unearthing history, World War I time, through an epidemic of hellish and deadly pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Bund, created in Poland, was a tough-minded working-class alliance demanding full rights for Jews at home. It was irreconcilably embattled against the rising young Zionist movement that would establish a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Molly Crabapple took it on herself—and learned the Yiddish language as part of the job—to research and write the whole story of the Jewish Bund: the old politics in it, the modern emotions that it still stirs, starting with the restored memory of her own family. And she’s made a monumental book of it under the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country."]

---. "The History of the Jewish Bund." American Prestige (August 12, 2026) ["Danny and Derek speak with artist and writer Molly Crabapple about her book on the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Here Where We Live Is Our Country. They discuss Molly's personal connection to the story, the Pale of Settlement and Jewish emancipation, the founding of the Bund in 1897, the Bund's armed self-defense against pogroms, its fraught relationship with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Bund's rivalry with Zionism, the flourishing of Bundist culture in interwar Poland, and the lessons of the Bund’s story for the Jewish left today."]

Crabapple, Molly, et al. "Zionism and Nationalism Built What Their Jewish Critics Feared in Israel and Palestine." Best of the Left #832 (November 6, 2026) ["Israel was formed to create a safe haven for Jews in the wake of World War II, an admirable goal. Since then, there have been major wars every decade, terrorist attacks, and Netanyahu has been warning about Iran getting a nuclear weapon since 1992. There were prominent Jews at the time, including Albert Einstein, who saw all of this coming and warned against the creation of a Jewish state with borders and an army, because they feared exactly what has come to pass because of the peril it would put Jews in and the damage that Jewish nationalism would do to the Jewish faith. The tragedy of Israel is that those warnings were not heeded and then that this perspective was effectively removed from the discussion entirely, making the path to true safety for Jews and everyone else, essentially invisible. We're exploring that history and those perspectives today."]

David Hudson: Film Studies/Film Culture (Azimuths)

 Hudson, David. "Alex Gibney's Musk." The Current (September 16, 2026) ["In a recent cover story for the Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik calls documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney “the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward.” Gibney won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, and he’s won Emmys for Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012), which traces the history of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015). In 2022, Gibney and his team began working on a film about Elon Musk for HBO. Within two years, they had what they considered to be a pretty solid account of the South African–born software engineer who developed an uncanny talent for turning money-losing companies into personal cash cows before cofounding PayPal (and then stepping away), founding SpaceX, taking over Tesla and the satellite network Starlink, cofounding OpenAI (and then stepping away), and taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, where his own account is boosted while others—particularly those expressing views he disagrees with—are throttled. By 2024, though, Musk was actively campaigning for—and to a considerable degree, helping to finance—the reelection of Donald Trump. Dressed in black and describing himself as “dark, gothic MAGA,” Musk joined the second Trump administration as the overseer of the newly launched Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is widely believed to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands around the world."

---. "Kubrick Season." Current (November 2, 2026) ["“Why does Kubrick’s work continue to fascinate, thrill, and move us?” asked Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri when he rolled out his ranking of the thirteen features (and placed Barry Lyndon at #1). “For starters, his mastery of style was never overtly showy or arty or cute: His films draw us in immediately on both a narrative and formal level (they look and sound amazing), which then allows them to gradually reveal their ideas to us. And his great themes are eternal ones. Kubrick made movies about the inevitable failure of humans’ most precise plans; about how our paths to success were often also our paths to ruin; about how the things we sought to control eventually controlled us; and, of course, about the unfeeling carelessness of the powerful toward those beneath them. The reason we’ll never lose interest in his work is because we’re still living in his world.”"]

---. "Luis Buñuel: Desire and Deviance." The Daily (January 28, 2026) ["In 1929, the poster boy of the movement, Salvador Dalí, teamed up with a fellow Spaniard, Luis Buñuel, who at the time was working in France as an assistant director for Jean Epstein, to turn their dreams into a screenplay that became Un chien andalou (1929). From this first, now-classic short through “to his final feature, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977),” wrote Adrian Martin in 2020, “Buñuel always stayed true to those primary surrealist principles with which he most identified: a spirit of revolt; the subversive power of passionate love, both romantic and erotic; a belief in the creativity of the unconscious (dreams and fantasies); a pronounced taste for black humor; and, last but never least, an abiding contempt for institutional religion and its representatives.”"]

---. "Oliver Laxe’s Sirât." Current (November 11, 2025) ["“The resilience of this group,” writes Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay, “their small-scale collectivism, and the way in which dance, and drugs, are a kind of social and even spiritual practice, as opposed to simple escapism, made me think of the late Mark Fisher’s final unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism,’ and his thinking here is an analogue to the movie’s techno-scored hedonic flow: ‘The crucial defining feature of the psychedelic is the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?’”"]

---. "We Will Always Love Dolly Parton." The Daily (August 27, 2026) ["“I try not to get into the politics of everything,” Parton told Mesfin Fekadu in the Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “I try to get into the human element of it. I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts—all within my own family. I know and love them all, and I do not judge . . . If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”"]

---. "Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard." The Daily (September 30, 2026) ["In the early 1980s, the case of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters from Yorkshire, kicked up a flurry of media attention in the British press. The Chaplins had been obsessing over a local truck driver and were briefly locked up for harassing the man. The story lit a spark in Werner Herzog’s imagination, one that smoldered for decades until he hit upon the brilliant idea of casting Rooney and Kate Mara as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters in contemporary Ireland—not twins, they insist—who go on trial for taking sneaky revenge on the beau (Orlando Bloom) who has spurned them for another woman."]

ENG 102: Subject Guides for Research Projects

Arts:

Latest:

Mason, Daniel. "Writing an Enchanted Landscape." Wonder Cabinet (October 10, 2026) ["How does a landscape come alive and even feel enchanted? Bestselling author Daniel Mason explores this question in his novels “Country People” and “North Woods.” Both are steeped in the natural history of New England, from its geology to its native plants and animals. They capture the uncanny feeling of living in a landscape layered with human history — the stone walls, cellar holes, and other remnants of lives long past, hidden in the woods. In this conversation, Mason talks about the deep history of the land and the folklore of rural Vermont. One plot strand in “Country People” involves a secret society whose members believe the Earth is hollow, with a cave leading to a magical kingdom inside. Mason, who’s also a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, is fascinated by the thin line between imagination and delusion. He believes novelists exist in a state of wonder, and he’s drawn to visionary writers like Dante, Milton, and William Blake. One recurring theme in his fiction is the idea of a “paradise lost.”"]

Subject Guide:

Humanities/Arts/Culture

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Economics: 

Latest: 

Scanlon, Kyla. "You Can Know Everything (About the Economy)." Talk Easy with Sam Fragaso (November 1, 2026) ["The way Americans talk about money is changing. Economic commentator Kyla Scanlon has emerged as a fresh, influential voice in that conversation. Recently named one of TIME’s 100 Creators, her New York Times bestseller, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work, has been hailed as “essential reading” by Jon Stewart. She joins us this week to offer her “boots-on-the-ground” understanding of the economy, ahead of the midterms."]

Subject Guide:

Economics/Political Economy/Business/Labor

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Education:

Latest:

Lepore, Jill. "On Silicon Valley Priests and Academic Rot." Open Questions (October 23, 2026) ["A Harvard dean recently suggested that "there should be acceptance, even encouragement" of AI writing in the college classroom. That sort of thing creeps Jill Lepore out. We talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian about what AI is doing to higher education, what went wrong at Harvard, and why our new tech overlords want dominion not just over our pockets and our politics but also our souls."
Guest: ⁠Jill Lepore⁠, professor of history and law at Harvard University]

Subject Guide:

Education/Students

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Film Studies/Film Culture

Latest:

Hudson, David. "Kubrick Season." Current (November 2, 2026) ["“Why does Kubrick’s work continue to fascinate, thrill, and move us?” asked Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri when he rolled out his ranking of the thirteen features (and placed Barry Lyndon at #1). “For starters, his mastery of style was never overtly showy or arty or cute: His films draw us in immediately on both a narrative and formal level (they look and sound amazing), which then allows them to gradually reveal their ideas to us. And his great themes are eternal ones. Kubrick made movies about the inevitable failure of humans’ most precise plans; about how our paths to success were often also our paths to ruin; about how the things we sought to control eventually controlled us; and, of course, about the unfeeling carelessness of the powerful toward those beneath them. The reason we’ll never lose interest in his work is because we’re still living in his world.”"]

Subject Guide:

Film Studies/Film Culture

------------------------------------------------------------------

Food:

Latest:

Mozaffarian, Dariush. Food is Medicine: Healing Our Bodies, Nourishing Our Minds, and Transforming Our Food System. Henry Holt and Company, 2026. ["An urgent indictment of the food we eat and a blueprint for a nutrition revolution to mend our health, economy, and planet, from a world-renowned expert in nutrition, medicine, and public policy. The food we eat is making us sick. In the United States and around the world, diet has become the leading cause of illness and premature death, from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and other chronic ailments. Advocates of healthier diets pin the blame on overeating, but the bigger issue is what we undereat—the dearth of food that nourishes and heals. Harnessing the power of the right foods can do more than prevent illness—it can treat it, extending life while reducing the crippling cost of ill health to our communities and economy. Food Is Medicine shows the way, from transforming our own diets to keep us healthy to getting the right foods from our farms into our stores and onto our plates—all while eating plentifully and pleasurably. A global authority, uniquely positioned on the front lines of nutrition science, medicine, and public policy, Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, draws on cutting-edge research to turn complex science into a clear, actionable program to end the health crisis in our homes and communities. Excavating the decisions that led to a broken food system, plagued by the harms of ultraprocessing and ruinous to the environment, he lays out how the meals we eat are damaging our bodies. He reveals the medicinal, healing power of ideal nutrition and introduces the innovators who are pioneering solutions—at the doctor’s office, in supermarkets, in the halls of Congress, and above all for individuals, to empower them to access the foods they need to live well. With clarity and optimism, braiding storytelling, science, and practical wisdom, Food Is Medicine lays out a vision for a twenty-first century food system that will restore health, nourishment, and equity without sacrificing convenience or choice. In the process, these solutions can revitalize our economy, and even help to heal our planet."]

Subject Guide: 

Food/Agriculture

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Healthcare:

Latest:

Mozaffarian, Dariush. "Why 94% of Americans Have Suboptimal Health (And How to Fix the System)." The Dan Buettner Podcast (October 22, 2026) ["Is almost everything you think you know about nutrition completely wrong? In this episode, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, cardiologist, public health scientist, and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, joins The Dan Buettner Podcast to dismantle decades of dietary dogma. Discover why 94% of American adults have suboptimal cardiometabolic health, why total fat and seed oils aren't the villains we made them out to be, and how ultra-processed foods are silently driving our chronic disease crisis. Plus, Dr. Mozaffarian breaks down the real science behind food as medicine, whole grains, and actionable policy solutions for a healthier future."]

Subject Guide:

Healthcare/Medicine/Body

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History:

Crabapple, Molly, et al. "Zionism and Nationalism Built What Their Jewish Critics Feared in Israel and Palestine." Best of the Left #832 (November 6, 2026) ["Israel was formed to create a safe haven for Jews in the wake of World War II, an admirable goal. Since then, there have been major wars every decade, terrorist attacks, and Netanyahu has been warning about Iran getting a nuclear weapon since 1992. There were prominent Jews at the time, including Albert Einstein, who saw all of this coming and warned against the creation of a Jewish state with borders and an army, because they feared exactly what has come to pass because of the peril it would put Jews in and the damage that Jewish nationalism would do to the Jewish faith. The tragedy of Israel is that those warnings were not heeded and then that this perspective was effectively removed from the discussion entirely, making the path to true safety for Jews and everyone else, essentially invisible. We're exploring that history and those perspectives today."]

Subject Guide:

History/Biography

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Philosophy:

Latest:

Johnson, David. "The Future That Makes Us: Nick Land and Hyperstition." The Observing I (November 3, 2026) ["One of the concepts associated with the CCRU is hyperstition. It’s an awkward word, admittedly, although considerably less awkward than some of the group’s other terminology. Broadly speaking, hyperstition concerns fictions that become effective within reality, influencing events and helping create the circumstances they describe. ... The philosopher Ian Hacking approached the problem from another direction, examining how classifications of people can influence the people being classified because we’re aware of the classification. The future we eventually experience isn’t necessarily the only future that could have happened. And the person we’ve become isn’t necessarily the only person we were capable of becoming. In this week’s episode of The Observing I, The Future That Makes Us: Nick Land and Hyperstition, I’m exploring that relationship between the stories we believe, the futures we anticipate, and the lives we end up living. Are we describing who we are, or deciding who we’re allowed to become?"]

Subject Guide:

Philosophy/Critical Theory

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Politics:

Latest:

Cohen, Cindy, et al. "The Secret Room." Privacy's Defenders (November 3, 2026) ["The government’s surveillance powers grew rapidly after Sept. 11, 2001, some in public view and some in secret. EFF suspected but couldn’t prove that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans' communications. The New York Times sat on a story about it for over a year, finally publishing it in December 2005. Then, in January 2006, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein walked into EFF's office with a manila folder of documents that blew the story wide open. Welcome to the third episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was. In this episode, former EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn talks with former EFF lawyer Kevin Bankston, who was at his desk drafting a lawsuit against AT&T when Klein showed up. Less than two weeks later, EFF sued the phone company on behalf of its own customers in Hepting v. AT&T. Cindy speaks again with now-retired Justice Department lawyer Tony Coppolino, who asked for the opportunity to defend the case. He called EFF with a warning after Klein’s documents were filed in court: If they were classified, EFF would be in big trouble. You’ll also hear from Klein himself, and from Carolyn Jewel, a romance novelist and AT&T customer who became the lead plaintiff in EFF's related case against the NSA. It's the story of a secret room in a San Francisco phone company building, a heroic whistleblower, and the people who refused to let mass surveillance stay hidden."]

Subject Guide:

Political Theory/Sociology/Government/Institutions

Technology:

Latest:

Rushkoff, Douglas. "Networks Don’t Throttle. Platforms Do: Zuck, Musk, and the Eugenics of Selective Reduction." Rushkoff (November 3, 2026) ["The internet was supposed to be a decentralised network of people sharing ideas, experimenting with identities, and imagining new possibilities. So how did it become a collection of privately owned platforms controlled by a handful of tech billionaires? From Elon Musk’s control over Starlink in Ukraine to Meta’s alleged interference in Brazilian politics, Douglas Rushkoff explores how the promise of an open internet gave way to systems of surveillance, corporate power, and algorithmic control. Reflecting on his experiences of the early internet, Rushkoff explains the fundamental difference between networks and platforms, why that distinction matters more than ever, and how we might reclaim the decentralised, collaborative spirit of the internet before its owners gain even greater control over our lives."]

Subject Guide:

Science/Technology/Mathematics

The Devils (United Kingdom: Ken Russell, 1971)

 

The Devils (United Kingdom: Ken Russell, 1971: 111 mins)

Crouse, Richard and Vincenzo Natali. "The Devils." The Projection Booth #168 (May 27, 2014)

Dry, Jude. "‘The Devils’ Is Just As Blasphemous, Bawdy, and Relevant Today As It Was When It Was Banned In 1971." IndieWire (March 22, 2017) ["Ken Russell's epic religious horror is a scathing critique on abuse of political power that new audiences will find prescient as ever in the age of Trump."]

Gallagher, Paul. "What a pact with the Devil (supposedly) looks like." Dangerous Minds (April 9, 2014)

Goldsmid, Edmund. "The Devils of Loudon." ("This is a 19th century translation of the primary account of the episode, originally written in French by Des Niau in 1634.")

Morgan, Kim. "The Devils are Here." Sunset Gun (October 16, 2026) ["Certain audiences, however (and some critics at the time), stunned by the film’s splendor and shock understood there was much more to the film than frenzied masturbating nuns and the violent martyrdom of Oliver Reed. Through time the cult grew and those who loved the film, appreciated not only its acting, cinematography (by David Watkin) and production design (by Derek Jarman), but its fiery politics, its inditement of Church and State, it’s condemnation of brainwashing, and it’s, at times, satirical edge. They saw that Ken Russell was more than just a demented provocateur – though to his eternally eclectic credit, he could be that too – and that this was a pollical film, his most political film – and one that has stood the test of time. Through his powerful fevered frames, the movie was a visceral wonder, unforgettable and finally, mythic. Those who saw it at the time, and loved it (or hated it), likely never forgot it. I can imagine some theatergoers felt as if they almost dreamt it."]

Riley, John A. "Great Directors: Ken Russell." Senses of Cinema (July 2009)

Thomas, Gordon. "'Nun-Lust, Torture-Porn, Church-Desecration and Bad Taste"': Reconnecting with Ken Russell's The Devils." Bright Lights Film Journal #76 (May 2012)

Wise, Damon. "Mark Kermode & Daphne Dentz On Restoring ‘Ken Russell’s The Devils’: “There’s A Balance Between The Grain, The Dirt, The Vibe And The Look.” Deadline (October 21, 2026)

ENG 102: My Students' Topics for Their 1st Argument-Research Essay

The Impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Substance Use Disorder Treatment How Social Media Changes Human Behavior
Early childhood education is essential as it promotes children's cognitive, social, and emotional development, prepares them for academic achievement, and fosters the vital skills necessary for them to grow into confident and competent individuals. Impact of Social Media on Mental Health
Children in foster care disproportionately face mental health challenges.
Perceived Superiority Through Language
Why Do Immigrants Face Mental-Health Challenges When Adjusting to a New Country?
America is an Oligarchy in Democracy’s Clothing
Addressing the Minimalization of Women in the Film Industry
Ultra-Processed people why we can’t stop eating food that is not food
GLP 1 Medications: Transforming Treatment or Trending Too Far?
Ways Society Can Be More Inclusive of Autistic Individuals
How to build a strong town – An architectural and civil engineering perspective Should adolescents have access to social media
A Body Without a Place
The Aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994: Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Healing
Exposing the Asylum: Nellie Bly's Journalism
Immigration, and How It is Not a Threat to America
Is Sleep Crucial to Work Productivity?
Why has housing become so difficult to afford and how does the problem affect people's financial stability and quality of life? The Benefits of Healthy Eating on Long-term Health and Disease Prevention
The Importance of Self-Discovery
The Myth and Messages of the Superhero Spider Man
Beyond conscious thoughts: Exploring the subconscious mind
The Consequences of Father Absence on Child and Society
What Are the Reasons Why People Continue to Smoke When They Know the Health Risks?
Virtual Idol - Hatsune Miku represents a large transformation in the way music is created and performed because she challenges the traditional way of a successful musical artist being a human performer.
Should Multinational Companies Be Required to Follow the Same Labor Standards in Every Country?
Dangers of superbugs and how bacteriophages can help?
Why Important Memories Live Within Us Forever
An Explanation of the Differences Between Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Bipolar Disorder
What Happened to the American Dream?: A Critique Drawn From Hunter S. Thompson's Writings
The Decline of Labor Unions and the Labor Trafficking Identification Gap in Agriculture
Overthinking: When Caring Becomes Too Much
How Does Patriarchy Shape the Everyday Lives of Women in Nepal
Peter S. Beagle’s, ‘The Last Unicorn’: A View on Declining Wonder
Save the Performing Arts
A Call For a Special Bracket for Trans Athletes
The Consequences of Social Exclusion for Autistic Children
Do People Need GLP-1 or More Self Discipline?
The belief in the inerrancy of the Bible causes harm because it prevents critical thought
The psychological and institutional realities of two distinct groups: women who acknowledge and accept responsibility for their offenses, and women who maintain that they were wrongfully accused or convicted.
The Social Messages in the X-Men Comics
Understanding Bipolar Disorder
Stigma, Prejudice and Discrimination Against People with Mental Health Issues
A Supporter of the Death Penalty Why He Cannot Support it in the Current Legal System
Is capturing and slaughtering thousands of wild horses necessary or inhumane?
How NIL and the Transfer Portal Stripped the Soul from College Athletics
One Hit Could Change Everything - The Continuing Problem of Brain Trauma in Organized Sports
Gender Inequality in Nepal
Why Ukraine has Been Successful in Staving Off Russia
Generative Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on Creative Industries
Corporate Power and Its Impact on Americans
Psychedelic Therapy and The Positive Effects on
Depression And Other Mental Illness
Rewiring the Post Stroke Brain
Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment
The American Dream
Misinformation Within the Health and Fitness Field
The History of Western Music and How Music Effects Emotions
A good designer needs to understand how light and darkness work together, account for neighboring properties and the environment, and use that knowledge to create the effect the client wants.

Maria Popova: Art/Biography/Literature/Philosophy/Poetry/Science (Azimuths)

We live our lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty -- the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet (1). - Popova, Maria. The Universe in Verse: 15 portals to Wonder Through Science & Poetry. Storey Publishing, 2024.

The Marginalian [Maria Popova's website, formerly 'Brain Pickings']

Popova, Maria. "20-Year-Old Hunter S. Thompson’s Superb Advice on How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Meaningful Life." Brain Pickings (November 4, 2013)

---. "Adrienne Rich on Lying, What “Truth” Really Means, and the Alchemy of Human Possibility." Brain Picking (November 13, 2014)

---. "Adrienne Rich on Why an Education Is Something You Claim, Not Something You Get." Brain Pickings (May 21, 2014)

---. "Alain de Botton on How to Think About Sex More." Brain Pickings (February 14, 2013) [“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”]

---. "Aldous Huxley on Drugs, Democracy, and Religion." Brain Pickings (March 25, 2014)

---. "Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work." The Marginalian (October 26, 2026)

---. "George Lucas on the Meaning of Life." Brain Pickings (March 17, 2014)

---. "The Hidden Brain: How Ocean Currents Explain Our Unconscious Social Biases." Brain Pickings (April 9, 2014)

---. "How Relationships Refine Our Truths: Adrienne Rich on the Dignity of Love." Brain Pickings (July 2, 2013)

---. "Intuition Pumps: Daniel Dennett on the Dignity and Art-Science of Making Mistakes." Brain Pickings (May 29, 2013)

---. "Love, Sex, and the World Between." Brain Pickings (January 14, 2014) [ Susan Sontag - “Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together… And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t.”]

---. "Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being." Marginalian (August 27, 2023) ["In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being (public library), the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.”"]

---. "Obey: How the Rise of Mass Propaganda Killed Populism." Brain Pickings (February 6, 2013)

---. "On 20 Years of he Marginalian." Wonder Cabinet (October 24, 2026) ["Twenty years ago, Maria Popova was newly arrived in the US and working four jobs to pay for college. Lonely and disoriented, she started keeping a record of her search for meaning. Today, what began as an email to seven friends has millions of followers and is preserved in the Library of Congress permanent web archive. The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) is still a one-woman labor of love, a free and ad-free cultural blog exploring science and philosophy, art and literature, poetry and children’s books. In this conversation, Maria Popova looks back on twenty years of reading and writing “through the lens of wonder.” How do we make sense of life in a random and chaotic universe? How do we sustain a sense of wonder in the face of disappointment or despair? Popova shares some of her own inspirations – from reading Mary Shelley’s diaries and J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters, to witnessing Bulgaria’s popular democratic uprising as a child. We discuss science as a portal to wonder, and her fascination with mapping the invisible connections that link people and ideas across time and place. In addition to The Marginalian, Popova has written multiple books: "Figuring" (2019), an LA Times Book Prize-winning “biographical mosaic” weaving together the lives of historical figures such as astronomer Johannes Kepler, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, and marine biologist Rachel Carson; "Traversal" (2026), connecting the lives and legacies of visionaries like Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin; "The Universe in Verse" (2024), an anthology of science and poetry; "The Snail with the Right Heart" (2021), a true, illustrated children's story about genetic mutation, chance, and biological uniqueness; and "An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days" – an oracle deck."]

---. "Vladimir Nabokov on Writing, Reading, and the Three Qualities a Great Storyteller Must Have." Brain Pickings (February 21, 2014)

---. "What Power Really Means: Cheryl Strayed Reads Adrienne Rich’s Homage to Marie Curie." Brain Pickings (April 24, 2018)

---. "Why I Write: Joan Didion on Ego, Grammar, and the Creative Impulse." Brain Pickings (October 16, 2012)

---. "Why Look at Animals: John Berger on What Our Relationship with Our Fellow Beings Reveals About Us." Brain Pickings (April 1, 2014)

---. "Why We Ignore the Obvious: The Psychology of Willful Blindness." Brain Pickings (August 27, 2014)

Michael D. Benton: A Celebration of Alterity

 

A Celebration of Alterity  by Michael Benton  

Alterity

Slippery word

Whose meaning is

Not decipherable

Never stated clearly,

Nor fixed firmly

The nerve of the word

Altarity

It may be approached,

Though, if one dares,

Through networks

Of associations

Altar, Alter

Alternative, Alternation

I yearn to sacrifice

Myself upon the

Altar of your difference.

Yet, I hold back

Fearing that the pleasure

May somehow alter me.

Your scent and taste

Seizes the roots of my soul

What alternative is there?

I vacillate, between pleasure and pain

Ceaselessly resonating between

Yawning gaps of reason

Even the meaning of alterity

Precipitates a crisis

Symbol of difference

Naming of the OTHER

Its power mocks

Conformity’s lack

Resist the conservative urge

To embrace sameness

Explore those who differ

Open up closed circuits

Rise up to celebrate

The eros of alterity   

Michael D. Benton: I Am Past Imperfect

 “I Am Past Imperfect”

by Michael D. Benton

The little boys make up the man. A collection of little boys nestled together and masked to the world as an individual man. Russian Dolls situated one in another, each new incarnation rising out of the collective to claim the seat of power like a Roman autocrat, shouting out to the world I am "The Man." Each ascending self, conceiving of their self, as an immortal individual. Foolish little selves thinking that they will rule forever. Foolish little selves believing they are "The Man."

How do I remember who I am? Can one peel back the layers of one’s selves and penetrate to the core? Will I only find a million little pieces that people will revile as false and misleading? Is it just one missing piece somehow stuffed in the pocket of one of my selves that can make me whole? Can I ever be whole, or, is that just an illusion? Do we only become complete in death, our last breath, the author’s signature? Is the seeking of completeness a fool’s errand?

I’m sure this task requires a sense of humor because the surgeon of the soul exposes foolish personas; but mocking laughter would not be the worst effect, insecurities would be exposed, fears confronted, and hatred examined. My life has been violent. My life has been peaceful. My life has been boring. Do I have the courage to travel down the road that leads to the abyss? Can I stomach the dark tea time of the soul?

However foolish I have been in the past, my future self, now, now, now, now, now, recognizes the (im)possibility of truth(s). We re-member and re-cognize the past. The act of remembering reconstructs the past. The viewer gives meaning to the view. I remember what I remember today and will remember what I remember tomorrow. No one can expect these memories to remain the same. I am but an archivist of the self, pulling traces out of my clogged brain, seeking narrative sense, pulling fragments together, a collage of the selves represented as a self. Restor(y)ing the self.

This will be a horror story. No. This will be a bildungsroman. No. This will be a romance. No. This will be a comedy. No. Can we label today what may change tomorrow? No. This will be a true story? No. Yes. Maybe. Depending on what you conceive of as the truth. Some may even recognize themselves in what I write, but I warn you it is not you I write about, although, you might ask why it is I am writing about you? You might ask what is in you that you recognize in my story? You bring your own story to my tale in completing it anew for you. My story becomes our story when you read it, like love’s warm embrace, each union is unique. A fiction full of lovers, come feel my key stroke, aching to unite with you and create new meanings.

This will not be a true story. Yes! No! Maybe? This will be a true story. Yes! No! Maybe? What has always amazed me the most in life is not that so many people remember the same event/moment differently. No, that seems obvious to my 21st Century Mind, what amazes, nay, scares me, is how so many people, and societies, are able to erase the distinctive and memorable recognition that memories are but constructs of the moment and will change again and again and again. This is the violence we do to ourselves, a violence as deep and painful as our erasure of the fact that one day we will not exist. We are past imperfect.

So, what will follow is the absolute truth…

Cloud Cuckoo Land - Music Mix #60

 The Who; Hannah Mae Rector; Blind Faith; Traffic; Saya Gray; Doom Gong; Brenda; Clipse; John Legend; Voices of Fire; Pusha T; Malice; Julia Colum; The Cavemen; Angelique Kidjo; Twen; Everything Velvet; Fantastic Negrito; Orchestre de Paris; Rosalia; Yves Tumor; Maren Morris; Kesha; Orville Peck; Hudson Mohawke; Tayla Parx; Jeff Beck; Portugal. The Man; MGMT; De la Soul; Mavis Staples; Juana Molina; Electric Light Orchestra; The Belair Lip Bombs; Outkast; Alice in Chains; Jon Batista; Sessa; Clock DVA; Constant Smiles; Van Halen; Siouxsie and the Banshees; Thundercat; Aerosmith; Miles Davis; Goose; Water From Your Eyes; Paul Schalda; Strange Passage.

ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #19

Bascompte, Jordi and Rodrigo Cámara-Leret. "Plants, Languages, and the Loss of Medicinal Knowledge." Many Minds (October 7, 2021) ["Our planet is home to an astonishing diversity of plants—close to 400,000 species. Over the millennia, indigenous communities around the world have been studying those plants, experimenting with them, using them as a sort of free-growing pharmacy. Certain species, prepared in certain ways, might be used for digestive ailments; others for the skin, teeth, or liver. But this vast trove of medicinal knowledge is now under threat. Under two threats, really—we’re losing plant species and we’re losing indigenous languages and cultures. My guests this week are Dr. Rodrigo Camara-Leret and Dr. Jordi Bascompte, both of the University of Zurich’s Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies. Rodrigo is a Senior Researcher there, and Jordi is a Full Professor. We discuss their remarkable recent paper titled ‘Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge‘, published this past summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In the paper, Rodrigo and Jordi analyzed data from three hotspots of biocultural diversity—New Guinea, the Northwest Amazon, and North America. They were trying to better understand the nature of indigenous medicinal knowledge, the threats it is facing, and how we might best protect it. This is one of those papers that immediately grabbed me. It’s deeply, unclassifiably interdisciplinary; it takes on an urgent question with a clever approach; and it tells us something we genuinely didn’t already know. As I already said, our global stores of ethnobotanical knowledge are under threat—and from different directions. What Jordi & Rodrigo’s work shows is that, in order to protect that knowledge, we need to focus on protecting indigenous languages. Before we get to it, just wanted to mention that, as it happens, Jordi was just very recently awarded the prestigious Ramon Margalef prize for his groundbreaking contributions to the field of ecology. So it was an extra special honor to have him on this episode."]

Coombs, Wayne. "Analysis: The Pharmaceutical Colonization of Appalachia." The Daily Yonder (February 7, 2018) ["To fight the opioid epidemic, first we need to identify the enemy. Research on the theory of historical trauma – affecting entire populations and regions – could point us toward more effective treatment."]

Cooperrider, Kensy. "WEIRD: Adventures of an Acronym." Many Minds (July 1, 2020) ["The topic is the acronym WEIRD—maybe you’ve heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It’s become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was first introduced 10 years ago. On this episode I talk about its origins and the far-reaching influence it’s had since."]

Cullors, Patrisse and Ken Rosenberg. "Bedlam: Film Shows How Decades of Healthcare Underfunding Made Jails 'De Facto Mental Asylums.'" Democracy Now (December 27, 2019) ["Are prisons and jails America’s “new asylums”? A new documentary looks at how a disproportionate number of underserved people facing mental health challenges have been swept into the criminal justice system, where they lack adequate treatment. Nearly 15% of men and more than 30% of women in jails have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder. For many of them, jail is their first point of entry into mental health treatment. The documentary “Bedlam” was filmed over five years in Los Angeles County’s overwhelmed and vastly under-resourced Emergency Psychiatry Services, a jail warehousing thousands of psychiatric patients, and the homes — and homeless encampments — of people who are living with severe mental illness. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will air on PBS “Independent Lens” this April. The film features many people, including Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who share their personal experiences with family members’ chronic psychiatric conditions that have pushed them into the path of police officers, ER doctors and nurses, lawyers and prison guards. We speak with Cullors, who shares her experience with seeking help for her brother Monte, who has lived with schizoaffective disorder since he was a teenager, and director Ken Rosenberg, an addiction psychiatrist affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City whose own sister struggled with schizophrenia."]

Davies, Surekha and Natalie Lawrence. "Monsters and Their Makers." Many Minds (October 22, 2025) ["It seems we’ve always had monsters among us. We’ve long been enthralled by dragons and giants, by the likes of Frankenstein and Godzilla and Dracula, by witches and werewolves and countless others. They roam our maps and creation myths; they crop up in our dreams, in our children’s books, in our political rhetoric. Where do these beings spring from? What do they do for us? How have they changed over time? And, ultimately, what do our monsters say about their makers? My guests today are Dr. Natalie Lawrence and Dr. Surekha Davies. Both are historians of science and authors of recent books on monsters: Natalie’s book is Enchanted creatures: Our monsters and their meanings. Surekha’s book is Humans: A monstrous history. Here, Surekha, Natalie, and I talk about monsters as category breakers and boundary walkers—and about how monstrosity is in the eye of the beholder. We walk through a menagerie of monsters—from the apocryphal blemmyes of old travelogues, to a hairy-faced girl in 16th century France, to the figure of Caliban in The Tempest. We discuss the psychological and cultural forces that generate monsters. And we talk about whether anyone would want to live in a world without them. Along the way, we touch on the “monstrification” of social groups; psychoanalysis; our primal fear of snakes; curiosity cabinets; therianthropes and the Cave of the Three Brothers; the relationship between monstrosity and geography; our long fascination with so-called monstrous births; the Muppet Show; dinosaurs and sea creatures; and the question of what monsters might do for children in particular."]

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."]

Finnerty, Paraic, Linda Freeman and Fiona Green. "Emily Dickinson." In Our Time (May 11, 2017) ["Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Emily Dickinson, arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation of her grew. With her distinctive voice, her abundance, and her exploration of her private world, she is now seen by many as one of the great lyric poets. "]

G'Sell, Eileen. "Uncanny Intimacies, Abject Desires." Film Quarterly (September 1, 2026) ["This article introduces the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25.” What did Mulholland Drive (2001) say about female fantasy, suffering, and desire at the turn of the twenty-first century, and how might that matter today? Rather than debate Mulholland Drive’s degree of feminism or the extent to which David Lynch himself proved able to create feminist cinema, the authors of this dossier approach the film as an intricate text that frustrates traditional interpretive approaches based on the specter of the “male gaze” and the assumption of coherent, consistent character subjectivities. Consulting canonical feminist and philosophical texts as well as contemporary queer theory, sound studies, and star studies, the dossier authors write from the perspective of differing generations and disciplines, offering a lively array of critical reads."]

Johnson, David. "René Girard and the Trouble with Other People’s Desires." The Observing I (September 29, 2026) ["We convince ourselves that once we have a mortgage and a career, our desires belong strictly to us. You picked your work because of your own ambitions. You bought that particular coat because you appreciate the tailoring. You like the bitter coffee and the minimalist flat because you are an authentic, self-authored adult making independent choices. It’s a comforting story. We spend an extraordinary amount of money keeping it on its feet. But have you ever stopped to wonder where your current ambitions actually came from? The uncomfortable reality is that human desire is remarkably unoriginal. It rarely invents anything from scratch. A French thinker named René Girard spent fifty years suggesting that this isn’t just an embarrassing psychological quirk. He thought it was the entire engine of civilization, and the hidden root of why we make each other miserable."]

Lim, Dennis. "Rouge: Love Out of Time." Current  (June 21, 2022) ["Rouge (1987) opens with a shock of beauty—or rather two shocks, in the forms of the young lovers whose doomed romance is about to unfold. In a wordless prologue, a woman (Anita Mui Yim-fong)—clad in a black, dragonfly-patterned cheongsam and framed in close-up against an expanse of floral wallpaper—locks eyes with the viewer, looking into the camera as if it were a mirror. A makeup ritual is in progress: she paints on her eyebrows, then holds a piece of red dye paper to her pursed lips, turning them scarlet. A fade to black transports us to a bustling restaurant where courtesans mingle with suitors, and where one patron (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing) is making a literally head-turning entrance. Ascending the stairs, seemingly beckoned by a siren song from above, he passes two women whose eyes coyly linger on him; he turns to acknowledge their gazes, his smile suggesting he knew he would have that effect. As he enters a room in which a courtesan is serenading a table of guests, the music stops, as if catching its breath."]

Luhrmann, Tonya and Kara Weisman. "Why Some See Spirits." Many Minds (April 28, 2021) ["Have you ever seen what seemed to be a spirit? Or heard a voice from an unseen source? Or maybe just sensed a presence and found yourself with goosebumps all over? These kinds of experiences can be incredibly powerful— life-altering, in fact—but they don’t happen often, and they don’t happen to everyone. So what drives this individual variation? Why do some of us have these extraordinary experiences while others never do? Could it be something about our personalities? Or our cultures? Could it have to do with the way we understand our minds? My guests on today’s show are Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, and Kara Weisman, a postdoc at UC-Riverside (formerly in the Psychology department at Stanford). Along with nine collaborators from across institutions, Tanya and Kara recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) titled ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths.’ This episode is nominally in our “behind the paper” series, but really it tells the story of not just this one paper but a much larger project: The Mind and Spirit project. The project was an unusual effort in scope: it included anthropologists and psychologists; it involved fieldwork in Ghana, Thailand, China, Vanuatu, and the US and practitioners of different faith traditions; it used both in-depth interviews and large-scale survey testing with thousands of participants. The particular paper we’re discussing today probed the basic idea that so-called “spiritual presence events”—those tingly, jarring, extraordinary experiences that some of us have—could be due to two main factors, factors that vary across individuals and cultures. The first proposed factor is how people understand the mind-world boundary. People who conceive of the mind as fundamentally leaky or “porous” might be more likely to have these kinds of experiences. The second proposed factor is how likely people are to get absorbed in their sensory experiences, to lose themselves in music, art, nature, movies, and so on. In our conversation, Tanya, Kara, and I talk about the deeper history behind this work; we break down what the constructs of porosity and absorption mean exactly and how they chose to measure them; we discuss the challenges and rewards of cross-disciplinary collaboration; and we talk about why I really need to read more William James. I wanted to feature this paper the moment I learned about it—it’s such an impressive piece of research on several levels. It’s also just certifiably cool. It’s dealing with cultural differences. It’s dealing with individual differences. And it’s dealing with variability in, to use the authors’ words “something as basic as what feels real to the senses.”"]

Marso, Lori Jo. "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): David Lynch, Simone de Beauvoir, and 'Feeling Like a Feminist'" Film Quarterly 80.1 (2026): 36 - 41. ["This article, part of the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25,” argues that the “sweet dreams” of the women characters in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) invite viewers to “feel like feminists.” Engaging the writings of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex alongside Beauvoir’s 1959 essay on the myths of Brigitte Bardot, Marso finds subversive feminist dreamscapes in Lynch’s film. Feminist sweet dreams exist within the onscreen interactions of Betty/Diane with Rita/Camilla as the two women characters simultaneously navigate the demands of patriarchy and the mythic expectations for “becoming woman.” Lynch’s film demonstrates both gaps and overlap between gendered fantasies and ugly realities, inviting disorienting and uncomfortable feelings for viewers. These feelings, Marso suggests, can be interpreted and mobilized towards “feeling like feminists” such that viewers seek and find a feminist future within current conditions."]

Maclay, Willow Catelyn. "Loving the Monster." MUBI (2026) [Program notes written to accompany Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. An exploration of trans representation in the movies.]

Preciado, Paul B.  Can the Monster Speak? Trans. Frank Wynne. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024. ["To introduce myself, since you are a group of 3,500 psychoanalysts and I feel a little alone on this side of the stage, to take a running jump and hoist myself onto the shoulders of the master of metamorphosis, the greatest analyst of the excesses that hide behind the façade of scientific reason and of the madness commonly referred to as mental health: Franz Kafka. In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote ‘Ein Bericht für eine Akademie’ – ‘A Report to an Academy’. The narrator of the text is an ape who, having learned human language, is appearing before an academy of the greatest scientific authorities to report to them on what human evolution has meant to him. The ape, who claims to be called Red Peter, explains how he was captured during a hunting expedition organized by the firm of Hagenbeck, transported to Europe aboard a steamship, is trained to perform in music halls, and how he later sprang into the community of human beings. Red Peter explains that in order to master human language and be accepted in the European society of his time, he had to forget his life as an ape. And how, in order to endure this oblivion and the violence of human society, he became an alcoholic. But the most interesting thing in Red Peter’s monologue is that Kafka does not present this process of humanization as a story of emancipation or of liberation from animality, but rather as a critique of colonial European humanism and its anthropological taxonomies. Once captured, the ape says he had no choice: if he did not wish to die locked up in a cage, he had to accept the ‘cage’ of human subjectivity. Just as the ape Red Peter addressed himself to scientists, so today I address myself to you, the academicians of psychoanalysis, from my ‘cage’ as a trans man. I, a body branded by medical and juridical discourse as ‘transsexual’, characterized in most of your psychoanalytic diagnoses as the subject of an ‘impossible metamorphosis’, find myself, according to most of your theories, beyond neurosis, on the cusp of – or perhaps even within the bounds of – psychosis, being incapable, according to you, of correctly resolving an Oedipus complex or having succumbed to penis envy. And so, it is from the position assigned to me by you as a mentally ill person that I address you, an ape-human in a new era. I am the monster who speaks to you. The monster you have created with your discourse and your clinical practices. I am the monster who gets up from the analyst’s couch and dares to speak, not as a patient, but as a citizen, as your monstrous equal."]

Prentice, Deborah and Robb Willer. "Pluralistic Ignorance: The psychology behind why people defend the norms they secretly despise." You Are Not So Smart #181 (July 30, 2020) ["The false belief that the majority supports an unpopular norm slows down the process of ending it and sways policy makers, employers, advertisers, and the rest of society to act as though they live in a world that isn’t really there. And When change is on the horizon, pluralistic ignorance keeps people on the fringe, the sort of people whose beliefs and attitudes will be phased out by that change, clinging to their outdated worldviews for longer than they would otherwise. It also keeps their opponents feeling less supported than they truly are while pushing people in the middle to favor the status quo. In the end, a make-believe status quo changes the way everyone acts and thinks. As sociologists Hubert J. O’Gorman and Stephen L. Garry once put it, in situations like these, people often “unintentionally serve as cultural carriers of cognitive error.” Pluralistic ignorance has been blamed for everything from excessive drinking on college campuses to the persistence of racial segregation well into the 1970s. So, how do you deal with such a strange and mind-twisting phenomenon? Well, for some norms, the solution is simple, though it can take a lot of organization and effort. You must ask everyone what they really think and feel, and then you broadcast that to everyone in some way. You must make the private public. You must make it safe to say what is really on your mind — or you simply reveal that it was safe to do so all along. Many scientists bring up the parable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story by Hans Christian Andersen, a vain emperor hires two tailors who tell him they’ve made a suit of clothes so fine that it appears invisible to people who are unfit for their job or are very dumb. The trick, of course, is that the tailors haven’t made anything at all. All the emperor’s lackeys and subjects act as if his clothes were beautiful and amazing out of fear of appearing stupid or unfit, until finally a child points out that the emperor is walking around naked. At that point, everyone sighs in relief and feels safe to say what they were thinking all along. Stories with similar plots go back to antiquity, so the idea has been with us for a long time. The takeaway is usually: if someone has the courage to speak up, then the spell will be broken."]

Roth, Ben. "Eugene Tssui: (R)Evolutionary Imagination." Doors of Perception (August 30, 2026) ["Eugene Tssui (pronounced ‘sway’) is a polymath on a mission to bring about a world of beauty, imagination and moral accountability. Instead of working against the planet, his design philosophy is one of restoration and kinship with all of life, recognizing Nature as the supreme teacher. As an architect, clothing and industrial designer, musician, athlete, professor, author and inventor —Tssui works in one continuous field of experimentation, constantly challenging what conformity and unquestioned assumption have declared settled. In his flamboyant suits and capes, he looks like a galactic ambassador out of a Star Trek movie, yet his creations are deeply rooted in this world: a building’s shape inspired by the body of a tardigrade, or termite mound. That uncompromising faithfulness to his ideal is also why so few of his buildings were ever built. Discovering Tssui in this video a few days ago served as a powerful reminder of how narrow the corridors of possibility are that we normally navigate. So much of our life comes down to picking from what the market has already made and put in front of us, while imagination and creation — the most human faculties we have — wither away. Turning toward the world and creating with it, we fall in love with it again."]

Rovelli, Carlo. "On the Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework." Literary Hub (September 21, 2026) ["A child born in a village naturally thinks that the whole world is like that village. He expects to encounter outside it the same mores, the same way of dressing, the same language. When he finds that the world is otherwise, he is amazed. This amazement is the beauty of learning. And this is science. It is not always easy, however, to free ourselves from the ideas and outlook of our native village. Even learning that in Rome cats are called gatti, and in New Delhi billee, does not prevent us from having a hard time thinking that the proper, true name of the feline is not “cat.” Reality is more complex and more varied than we think. We instinctively mistake local peculiarities for universal truths. We do not easily realize that the things which seem obvious to us are just aspects of “the garden that makes us so ferocious,” as Dante calls the Earth when he views it, at the end of Paradiso, far below and tiny, from the heights of the heavens of fixed stars. The peculiarity of the surface of the Earth, the village in which we happen to be born, generates prejudices in us that are not easy to recognize. If we do not want to be like the child that only knows its own village, we must learn to separate ourselves from these prejudices."]

Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000: 1-9. ["Vandana Shiva charts the impacts of globalized, corporate agriculture on small farmers, the environment, and the quality of the food we eat. With chapters on genetically engineered seeds, patents on life, mad cows and sacred cows, and the debate on shrimp farming, this is an impassioned and inspiring book that will shape the debate about genetic engineering and commercial agriculture for years to come."]

Singh, Manvir. "The Shaman, The Witch, and the Folktale." Many Minds (July 15, 2020) ["Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh. Manvir recently finished his PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and will soon begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Manvir studies human culture. In particular, he focuses on certain cultural practices and products that spring up over and over again across the world’s societies—often in strikingly similar form. To explain these similarities, Manvir appeals to the human mind. He argues that our universal mental machinery plays a powerful role in molding our cultural traditions and products. We start by diving deep into the topic of shamanism. We talk about why humans around the world have long put their trust in shamans—and why they still do today. We discuss why it is that, to secure that trust, shamans everywhere enter trance states, deny themselves worldly comforts, and undergo harrowing initiation rituals. We then move beyond shamanism. We talk about why we believe in witches and why we like stories about orphans and other sympathetic characters. We consider why people the world over know a lullaby when they hear one. Part of what I admire about Manvir’s work is his balanced interest in both universal cultural patterns and fine-grained particulars. He’s interested in the forest, definitely, but also in the trees. And, trust me, there are a lot of fascinating trees here."]

Shlaim, Avi and Jamie Stern-Weiner. "Israel's Road to Genocide." Eurozine (August 26, 2026) ["In inflicting overwhelming force on Gaza’s civilian population with the intention of expelling it abroad, Israel’s devastating response to the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023 was consonant with, and rooted in, decades of state practice and ideology."]

Smalley, Gregory J. "2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)." 366 Weird Movies (March 25, 2015) ["Arthur C. Clarke said that Stanley Kubrick’s instructions in crafting 2001: A Space Odyssey were to create not merely a standard science fiction story of discovery, but rather “a theme of mythic grandeur.” The use of “Odyssey” in the title aptly suggests a space journey, which does of course occur; but it also reflects the mythological impact of Homer’s epic poem, which became one of the pillars of Greek civilization. While Richard Strauss’ fanfare that begins the familiar trumpet and timpani theme of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” certainly evokes the grandeur of the mysterious monolith that first appears to the uncomprehending apemen, it’s no accident that Kubrick selects a piece of music written to honor a philosophical fable about the necessity of creating new myths. By the 1960s, Darwin’s theory of evolution and other scientific advances had been eating away at the old European spiritual order for a century. In the space age, telescopes and satellites had, for the first time, turned little specks of light in the sky into real neighbors–the barren moon, the mysterious giant Jupiter shrouded in clouds of colored gas—that, incredibly, mankind might some day visit. Humanity’s definition of the universe and our place in it was changing, and Kubrick saw that our stock cosmic iconography was in desperate need of an upgrade. Enter 2001: A Space Odyssey, a cinematic rocket ride into the unpredictable sublimity of the future, a new myth of high modernity."]

Tolson, Franita. "Nomology (The Constitution)." Ologies (July 2, 2019) ["If you've never read The Constitution, you're like most of us. What does it even say? Most of Americans aren't law scholars, which is why we sat down with a Dean of USC's Gould School of Law, Professor Franita Tolson, to have her give us the crib sheet on the most important document in the free world. What's up with the amendments? What are the articles? What does it mean to be an American? What rights do we have? How did we get them and how do we keep them? We also discuss what it was like having Barack Obama as her law professor, if she reads the Apple Terms & Conditions, the Civil Rights Movement, Hamilton, whether Trump can be impeached, how to get familiar with the best SCOTUS gossip and Shonda Rhimes. By the end of the episode, you'll be able to wink at the Constitution and say "I get you" and you also might be engaging in more peaceful protests or applying to law school or hanging Professor Tolson's portrait on your wall."]

Tuerkheimer, Deborah. "'I Am Jane Doe': Cornell Case Reignites Debate over Rape Culture, Frats & Prosecuting Sex Crimes." Democracy Now (October 5, 2026) ['Revelations of sexual assault at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024 and how the university responded have sparked national outrage, reigniting a public debate about “the extent to which fraternities, the extent to which athletics really support this kind of culture that allows perpetrators to escape with little or no accountability,” says law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer. In 2024, seven male students avoided criminal prosecution after allegedly drugging and gang-raping a female student at the Chi Phi fraternity house. Cornell is now under intense scrutiny for its handling of the original investigation, which found that the student identified as Jane Doe was sexually assaulted by two of seven men, resulting in expulsions for two and lesser consequences for the other five. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has admitted that his office at the time did not independently investigate the case when it declined to bring charges. The DA has now reopened the case, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul has named Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to investigate how the case was handled. 'Around the country, we see a pattern of investigators, police officers and even prosecutors deciding at the outset that the allegations are not worth pursuing, and dismissing the case before any kind of investigation gets off the ground,' says Tuerkheimer."]

West, Stephen. "Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut." Philosophize This! (August 29, 2026) ["Today we talk about Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five. How war stories can distort the reality of war, how trauma can fracture our experience of time and identity, and why Billy Pilgrim becomes attracted to the strange philosophy of the Tralfamadorians. Hope you love it. :)"]

Zingales, Luigi and Bethany McLean. "Is Silicon Valley Turning Fascist?" Capitalisn't (April 3, 2025) ["Silicon Valley’s traditionally Democratic tech leaders are turning toward President Donald Trump, but are the reasons as straightforward as lower taxes and favorable regulations? Perhaps not, if we consider the influence of a convoluted political philosophy called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Washington and Silicon Valley power players, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, have all cited the philosophy’s ideas and one of its leading developers, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin was reportedly present at Trump’s inaugural gala as an informal guest of honor. In a nutshell, Dark Enlightenment rejects liberal democracy as an outdated software system incompatible with freedom and progress. Instead, it argues for breaking up the nation-state into smaller authoritarian city-states, which Yarvin calls “patchworks.” These patchworks will be controlled by tech corporations and run by CEOs. The theory is attached to another idea called accelerationism, which harnesses capitalism and technology to induce radical social change. In fact, Yarvin proposed a plan he called “RAGE”—or “Retire All Government Employees”—as far back as 2012. So, how did this obscure and oxymoronically named philosophy reach the highest echelons of business and political power? Bethany and Luigi trace the theory from its origins to its practical manifestations in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Silicon Valley’s race to develop artificial intelligence, and the growing push for “Freedom Cities” unfettered from federal regulations. Are the people embracing Dark Enlightenment espousing its ideas because they genuinely believe it is the way forward for humanity? Or do they believe it because it's a way for them to make money? What does it mean for capitalism and democracy if the administration runs the federal government like a tech company?"]

Zinn, Howard. "On His Life and Times." Against the Grain (September 28, 2026) ["Historian and activist, teacher and playwright — Howard Zinn told a different history of the United States, one of struggle between those on the bottom against those on top."]

David Johnson: Psychology/Philosophy/Culture/Arts (Azimuths)

 Johnson, David. "The Anti-Guru: U.G. Krishnamurti and the End of Seeking." The Observing I (September 15, 2026) ["Self-improvement is a funny old thing because, on the face of it, it makes perfect sense. There are obviously things we can change about ourselves. If you keep losing your temper with people, maybe work on that. If you sleep four hours a night, live on caffeine and wonder why you feel dreadful, there are probably a few clues lying around. But it can creep. You fix one thing, notice another, read a book, learn a new term, start monitoring a few habits, and before you know it you’ve become both the employee and the deeply disappointed manager of your own personality. That’s the bit that interests me about U.G. Krishnamurti. Not because I think we should all stop trying to change. That gets silly very quickly. But because U.G. spent most of his life trying to become enlightened and eventually decided that the whole business of trying to become something was the problem. Which, after decades of spiritual practice, is quite an awkward conclusion to arrive at."]

---. "Decoding Carl Jung: Dreams, Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious." The Observing I #77 (August 16, 2024) ["In today's episode, we're getting down into it with Carl Jung. We go on a deep exploration into his psychology, from dream interpretation, the power of the collective unconscious, and how we can relate to the symbolism of Jungian archetypes. We'll also take a look at how Jung's influence persists today, and some of the criticisms and controversies surrounding his ideas."]

---. "The Future That Makes Us: Nick Land and Hyperstition." The Observing I (November 3, 2026) ["One of the concepts associated with the CCRU is hyperstition. It’s an awkward word, admittedly, although considerably less awkward than some of the group’s other terminology. Broadly speaking, hyperstition concerns fictions that become effective within reality, influencing events and helping create the circumstances they describe. ... The philosopher Ian Hacking approached the problem from another direction, examining how classifications of people can influence the people being classified because we’re aware of the classification. The future we eventually experience isn’t necessarily the only future that could have happened. And the person we’ve become isn’t necessarily the only person we were capable of becoming. In this week’s episode of The Observing I, The Future That Makes Us: Nick Land and Hyperstition, I’m exploring that relationship between the stories we believe, the futures we anticipate, and the lives we end up living. Are we describing who we are, or deciding who we’re allowed to become?"]

---. "The Malignant Malfunction: Thomas Ligotti and the Horror of Consciousness." The Observing I (October 6, 2026) ["This week on The Observing I, we kick off our four-part October series by looking at horror. But we aren't dealing with haunted rectories, vampires, or slashers lurking in the bushes. Traditional horror has always felt slightly tame to me because it assumes the danger is somewhere out in the garden. It allows you to lock the front door, leave the hall light on, and pretend that the fortress is secure. Unless it’s one of those Japanese horrors where they come out of the television at you or appear in your bed. The philosophical pessimism of the American writer Thomas Ligotti and the Norwegian mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe begins from a much colder realization: the call is coming from inside the house.The horror is the three pounds of wet tissue sitting behind your own eyes."]

---. "Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self." The Observing (February 10, 2026) ["There are two kinds of voices living inside you. The authoritative word arrives with credentials, with institutional backing, with the collected wisdom of everyone who came before you and decided how things should be. It does not negotiate. It announces itself and waits for you to comply. Your parents spoke it. Your religion spoke it. Your culture spoke it. And you absorbed it so completely that by the time you were old enough to question it, you could not tell where the voice ended and you began. The internally persuasive word is different. It emerges from dialogue. From the messy, uncertain process of testing ideas against experience. It is the thought that keeps coming back even when you try to ignore it. The question that will not let you sleep. The feeling that something is wrong even though you cannot articulate what or why. The internally persuasive word does not give you answers. It gives you better questions. You change through dialogue. Through conversation where neither person walks away the same. Where words move between you and transform in transit and come back different than they left. But most people never make it past the authoritative word. Because the internally persuasive word is uncomfortable. It says maybe everything you were told was wrong. Maybe the life you built is not the life you want. Maybe the person you have been performing is not the person you are."]

---. "No Exit, No Problem: Pema Chödrön’s Inner Frontier." The Observing I (June 6, 2026) ["When things fall apart, the first temptation is to rebuild the story. Pema asks what happens if we stay with the wreckage for one breath longer."]

---. "Not Yet: The Philosophy of Ernst Bloch." The Observing #143 (March 17, 2026) ["Not yet. Ernst Bloch was born in a factory town on the Rhine in 1885 and spent the next ninety-two years refusing to accept that the present tense was the final word on anything. He built an entire philosophy out of the gap between what is and what should be. He called it the not-yet. The Nazis called it incompatible. The East Germans called it a deviation. The students of 1968 called it exactly what they were looking for. This episode is about what happens when a man bets everything on a future he can’t prove, gets exiled, fired, suppressed, and walled out for doing it, and keeps betting anyway. It’s about hope as a philosophical structure rather than a feeling. It’s about the Vor-Schein, the pre-appearance, the light that the future casts backward into the present before it arrives. And it’s about the knock you hear at 3am when the rest of your brain has the good sense to be quiet, and what Bloch would tell you to do with it."]

---. "René Girard and the Trouble with Other People’s Desires." The Observing I (September 29, 2026) ["We convince ourselves that once we have a mortgage and a career, our desires belong strictly to us. You picked your work because of your own ambitions. You bought that particular coat because you appreciate the tailoring. You like the bitter coffee and the minimalist flat because you are an authentic, self-authored adult making independent choices. It’s a comforting story. We spend an extraordinary amount of money keeping it on its feet. But have you ever stopped to wonder where your current ambitions actually came from? The uncomfortable reality is that human desire is remarkably unoriginal. It rarely invents anything from scratch. A French thinker named René Girard spent fifty years suggesting that this isn’t just an embarrassing psychological quirk. He thought it was the entire engine of civilization, and the hidden root of why we make each other miserable."]

---. "Terence McKenna and the Problem of Enchantment." The Observing I (April 21, 2026) ["There are certain figures who stay with us not because they were entirely right, but because they gave language to something we were already feeling. Terence McKenna was one of those figures. He continues to exist in the cultural imagination because he seemed to speak directly to a part of the human being that modern life does not know what to do with. The part that resists reduction. The part that feels, often quietly, that the ordinary story we are given about reality is somehow too small. Too flat. Too dead. The part that suspects consciousness is stranger than we are told, that meaning is deeper than utility, and that the world may still contain forms of mystery that our institutions have forgotten how to name. He didn’t speak like an academic, but he didn’t speak like a conventional spiritual teacher either. He sounded like someone standing at the edge of the known world and sending back his field notes. About mushrooms. About language. About time. About shamanism. About the collapse of modernity. About the possibility that consciousness was not a side effect of matter, but something far more central and participatory than our dominant culture was willing to admit. And whether you agreed with him or not, there was something undeniably alive in that voice."]

---. "What Do We Want From Monsters?" The Observing I (October 27, 2026) ["Have you ever watched a horror film and come away from it feeling that it just wasn’t frightening enough? Under most circumstances, getting through an experience without being terrified would count as a success. Most of us make a reasonable effort to avoid mortal danger. But we’ll, quite contentedly, watch a film designed to disturb us, then complain that it didn’t do the job well enough. In this episode, I explore why we deliberately seek out experiences that, under other circumstances, we’d do almost anything to avoid, and try to get to the bottom of our attraction to horror."]