We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
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."]
---. "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."]
"Johfra Bosschart was a Dutch painter who described his own works as 'Surrealism based on studies of psychology, religion, the Bible, astrology, antiquity, magic, witchcraft, mythology and occultism.' He was the founder of the now defunct Meta-Realist group." - source: The Door of Perception
Symbol Reader provides an interpretation-reading of his painting "Virgo" below. His series on the zodiac signs was produced between 1974 and 1975:
"One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15–24. Depression kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the US. Drug overdoses kill 70,000 in the USA. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 25–50 million people in the US. What is going on? The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr. Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.
“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.” — Gabor Maté
In The Wisdom of Trauma, we travel alongside bestselling author and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Gabor Maté to explore why Western society is facing such epidemics. This is a journey alongside a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma, and society.
“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you.” — Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul."
Bayne, Tim. "Exploring the Boundaries of Consciousness."NOEMA (July 25, 2024) ["A journey into the mystical hillsides of Nepal in search of answers to questions about which beings we can call conscious."]
Beck, Ulrich and Bruno Latour. "How To Think About Science (Part 5)."Ideas (February 11, 2015) ["Few people ever apply a name that sticks to an entire social order, but sociologist Ulrich Beck is one of them. In 1986 in Germany he published Risk Society, and the name has become a touchstone in contemporary sociology. Among the attributes of Risk Society is the one he just mentioned: science has become so powerful that it can neither predict nor control its effects. It generates risks too vast to calculate. In the era of nuclear fission, genetic engineering and a changing climate, society itself has become a scientific laboratory. In this episode, Ulrich Beck talks about the place of science in a risk society. Later in the hour you'll hear from another equally influential European thinker, Bruno Latour, the author of We Have Never Been Modern. He will argue that our very future depends on overcoming a false dichotomy between nature and culture."]
Blight, David W. "Dreams of Our Nation."The New York Review of Books (June 11, 2026) ["Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity. Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity. These subjects—many of them now under attack by Trumpist censors—have greatly enriched our understanding of the United States. But is there not still reason to study how Americans, from within their infinite chorus of difference and pluralism, have understood their nation as a whole? If historians don’t, advocates of “patriotic” history will do that work for us. Two distinguished American historians, Edward Ayers and Richard Slotkin, have written quite different books that bring the nation back into full focus. In American Visions, Ayers, one of our greatest scholars of the South and the Civil War, argues that to understand this nation readers must search for its roots in the period from 1800 to 1860, a time of enormous growth, expansion, and conquest alongside a surging slave society that put the entire country in peril. In A Great Disorder, Slotkin, our most prolific scholar of national myth, examines the concepts that, he contends, Americans have, knowingly or not, used to understand themselves and act in the world, often violently. Both books were written before the 2024 election, yet they have much to tell us about our current crisis of severe polarization as well as the assaults on the historical professions and cultural institutions by the Trump administration."]
Cole, David. "The Second Redemption."The New York Review of Books (June 11, 2026) ["The Voting Rights Act is dead. The law, very likely the most consequential civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed, died on April 29, 2026. It was not a natural death. Congress did not repeal it, having concluded, for example, that it was no longer needed. On the contrary, Congress has reauthorized the statute four times since its initial passage in 1965, and has only expanded, not narrowed its scope. The perpetrator was instead the Supreme Court—or, more accurately, its six Republican-appointed members. In a deeply disingenuous decision, Justice Samuel Alito claimed only to be “updating” the act. In fact the Court radically rewrote the law to eliminate the protections it has long secured for minority voters throughout the nation. The decision in Louisiana v. Callais may be the Roberts Court’s most radical and far-reaching yet, rivaled only by the 2022 elimination of the right to abortion. It will almost certainly usher in a bleaching of the nation’s legislative bodies—federal, state, and local—unlike anything this country has seen since the “Redemption” of 1873–1877 ended Reconstruction and returned white supremacists to power throughout the South. In theory Congress can correct the Court’s egregious error, because it purports to merely be interpreting Congress’s statute. Indeed, Congress has done so before. If Democrats take Congress and the presidency in 2028, restoring the Voting Rights Act should be at the top of their agenda. But the very gerrymandering the decision invites will make getting there more difficult than ever, as Republicans in red states will in the meantime be free to cement their partisan advantage by disenfranchising black voters with impunity."]
Enfield, Nick. "What is Language For?"Many Minds (April 13, 2022) ["Today’s show takes on a disarmingly simple question: What is language for? As in, why do we say things to each other? What do words do for us? Why do our languages label some aspects of the world, but not others? My guest today is Dr. Nick Enfield. He’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Nick has authored or edited more than a dozen books on different aspects of human language and communication—books on word meaning, gesture, conversation, social interaction, the languages of Southeast Asia, and more. His latest book, just published by MIT press, is titled Language vs Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists. In it, Nick argues that language is pretty awful at capturing reality—but actually that’s fine, because capturing reality isn’t the primary reason we use it. The real reason, in his view, is to coordinate with others. In this conversation, Nick and I flesh out this way of thinking about language as foremost a social coordination tool. Along the way, we talk about the two “reductions” that happen as brute reality gets transmuted into words. We discuss the economist Thomas Schelling and so-called Schelling maps. We talk about color words and plant names, salt and spoons, the insights of Benjamin Lee Whorf, the idea of “verbal overshadowing,” and a bunch of other phenomena and thinkers. As I say in the interview, Nick has one of the most expansive views of human language of anyone I know. He draws on anthropology, economics, primatology, developmental psychology, not to mention decades of his own fieldwork in Laos. That expansive—one might say, “many minded”—perspective is on full display here."]
"Get in the Cage."Post 45 (Special Issue on Nicolas Cage: 2021) ["Who is Nicolas Cage? The name itself is enough to conjure a whole host of associations not easily reconciled. There's the star of beloved indies like Raising Arizona (1987) and Wild at Heart (1990), the action hero of Con Air (1997) and National Treasure (2004), and the Oscar-winning/nominated performer in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Adaptation (2002). There's Nicolas Kim Coppola, the heir of cinematic royalty hiding in plain sight; there's the money-crazed Cage of absurd opulence and subsequent financial meltdown; and, perhaps more than anything, there are the memes. Regardless of how many Cage films you've watched, you've almost certainly encountered him as a .gif, a YouTube supercut, or in a clip like the famous scene from The Wicker Man (2006), in which Cage screams "Not the bees! Not the bees!" as he is tortured to death by the white-clad cult that walked so Midsommar's could run."]
Gibney, Alex, et al. "On Elon Musk Documentary."Reuters (September 8, 2026) ["Documentarist Alex Gibney speaks at a press conference for his new Elon Musk documentary ahead of its Venice Film Festival premiere."]
Gillan, Zach. "Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism."The Ancillary Review (May 2, 2025) ["It boils down, I think, to two axioms: 1) To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root. 2) To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.) The first step toward envisioning a better world is recognizing what is wrong with this one. Weird fiction prepares us for the process of seeing society’s dominant ideology not only as Wrong—an unsettled, disturbing way of interpreting and interacting with the world—but also as irreal, as fictional. It gives us a metaphor—dark, disturbing, alarming—for the theory and structure of thought that precedes the action of praxis, and engage in active resistance. This action is key: not to fall into the nihilistic madness of the Lovecraftian victim or the passivity of the status quo. Weird fiction must prepare us not to surrender to or deny the horrors of the world, but to read and understand them. Before it was killed and messily reanimated as a boogieman by the Right, this is what Black activists meant by “woke”—the injunction to have your eyes open and consciousness aware of the horrific structures underlying daily life. Weird fiction is a useful metaphor for this awakening; we must, in other words, read the social world in which we live as a work of weird fiction. "]
Goldin, Hana Lee. "A Field Guide to Media Ownership."Card Catalog (September 8, 2026) ["Media is not a neutral stream of information; it is made by people and institutions whose priorities can influence what they publish. Tracing who is behind a source shows where those priorities may come from and gives us a clearer basis for deciding how much to rely on it. It turns the question from simply “Is this true?” to “Who made this, and what conditions may have influenced how it reached me?”"]
Griffiths, David. "Queer Theory for Lichens."Undercurrents #19 (2015) ["The symbiotic view of life suggests that we are not individuals, and that we have never been individuals. While the traditional view of organisms (including humans) is that they are self-contained, discrete, and autonomous individuals, scientific research is increasingly suggesting that this is misleading; the view of organisms as individuals is perhaps no longer viable. This is illustrated in the symbiotic bacterial ancestry of the mitochondria in “human” cells, as well as in the contemporary symbiotic relationships that are at work in the human gut microbiota. Eating, digesting and living are impossible without our symbiotic relationships. The brief natural cultural history of lichens that I have offered illustrates these points and demonstrates that if life and nature are to be found anywhere, it is not autonomous individuals but the constitutive comminglings, involvements, and interconnected relationships that make up the ecological mesh."]
Hudson, David. "Alex Gibney's Musk."The Daily (September 16, 2026) ["It’s screening this month in Toronto and is slated for a theatrical release next month, but Paramount’s eventual takeover of Warner Bros. may lead to a dead end at HBO Max. “Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter,” noted Gibney on Sunday. “And his son David Ellison,” the current CEO of Paramount Skydance, “has shown he’ll twist whatever facts are at his disposal in order to please the Capo dei Capi who happens to be the President of the United States. So that is a deep concern. But so far, so good.” If the Ellisons turn out to be a roadblock, reviews will certainly not be. “If most of what [Gibney] presents here about Musk isn’t particularly new,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times, “there is a fearsome power to the way the director brings it all together. Musk isn’t just a pesky fixture in the news cycle. Gibney’s mega-portrait asks us to look at the sum of his actions and take him seriously as a threat to democracy.” “None of what we have seen and thought about Musk can fully ready us for what the filmmaker has done here,” writes Steven Zeitchik. Musk is “an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches—but [he] can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.”"]
Johnson, Adam and Nima Shirazi. "Hollywood & Anti-Muslim Racism (Part 1) - Action and Adventure Schlock."Citations Needed #113 (July 8, 2020) ["The United States and its close allies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing and occupying large sections of the so-called “Muslim world” for decades – drastically ramping up after the 9/11 attacks and seemingly with no end in sight. The U.S., like all empires, cannot operate a large, complex system premised on violence, meddling and subjugation without a moral pretext. This moral pretext, even before 9/11, was primarily about fighting a war on so-called “Terrorism” or “Islamic extremism” while allegedly promoting “stability,” “freedom” and “democracy.” Along with American news media’s constant fear-mongering over scary Muslims lurking in the shadows, a major pillar propping up this moral pretext is pop culture – namely the cultural products coming out of Hollywood. Our decades-long "War on Terror" would no doubt be much more difficult to sustain without a constant reminder from TV and film that, despite the fact that the average American is more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a terrorist attack, the threat of Islamic terrorism remains ever-present and existential, marked by an inevitable “clash of civilizations” devoid of context or any notion that the U.S. is a primary driver of violence across the globe. Over the course of three episodes, we'll be taking a look at how Hollywood’s television and studio film output helps prop up America’s military aggression in the Middle East, engages in both casual and explicit racism, strips conflicts of any historical or imperial context pushes the idea the only Good Muslim is a snitch or CIA agent, and generally leaves its audience angry and ill-informed. In this episode, we review Hollywood’s long history of anti-Muslim racism in both classic and campy action/adventure films and TV and how it both primed us for – and sustains – the never-ending and self-perpetuating "War on Terror.""]
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."]
Lifton, Robert Jay. "Malignant Normality."Dissent (Spring 2017) ["Extreme ideologues do much to create a malignant normality, which comes to pervade most institutions, including medical ones. Then ordinary people who work in those institutions adhere to that normality, often aided by bits and pieces of the extreme ideology. The prevailing normality can be decisive because it excludes alternatives and provides strong pressures for destructive behavior."]
Lim, Dennis. "The Before Trilogy: Time Regained."Current (March 1, 2017) ["Think of this as time travel.” So goes one of the great pickup lines in all of cinema, arriving mere minutes into Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and inaugurating a screen romance unlike any other. Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young Texan on a train in eastern Europe, has just struck up a conversation with Celine (Julie Delpy), a young Parisienne who’s heading home from a visit with her grandmother in Budapest. A strong mutual attraction is evident from their effortless banter, which darts from whimsical (Jesse riffs on his idea for a yearlong, real-time public-access cable experiment) to solemn (Celine reveals that she’s constantly terrified of death) to confessional (they share childhood memories and discuss the burden of parental expectations). When the train pulls in to Vienna, where Jesse will catch a flight home the next morning, he persuades Celine to hop off and continue talking as they explore the city. He pitches this as a way to forestall doubt: when her future self looks back, she won’t have to wonder if that interesting guy she once met on the train was a missed opportunity. The shifting meaning of a moment—as it is anticipated and then experienced, as it is remembered or misremembered, as it gains or loses luster in a year, a decade, or more—is the existential question that animates the story of Jesse and Celine, which has now played out over three films spanning nearly two decades. Before Sunrise depicts the charmed brief encounter of this bright, self-conscious, hyperverbal, sometimes maddening, mostly endearing pair; Before Sunset (2004) stages the rueful deferred reunion that characters and viewers alike long yearned for; and Before Midnight (2013) catches up with them on the cusp of middle-aged domesticity, in medias res, as they go about the business of living."]
Lupyan, Gary and Bill Thompson. "Lost in Translation."Many Minds (November 11, 2020) ["This episode takes on a timeless question: Do concepts differ from one language to the next, or are they basically the same? Maybe you think we already know the answer. You’ve probably heard of cases where one language labels a concept that other languages don’t—the German word schaudenfreude, or the Danish notion of hygge, or, my favorite, the Japan concept of tsundoku. These examples are fun and get a lot of attention, and they certainly make it clear that there’s at least some variation. But a more provocative possibility is that even everyday words that seem easy to translate—words for concepts like chair, beautiful, or walk—might actually differ considerably from one language to the next. Today I talk to Dr. Bill Thompson, a postdoc at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gary Lupyan, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology. Along with their co-author Sean Roberts, they published a paper this summer that looks at just this issue, at whether basic words have the same meanings across languages. The paper’s title is: “Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment.” We talk about the computational approach they use to quantify the similarity of word meanings. We consider their finding that certain kinds of concepts are more similar across languages than others. We discuss the role of culture in shaping concepts. And we talk a bit about why their paper caused something of a stir online. I found this to be a really thought-provoking conversation. It circles around one of the deepest questions we can ask about the human mind: Where do our concepts come from? Spoiler: we don’t settle the question once and for all here. But we do throw some light on it—perhaps."]
Luxenberg, Steve. "Separate and Unequal."On the Media (March 8, 2019) ["Throughout the 1800s, the question at the heart of nearly every political, cultural and academic conversation dealt in some capacity with whether Black Americans were eligible for full citizenship. Our collective understanding of 19th-century racial politics depends on the landmark civil rights legislation that came out of the era. One notorious decision was Plessy v. Ferguson, the case in which the Supreme Court confirmed the constitutionality of racial separation, helping to pave the way for nearly 60 years of Jim Crow laws. Though the decision was overturned by the 1954Brown v. Board of Education decision, the de facto segregation Plessy codified continues into the present. But at the time, Plessy wasn’t deemed newsworthy — at least not by the white-dominated, partisan press. To contextualize the road to Plessy, Bob spoke with Steve Luxenberg, author of the new book, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation."]
Mander, Jerry. "Privatization of Consciousness."Monthly Review (October 2012) ["Is advertising legal? Most people agree that it is an uninvited intrusion into our lives and our minds, an invasion of privacy. But the fact that we can be aware of this without being furious, and that we do little to change the situation, is a good measure of our level of submission. There is a power relationship in advertising that is rarely, if ever, looked at, and yet it is a profoundly corrupt one. Some speak; others listen."]
Schlosser, Eric. "Fast Food Nation, Mystery Meat & Trump’s Dismantling of U.S. Food Safety System."Democracy Now (September 17, 2026) ["Amid growing concerns over food safety in the United States, President Donald Trump last month authorized the duty-free importation of 660 million pounds of cheap beef trimmings that will get mixed in with other cuts to make ground beef. Imported beef and pork were once labeled with their country of origin, but Congress voted in 2015 to end that requirement, so customers at the grocery store will have no way to identify this “mystery meat,” which is coming mostly from Brazil. President Trump’s proclamation in August came just a day after he met in the White House with Joesley Batista, whose family controls the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world. JBS is notorious for food safety violations and admitted in 2017 to bribing thousands of Brazilian officials for favorable treatment. “It smells like a pretty corrupt deal,” says investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. He says Trump’s move is “basically screwing over American ranchers,” and the imported beef is “some of the meat most likely to be contaminated.” Schlosser is author of the landmark book Fast Food Nation, published in 2001. He says that in the 25 years since then, the United States has developed “two food systems.” While affluent and well-educated people increasingly favor sustainable, organic foods and care deeply about how food is grown and consumed, working people and the poor are relegated to the “fast-food industrial system” of cheap, mass-produced food of dubious safety."]
Schnel, Alex. "The Savvy Cephalopod."Many Minds (January 20, 2021) ["Today we’ve got another “behind the paper” episode for you. In it, we’re talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, ‘How intelligent is a cephalopod?’ I’ve been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You’ve probably seen those videos of octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what’s really going on—cognitively—behind these behaviors. What’s happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess? This really is the core issue in Alex’s paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex’s studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it. I’ve been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It’s convinced me that we still have a ton to learn about—and probably from—these brainy, shape-shifting creatures."]
Seerval, Shanoor. "Limiting Abortion Access for American Women Impacts Health, Economic Security: An International Comparison."To the Point (January 12, 2023) ["In June, the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, changing America’s health care landscape. This triggered new and existing legislation in states seeking to restrict abortion, which will deepen already-existing inequities among states in terms of access to abortion, maternal health, and reproductive health services. These new laws will have a disproportionate impact on low-income women and women of color as a result of factors including an increased likelihood of being uninsured and decreased likelihood of having jobs with adequate wages or employer-based coverage. In this post, we examine how reproductive health care in the United States compares with care in other high-income countries to draw lessons for how U.S. policymakers could work to improve women’s health."]
Smalley, Gregory J. "Being John Malkovich (1999)."366 Weird Movies (August 29, 2010) ["Synecdoche, New York may be Charlie Kaufman‘s weirdest script, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his most emotionally affecting, and Adaptation his cleverest, but he’s never written anything funnier than his debut, Being John Malkovich. From the moment Craig Schwartz steps onto the 7 1/2th floor, stooping so he doesn’t hit the ceiling, talks to executive liaison who believes his name is Juarez, interviews with the boss who insists he has a speech impediment, and watches the orientation video where an 19th century industrialist (who talks like a pirate) explains he built this floor for his short-statured wife so there would be one place on earth where her and her “accursed kind” could live in peace, Being John Malkovich demonstrates its devotion to deadpan absurdist yuks. Add in running jokes at the expense of puppeteers, a chimp undergoing psychoanalysis, the low comedy of John Malkovich being struck on the head by a beer can thrown from a passing vehicle, and about a dozen other crazed gags, and you have a movie that’s like what might happen if someone found a cache of old unused Monty Python sketches and miraculously crafted them into all into a coherent narrative."]
"The State of the Nation's Housing 2025."Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University (2025) ["In 2025, households and housing markets face an ever-more challenging environment. High home prices and elevated interest rates reduced homebuying to its lowest level since the mid-1990s. Increases in both insurance premiums and property taxes have heightened financial stress on homeowners and landlords. And, despite an abundance of new apartments, high rents have left more people than ever cost burdened, and have contributed to a sharp rise in homelessness. Meanwhile, unprecedented destruction from wildfires has further highlighted the growing threat to the housing stock from climate-related disasters. At the same time, federal housing support is lessening, creating uncertainty regarding the availability of crucial assistance programs. The looming possibility of an economic downturn is exacerbating the nation’s already-enormous housing challenges."]
West, Stephen. "Everything that connects us is slowly disappearing. - Byung Chul Han pt. 2."Philosophize This! #189 (October 3, 2023) ["This episode continues exploring the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, who argues that today’s society is not best represented by Orwell’s 1984 but by Huxley’s Brave New World, where people voluntarily embrace control through pleasure and self-optimization. Han claims that modern neoliberalism, with its slogans of authenticity and empowerment, actually dissolves community bonds, rituals, and shared narratives, leading to widespread narcissism, anxiety, and disconnection. What disappears, he says, is “constructive negativity”—the pauses, transitions, and moments of reflection that allow for deep understanding, real difference, and truth. As rituals vanish and information floods perception, Han sees society replacing meaningful communication with shallow noise, flattening culture and weakening democracy. In this world obsessed with transparency and efficiency, he suggests a radical antidote: be an “idiot”—someone who slows down, embraces uncertainty, and reconnects with the depth and discomfort that make life and love real." Further Reading: The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han (2015); Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han (2017); The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present by Byung-Chul Han (2020)]
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."]
Blasi, Damian. "The Natural History of Linguistic Diversity."Many Minds (August 28, 2026) ["Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it’s also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind. My guest today is Dr. Damián Blasi. Damián is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Over the last decade or so, Damián’s emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He’s been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the 2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award from the Cognitive Science Society. In this conversation, Damián and I talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary. We discuss a recent paper in which Damián and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back. Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that the possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine."]
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."]
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."]
Enfield, Nick. "What is Language For?"Many Minds (April 13, 2022) ["Welcome back friends and happy spring! (Or fall, as the case may be.) Today’s show takes on a disarmingly simple question: What is language for? As in, why do we say things to each other? What do words do for us? Why do our languages label some aspects of the world, but not others? My guest today is Dr. Nick Enfield. He’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Nick has authored or edited more than a dozen books on different aspects of human language and communication—books on word meaning, gesture, conversation, social interaction, the languages of Southeast Asia, and more. His latest book, just published by MIT press, is titled Language vs Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists. In it, Nick argues that language is pretty awful at capturing reality—but actually that’s fine, because capturing reality isn’t the primary reason we use it. The real reason, in his view, is to coordinate with others. In this conversation, Nick and I flesh out this way of thinking about language as foremost a social coordination tool. Along the way, we talk about the two “reductions” that happen as brute reality gets transmuted into words. We discuss the economist Thomas Schelling and so-called Schelling maps. We talk about color words and plant names, salt and spoons, the insights of Benjamin Lee Whorf, the idea of “verbal overshadowing,” and a bunch of other phenomena and thinkers. As I say in the interview, Nick has one of the most expansive views of human language of anyone I know. He draws on anthropology, economics, primatology, developmental psychology, not to mention decades of his own fieldwork in Laos. That expansive—one might say, “many minded”—perspective is on full display here."]
Hoel, Erik. "Why Do We Dream?"Many Minds (December 8, 2021) ["You may not remember much about it, but chances are last night you went on a journey. As you slept, your brain concocted a story—maybe a sprawl of interconnected stories. It took you to some unreal places, gave you superpowers, unearthed old acquaintances, and twisted your perceptions. Meanwhile, billions of brains all around you, up and down the tree of life, were probably doing something very similar—dreaming, that is. But why do we do this? What could possibly be the function of these nightly ramblings? My guest today is Dr. Erik Hoel. He is a writer and a neuroscientist at Tufts University. In a paper published earlier this year, Erik presented a new theory of why we (and other creatures) dream. It’s called the “over-fitted brain hypothesis”; the basic idea is that dreaming helps us stay cognitively limber, adaptable—less tied to the particulars of our previous experiences. Erik and I discuss how he came to this new theory. We talk about how his account develops an analogy between the “overfitting” problem in machine learning and the “overfitting” problem that biological brains face as well. We discuss how his hypothesis can account for the bizarre nature of dream experience. And we consider Erik’s provocative suggestion that dreams are really just one type of fiction—biological fictions, if you like—and that other types of fiction may serve similar purposes."]
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.”"]
Lupyan, Gary and Bill Thompson. "Lost in Translation."Many Minds (November 11, 2020) ["This episode takes on a timeless question: Do concepts differ from one language to the next, or are they basically the same? Maybe you think we already know the answer. You’ve probably heard of cases where one language labels a concept that other languages don’t—the German word schaudenfreude, or the Danish notion of hygge, or, my favorite, the Japan concept of tsundoku. These examples are fun and get a lot of attention, and they certainly make it clear that there’s at least some variation. But a more provocative possibility is that even everyday words that seem easy to translate—words for concepts like chair, beautiful, or walk—might actually differ considerably from one language to the next. Today I talk to Dr. Bill Thompson, a postdoc at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gary Lupyan, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology. Along with their co-author Sean Roberts, they published a paper this summer that looks at just this issue, at whether basic words have the same meanings across languages. The paper’s title is: “Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment.” We talk about the computational approach they use to quantify the similarity of word meanings. We consider their finding that certain kinds of concepts are more similar across languages than others. We discuss the role of culture in shaping concepts. And we talk a bit about why their paper caused something of a stir online. I found this to be a really thought-provoking conversation. It circles around one of the deepest questions we can ask about the human mind: Where do our concepts come from? Spoiler: we don’t settle the question once and for all here. But we do throw some light on it—perhaps."]
Schnel, Alex. "The Savvy Cephalopod."Many Minds (January 20, 2021) ["Today we’ve got another “behind the paper” episode for you. In it, we’re talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, ‘How intelligent is a cephalopod?’ I’ve been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You’ve probably seen those videos of octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what’s really going on—cognitively—behind these behaviors. What’s happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess? This really is the core issue in Alex’s paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex’s studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it. I’ve been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It’s convinced me that we still have a ton to learn about—and probably from—these brainy, shape-shifting creatures."]
Tschinkel, Walter. "Architects of the Underworld."Many Minds (January 19, 2022) [You’ve probably seen those lists of the so-called “wonders of the world.” Many are works of architecture: the Great Wall, the pyramids, the colosseum, Taj Mahal. But these lists are, in a sense, always incomplete. Our world holds other architectural wonders, after all—albeit ones that are hidden from human eyes, made from different materials, and a bit scaled down. I’m talking, of course, about the wonders of the underworld. I’m talking about ant nests. My guest today is Dr. Walter Tschinkel. Walter is an Emeritus Professor of Biological Science at Florida State University, where he’s led a distinguished career as a myrmecologist—a scientist who studies ants. He’s the author of the recent book Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests. For decades now, Walter has been delving into ant colonies using a variety of creative, homegrown techniques. Foremost among these is his method of “nest casting”—the process of making durable, three-dimensional casts of ant nests. In this conversation, Walter and I do a bit of “Ants 101.” We discuss the notion of ant colonies as superorganisms. We talk about how Walter developed his nest-casting technique (not to mention other ingenious methods). We discuss where the blueprint for an ant nest resides, and whether ants might appreciate the beauty of their own nests. We also talk about the scientific process—about the joys of low-tech problem solving, about the importance of negative results, and about the pleasure of pursuing a good scientific mystery."]
Ramones; Gorillaz; Del the Funky Homosapien; Steel Beans; Magdalena Bay; Goose; The Rolling Stones; Blur; Yeah Yeah Yeahs; Perfume Genius; The Claypool Lennon Delirium; Wet Leg; Pennywise; Night Teacher; Oklou; Optic Sink; Cream; Edwyn Collins; The Beach Boys; George Harrison; Black Angels; Joy Division; Le Tigre; Pink Floyd; Kamasai Washington; Psychedelic Porn Crumpets; Ritual Howls; Iggy Pop; Skorts; The Belair Lip Bombs; S.G. Goodman; Rio Kosta; Homer; Kirby; Juana Molina; The Afghan Whigs; Red Hot Chili Peppers; Lumineers; Andre Miguel Cervantes; Joseph Kamaru; Madala Kunene; Sibusile Xaba; Daniel Stompie Selibe; David Bowie; Death; New Order
"This is the mystery we thrust ourselves into: A single neuron is not conscious of its existence. A network of billions of unconscious single neurons is. These monads living in a world without perception become a being that perceives, thinks, and acts. Consciousness lies not in neurons, but in a sophisticated pattern of connectivity (125)." - Dr. Arnkatla Minervudottr-Chan in Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022.
"Plate from Ernst Haeckel's visually dazzling Kunstformen der Natur, the Art Forms of Nature, published in 1904. With the assistance of Jena artist-lithographer Adolf Giltsch, Haeckel produced one hundred plates depicting the forms of animal life, mainly marine animals. With this book Haeckel wanted to create an "aesthetics of nature" and to show how the incessant struggle for existence he had learnt from Darwin was in fact producing an endless beauty and variety of forms, "Darwin and Humboldt combined together."." - Source: Public Domain Image Archive
"What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe’. Much the same, he thought, applied to history. ‘Particular histories represent to you, what things have happen’d to such or such a People, with all their circumstances,’ he explained: ‘But to understand the whole clearly, you must know what relation every history can have to others.’ Only when such connected and wide-angled histories were available, might one hope to ‘see all the order of time’." -- Linda Colley, "Wide-Angled" (2013)
"Sirat, a film by the Spanish film director Oliver Laxe, opens in the monumental setting of a rave in the Sahara, where a father and son are searching for a missing daughter. As the two make their way from party to party, news of a brewing World War-style conflict animates the background. (In Islamic scripture, “sirat” refers to a bridge that connects Paradise and Hell, and one gets a dose of each here.) Neither road film nor parable, Laxe’s film unfolds through encounters, sound, and landscape, denying narrative certainty and sitting instead with loss, belief, and endurance. As a work of art, Sirat becomes its own cosmology, loosening the grip of the rational world. Refusing the traditional arc of story, it is at once mystical and political, intimate and cosmic – offering a new vocabulary of being. Sirat gives permission for softness and strangeness. It makes me feel less existentially alone." — Sumayya Vally
Bensinger, Ken, Max Lederer, and Paul Waldman. "The Pentagon is Waging War on Its Own Paper."On the Media (September 4, 2026) ["Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is demanding what he calls “more patriotic” coverage of his cabinet. On this week’s On the Media, hear how the Pentagon is cracking down on its publication, Stars and Stripes. Plus, an investigation reveals that some online content creators have taken money to endorse politicians. [01:00] Brooke Gladstone interviews Max Lederer, the publisher of Stars and Stripes, the independent, award-winning military news outlet within the Defense Department, about the Pentagon’s terminations of himself, the editor-in-chief, and the Middle East reporter, and the agency’s continued attacks on the paper’s congressionally mandated editorial independence. [13:38] Brooke speaks with Paul Waldman, writer of the Substack newsletter, The Cross Section, about how the media attention on Trump’s aide Natalie Harp, also known as “the human printer,” exploded. Plus, how she went from Fox News guest in 2019 to primary shaper of the president’s media consumption. [27:24] Micah sits down with Ken Bensinger, a New York Times media and politics reporter, to talk about his recent investigation into how hundreds of social media content creators are being paid to boost politicians ahead of elections, and not always disclosing it. Plus, Dave Jorgenson, former video producer at the Washington Post and founder of Local News International, speaks to the necessity of adopting standards around things political endorsements and AI use on social media, and how he’s using short-form videos to combat misinformation on the platforms where it flourishes."]
Blasi, Damian. "The Natural History of Linguistic Diversity."Many Minds (August 28, 2026) ["Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it’s also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind. My guest today is Dr. Damián Blasi. Damián is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Over the last decade or so, Damián’s emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He’s been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the 2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award from the Cognitive Science Society. In this conversation, Damián and I talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary. We discuss a recent paper in which Damián and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back. Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that the possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine."]
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."]
Carter, Alex. "The Lives of the Philosopher: Albert Camus."Past Present Future (August 26, 2026) ["In our series about how twentieth-century philosophy and biography intersect, David talks to philosopher Alex Carter about the life of Albert Camus, novelist, playwright, journalist, celebrity and public intellectual. What makes Camus a philosopher as well? How was he shaped by his Algerian background? Does it make sense to call him an absurdist? How did he try to reconcile the very different parts of his extraordinary life?"]
Chomsky, Noam. "Everyday Anarchist."Modern Success (April 14, 2013) ["The New Yorker has … termed Chomsky “one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century”, while the New York Times has him as “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But judged by the range, influence and novelty of his ideas, many argue that Chomsky is, in fact, the owner of one of the greatest minds in the history of our species. There is barely a domain of human understanding that has not been touched in some way by his thought. In the half-century since the 1960s, reverberations from his work have shaken the foundations of cognitive science, epistemology, media studies, psychobiology, computer science (to name but a few). "]
Conis, Elena. "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022)."New Books in Medicine (July 13, 2022) ["The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit. In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT—only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What changed? How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022) traces the surprising history of DDT’s rapid rise, infamous fall, and controversial revival to reveal to show that we’ve been taking the wrong lesson from DDT’s cautionary tale. Historian Elena Conis uncovers new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the ban but in fact the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She makes a compelling case that the real threat was not DDT itself but the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change the ways we make decisions about new scientific discoveries and technologies, Conis argues, we’re doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people at risk—both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge or consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from pesticides to vaccines to COVID-19 to climate change, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science—as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts—in order to combat the war on facts and protect ourselves and our environment."]
Connors, Catherine. "The Pope is Officially Team Human."Team Human (September 9, 2026) ["Douglas Rushkoff is joined by storyteller and thinker Catherine Connors to explore Pope Leo XIV’s remarkable intervention into the AI debate. Together, they unpack his critique of transhumanism, technological inevitability and Silicon Valley’s vision of human progress and his radical case for the dignity, imperfection and magnificence of being human."]
Drimmer, Sonja and Christopher J. Nygren."Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education."Public Books (December 16, 2025) ["There are key differences between the 1971 protest and the growing resistance to AI today. Back then, advanced computational development was directed explicitly toward military purposes. When this research had to pass through university infrastructures, the violence of its purpose was easy to see. And this, in turn, made the potential targets of resistance clear; indeed, it was relatively easy to organize protests in front of large mainframe computers, located in very specific facilities and locations. Now, however, computation is distributed. And this makes the targets to resist so diffuse that the shape of direct action becomes difficult even to conceptualize. Another difference is who is directing the violence. Once, universities saw their computational power exploited by researchers working for the Department of Defense. Today, universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry (albeit one that receives a staggering amount of money from defense contracts) that exploits students and faculty as data mines, test subjects, and a perpetual supply depot of future users, all for their own profit. Universities have accepted the overtures from this industry in a FOMO-driven frenzy without consulting their faculty, collecting empirical data on whether generative AI is pedagogically useful, or pausing to inquire about the long-term impact of AI on the students who have been entrusted to their care. Faculty are at best being coerced—and at worst being forced—to employ generative AI in their teaching, assessment, or advising. Moreover, with the educational mission that they thought they were signing up for undermined, students have no option to resist. In other words, we have all been left on our own to jury rig workable pedagogical scaffolds while the educational edifice is being bulldozed around us. Individual responses will not suffice; collective action is necessary."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch."Weird Studies #25 (September 12, 2018) ["JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art."]
Harper, Jordan. "Manufacturing Goodness: What Administrators Really Do and Why."Public Books (September 11, 2026) ["In this essay, I want to ask what is, on the surface, a simple question: What do administrators do and why? What drove me toward this question is the sheer volume of faculty, staff, and students I talk to, informally in conversation and through formal avenues like teaching and research, in which they share wishes for administrators to do something or do something different and wonder why they don’t and won’t. This reads as an issue of consciousness and the ruse of contextual exceptionality in my estimation. Some see certain issues as tied to individuals and their lack of competence and political will. Others just believe in colleges and universities as exceptional spaces solely, or at least primarily, in the education business. ... The problem facing and debilitating the sheep owned and run by administrators is that there is a deliberate calculus that is difficult to compute, an apparatus that transcends the physical that most eyes aren’t trained to see. There is an obsession over the student outcomes of institutional higher education—escaping impoverished life circumstances and finding meaningful work—that lead most to call on administrators to improve and guard the cherished university by any means necessary, and make fashionable ideas and impulses to collaborate with administrators. “What would happen if every time people used the word ‘university,’ Harney and Moten ask, “it came out sounding like ‘factory’?” And the funny thing about factories is that its interior is often chaotic and terribly experienced, but what they produce are earmarked as good(s) always, somehow, consistently worth making and selling."]
Jones, Reece. "The Terrifying Power of the U.S. Border Patrol."Think Back (September 2, 2026) ["Reece Jones has spent his career studying borders. His 2022 book Nobody Is Protected argues that for its entire century-long existence the US Border Patrol has been writing its own rules. Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii, traces the agency’s lineage from antebellum slave patrols and the Texas Rangers through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that formally created it, showing how a little-known legal quirk puts roughly two-thirds of Americans within reach of an agency largely exempt from Fourth Amendment restrictions. In this episode of THINK BACK, Reece and I talk through the Border Patrol’s origins, the landmark Supreme Court cases that expanded the agency’s authority, and how 9/11 and the drug wars accelerated a mission creep that had been building for decades. Jones’s history is even more significant and necessary in 2026 than when it was first published. He shows that the current administration isn’t inventing new abuses of power so much as exploiting a century of legal loopholes that nobody bothered to close."]
Muncer, Mike and Chris Newton. "The Evolution of the Vampire."The Evolution of Horror (September 3, 2026) ["Chris Newton joins Mike to discuss the sexiest, broodiest, gayest monster of them all, the vampire!."]
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Defending the Elusive."Notebook (September 15, 2026) ["Although it’s seldom acknowledged, one of the supreme pleasures of movies is the confusion and uncertainty often prompted by the beginning of a story, when we’re not yet fully tuned in to what’s going on. As in our sleeping dreams, a sense of infinite possibility stretches before us. That seemingly limitless vista soon disappoints once it is foreshortened into something real and recognizable, such as a place, an environment, a mood, a character, a theme, a genre, or a plot. Yet without these comfortable anchors, something that resembles prenatal bliss envelops our ignorance, and the fact that we can imagine almost anything makes the start of a film with all of its possibilities seem peculiarly and even exclusively ours. This is another way of saying that the less we know about something, the more our imaginations and expectations can come along to fill in the gaps. So the pleasure I’m talking about is a kind of shameless narcissism, albeit one that feels healthy because of its spur to our creative impulses. It’s also seldom acknowledged that cinema is interactive, becoming a collective experience even when we’re alone thanks to our phones, social media, and other tools used to convey our impressions afterwards. But because illusions of presence and motion are generated by viewers providing continuity to still frames as they’re being projected, with ourselves as the links between a projector and a screen, this means that the “movie” exists only inside us, even if we prefer to think of it being located elsewhere. A movie is expected to explain itself on some level. We agree to be nudged along by the crafty and creative individuals who make it easier for us to follow and understand. But this process also entails our unconscious filling in all the blank spots between the projector and the screen (suggesting presence) and those between individual still images (suggesting motion). This adds up to a form of collaboration we can all accept with pleasure, a creative form of acquiescence that we simply experience as moviegoing."]
Rushing, Josh. " New Doc EXPOSES Trump Murder War Crime Boat Strikes."Breaking Points (September 9, 2026) [Description of the documentary which can be viewed here: "Since September 2025, the US military has carried out more than 60 strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing more than 220 people. In a military campaign called Operation Southern Spear, President Donald Trump's administration has claimed to wage war against “narcoterrorism”. Yet the government has released little information about who was killed, the evidence against them or how targets were selected. In Killing at Sea, Fault Lines investigates the administration's claims about Operation Southern Spear by uncovering the stories of those targeted and the evidence used to justify lethal military force. Through the stories of families left searching for answers, alongside witness accounts, physical evidence and interviews with legal experts, Fault Lines asks whether the strikes are lawful, whether they have disrupted the drug trade and what accountability exists for those killed. From fishing communities in the Caribbean to Washington, DC, Killing at Sea examines a military campaign conducted largely beyond public view—and asks who is being killed in the US’s new war at sea, and why."]
Silverman, Jacob. "The Pump and Dump Presidency."Know Your Enemy (September 8, 2026) ["Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, and it isn't close. Between his family's crypto business — designed to enable foreign oligarchs, criminals, and state actors to bribe the administration while enriching Trump and his family — his insider trading and manipulation of the stock market, a tariff regime designed to bind business interests to Trump's personal whims, and the advent of a virtual market for criminal fraudsters to purchase pardons from the president himself, Trump and his family have accrued billions of dollars while hollowing out the rule of law and corroding what's left of our democracy. It is brazen, appalling, and poisonous. To guide us through this many-circled hell, we're joined by Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, who's been covering the crypto beat and the Trump-family corruption for years. Jacob helps us wrap our heads around the immensity of this problem — and what, if anything, can be done about it."]
Skiveren, Nicolai. "Cinematic Waesthetic: Wasted Worlds, Wasted Lives and Becoming-Waste in Contemporary Science Fiction Film." Revenant #10 (March 2024) ["This article explores the aesthetic, affective, and epistemological connections that bind together science fiction (SF) as a genre of cognitive estrangement, and the varied forms of waste that have come to permeate the genre’s filmic depictions of the future. Whether it be in the shadowy alleyways of Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the shantytowns of District 9 (2009), or the ravaged environments of Idiocracy (2006), waste is always there, lurking in the background, enveloping its human and nonhuman subjects with its elusive yet distinct atmosphere. And yet, it remains unclear what purpose(s), if any, waste might serve within these film-worlds. Because despite the seemingly central place that waste occupies in our cultural imaginaries of the future, no one has yet presented a systematic reflection on its affective, symbolic, and narrative significance. This article therefore brings together writings on ecological SF (Caravan 2014) and critical waste studies (Bauman 2004; Hawkins 2005; Viney 2014) to scrutinize the waste found across the above SF films. The article proposes that waste in contemporary SF film can be seen to operate mainly within three overlapping modes: ‘Wasted worlds,’ ‘Wasted lives,’ and ‘Becoming-waste.’ Drawing especially on Adrian Ivakhiv’s tripartite model for an eco-philosophy of the cinema, this article calls attention to the often subtle ways in which waste participates in (i) cinematic world-building, (ii) representations of otherness, and (iii) depictions of radical forms of change. Taken together, these three modes represent a suggestive image of how waste forms part of contemporary SF film."]
Smalley, Gregory J. "3 Women (1977)."366 Weird Movies (February 19, 2014) ["Tucked away on the long stretch of nowhere between Persona (1966) and Lost Highway (1997) lies 3 Women, the 1970s iteration of cinema’s recurring dream about sliding identities. This film is as dry and mysterious as a bone found in the desert. Directed by Robert Altman, the miniature scope—most of the film involves only two characters—and the way dramatic naturalism is subverted into disquieting weirdness is not what we typically think of as an “Altmanseque” epic ensemble satire. This change in tone makes this pensive movie all the more of a surprise coming from an accomplished director who (besides the experimental comedy of Brewster McCloud) was not known for his surrealist tendencies. The movie has a quiet quality that honors its Mojave desert setting; you hear the wind rustling through the spaces between Pinky and Millie."]
Webster, Jamieson. "A Library of Oceanic Feelings: A Psychoanalytic History of the Sea."Pioneer Works (September 9, 2026) ["As one of those people who only feel well by the ocean, I’ve long followed the trail of oceanic feelings—that sense of eternity or limitlessness, the connection to something larger—and been perplexed by Freud’s confession that he could find none of this in himself. Oceanic feeling was as closed to him as music. He admitted this in a letter to his friend Romain Rolland, whose reflections inspired the term and prompted the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud wrestles with the idea that an “oceanic feeling” binds people to religion through a lived sense of something immeasurably greater than themselves. He professes complete bewilderment, even as he speculates that such a feeling might preserve the earliest intimacies of infancy, a return to oneness with the maternal, or perhaps belong to that region beyond the ego where it brushes against the immensity of the id. But ultimately he remains suspicious, worrying that the experience has more to do with an infantile longing for a protective and omnipotent father. Poor Freud. The great explorer of the unconscious could find no feeling for that oceanic depth: its vortices of power, its vast and rhythmic flow, its unknown origins, nor for the other life it reveals beyond our paltry shores. Yet I never wanted to dismiss Freud as others have, explaining away his difficulty through character assassination, or asserting that he was simply too rigid, too enclosed, too fixated on fathers and laws and languages—land, territories, cultures—to open himself to that great engulfing maternal flow, no doubt more musical than sensible. Freud, they say, had a mother problem."]
West, Stephen. "Dewey and Lippman on Democracy. Philosophize This #130 (May 23, 2019) ["At the turn of the 20th century, a crucial debate emerged between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the viability of democracy in an increasingly complex world. Lippmann critiqued democracy’s reliance on public opinion, arguing that citizens construct simplified “pseudo-environments” shaped by media and stereotypes, rendering them ill-equipped to make informed decisions on vast global issues. He warned that modern democracies are driven more by emotionally charged reactions than by accurate understanding, and that media, language, and time constraints further distort reality. Dewey responded not by dismissing Lippmann’s concerns, but by reframing democracy as more than a political system—it was, to him, an ethical ideal and a form of social cooperation. Viewing society as an interconnected organism, Dewey believed individuals flourish only through participation and education. He saw democracy as a continuous process of mutual growth, where every person contributes uniquely, and where the antidote to authoritarianism lies in cultivating thoughtful, empowered citizens—not in retreating from democratic ideals, but in deepening them." Further Reading: Public Opinion – Walter Lippmann (1922); Democracy and Education – John Dewey (1916); The Problematic Public: Lippmann, Dewey, and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century – Eds. G. Mitchell Reyes & Nathan Crick (2023)]
---. "Simone De Beauvoir Pt. 1 - The Ethics of Ambiguity."Philosophize This! #106 (July 19, 2017) ["In this episode, the discussion builds on Sartre’s view of human existence as a constant tension between facticity—the unchangeable facts of our lives—and transcendence—the possibilities we have to shape ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir deepens this idea in The Ethics of Ambiguity by arguing that human beings do not live in just one tension but inhabit a web of overlapping dualities: subject and object, individual and collective, mind and body. Rather than simplify these contradictions, she insists we must face them honestly, embracing the inherent ambiguity of existence. De Beauvoir critiques historical philosophy and religion for offering comforting but false narratives that obscure this truth. She emphasizes that freedom—our unavoidable capacity to choose—is the foundation of any ethical life. However, she warns that many fall into “bad faith,” adopting fixed identities or nihilism to escape the discomfort of freedom. Instead, true ethical living requires not only accepting our own freedom but working to maximize the freedom of others. Through this lens, meaning is not discovered but created through action, and ethics begins with the acknowledgment that we are condemned to be free." Further Reading: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (2016) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre edited by Walter Kaufmann (1956) Existentialism for Everyday Life: Finding Meaning in a Chaotic World by Aurora Koskinen (2023)]
---. "Simone Weil - The Mathematician."Philosophize This! #174 (February 2, 2023) ["So in one of her earlier journals Simone Weil writes about a moral dilemma that ends up being a metaphor, for a situation that a lot of people might find themselves in while living in the modern world. She says to imagine a man…who lives in a society…where he is forced to solve complex math problems all day long…but the catch is that when he solves one of these math problems…any time he arrives at an answer, and that answer is an even number…he gets beaten with a stick…by the powers that be. They tell em we don’t take too kindly to even numbers round here son. Now go on…solve another one of them math problems, as he twirls the stick smiling with his dirty hands. The moral dilemma for Simone Weil was this: what should the mathematician do when he finds himself in this situation? Should he resist and fight back? Should he just refuse to solve any more of their math problems? Should he make a sign and protest about how upset he is? By the end of these two episodes released here today we’ll understand why Simone Weil came up with the particular solution that she did to this moral dilemma…and also why as the years went on…she grew in her thinking enough to realize that the answer…. might not be as simple as the one she originally came up with."]
---. "Simone Weil - Vessels of God."Philosophize This! #175 (February 2, 2023) ["This episode explores Simone Weil’s view on self-transformation, contrasting the Western emphasis on willpower and discipline with her deeper focus on cultivating attention. While will is effective for physical action and routine habit-building, Weil argues it falls short when it comes to moral clarity, inspiration, and spiritual depth. Attention, for Weil, is not passive but a disciplined openness to truth, beauty, and obligation—qualities she sees as reflections of a higher moral order, which she calls God. Crucially, Weil believes that goodness only becomes real when individuals act as vessels for this universal good, through conscious participation in the world. The episode also outlines three pathways to developing attention—love of beauty, love of neighbor, and religious or transcendent experience—and emphasizes the need for humility and lucid thought as safeguards against ego-driven moral blindness, especially in times of collective conflict." Further Reading: Waiting for God by Simone Weil (1951); Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (1952); The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza (2022)]
