Wonder Cabinet: Science/Humanities/Philosophy/Religion (Azimuths)

Wonder Cabinet homepage ["Intimate conversations about the mysteries of the cosmos and life on a sentient planet with writers, philosophers and scientists who are dazzled by it all."]

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Chungyalpa, Dekila. "On the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth." Wonder Cabinet (April 11, 2026) ["Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth. For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance. In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing was often female, and where land itself—especially the sacred Himalayan landscape of Sikkim—was alive with presence, meaning, and obligation. Today, she is a global conservationist and founding director of the Loka Initiative, building unlikely partnerships between climate scientists and religious leaders across traditions—from Buddhist monastics to Catholic clergy, Indigenous elders to Muslim clerics and Evangelical pastors. Her work suggests that the climate crisis is not only scientific or political—but spiritual."]

Haskell, David George. "Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty." Wonder Cabinet (March 28, 2026) ["What can flowers teach us about survival? Celebrated biologist and writer David George Haskell reframes flowers as agents of transformation—creatures that turned conflict into collaboration and remade the living world. For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if we’ve misunderstood them entirely? In How Flowers Made the World, biologist and writer David George Haskell invites us to see flowers not as delicate embellishments, but as one of the most powerful forces in Earth’s history. When flowering plants emerged more than 200 million years ago, they didn’t just adapt to the world—they transformed it. Through strategies of beauty, attraction, and reciprocity, they turned rivals into partners, reshaping ecosystems and making possible the rich diversity of life we know today. In a lyrical, science-rich conversation, we explore:
— Why Haskell calls flowers “nature’s revolutionaries”
— How beauty, pleasure, and desire function as evolutionary strategies
— The deep interdependence between flowers, animals, and humans
— What flowers can teach us about resilience in a time of ecological crisis
— How re-centering flowers might change the story we tell about life on Earth.
We live on a floral planet, Haskell says—and more than that, we are a floral species, utterly dependent on flowering plants for food, habitat, and survival. The lessons flowers offer—about creativity, cooperation, and transformation—may be exactly what we need to navigate a rapidly changing world. What would it mean to tell the story of life not through predators and conquest, but through seduction, partnership and bloom?"] 

Rovelli, Carlo. "Cosmic Mysteries and the Politic of Wonder." Wonder Cabinet (February 7, 2026) ["Carlo Rovelli’s quest to understand the nature of reality began not in a physics lab, but in youthful experiments with consciousness, political protest and a restless hunger for meaning—years before he “fell madly in love with physics.” Today, Rovelli is famous for his bestselling books, including "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" and "Reality Is Not What It Seems," and his pioneering work on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, including black holes and quantum gravity. In a wide-ranging conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Rovelli about his early, profound experiences with LSD; his discovery of the "spectacular" beauty of general relativity and quantum mechanics; his lifelong search for purpose in both the cosmos and his own life; and why scientists need to be politically engaged. Carlo also tells us about the big idea that he’d put in our own wonder cabinet. This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. We also play a short excerpt from Anne Strainchamps’ earlier interview with Rovelli that originally aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge."]

Singh, Manvir. "Was Shamanism the First Religion?" Wonder Cabinet (April 4, 2026) ["Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience? Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds. How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions. Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?"]

Solnit, Rebecca. "Hope After the End." Wonder Cabinet (February 14, 2026) ["How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us. But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book "The Beginning Comes After the End," writer and activist Rebecca Solnit makes the case that something is dying, all right — because something better is being born. A rising worldview that embraces antiracism, feminism, environmental thinking, Indigenous and non-Western ideas, and a vision of a more interconnected, compassionate world. Solnit is an engaged writer and intellectual in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. Her new book picks up where her earlier bestseller “Hope in the Dark” left off — with an argument against despair and historical amnesia. In this conversation, we explore the extraordinary scale of progressive social, political, scientific and cultural change over the past century, the roots of Solnit’s stance of “pragmatic, embodied hope,” her thoughts on “moral wonder, “ and her years in San Francisco’s underground punk rock scene. She also tells us what she’d put in our own wonder cabinet: an AIDS Memorial Quilt square sewn by Rosa Parks."]

Strand, Sophie. "Ecological Storytelling and Mythic Imagination." Wonder Cabinet (January 31, 2026) ["Writer and ecologist Sophie Strand thinks at a scale that can feel dizzying—in the best way. In a single conversation, she can move from the chemical structure of cells to mushroom spores, from ancient weather gods to mycorrhizal fungi, from Bronze Age collapse to the slow intelligence of soil. In this episode of Wonder Cabinet, we talk with Strand about wonder that doesn’t float upward but roots downward—into bodies, ecosystems, decay, and deep time. We begin with her essay “Your Body Is an Ancestor,” published shortly before Halloween and the Day of the Dead, and follow her imagery into our shared prehistoric past.
The conversation also explores how Strand’s experience of chronic illness reshaped her understanding of nature, selfhood, and health. Rather than seeing the sick body as broken, she turns to ecological metaphors: spider webs, soil structures, caterpillars dissolving inside cocoons. What might it mean to understand ourselves not as machines that fail, but as landscapes that change? Along the way, we talk about fantasy and “romantasy,” Tolkien, Harry Potter, Dramione fan fiction and communal storytelling rituals. This is a conversation about wonder with dirt under its fingernails: embodied, mythic, ecological, and deeply alive to the cycles of death and regeneration that bind us all."]

Que sais-je? - Music Mix #54

Wilco; King Missile; Angine de Poitrine; Stereolab; AC/DC; The Cure; Wendy Eisenberg; Marcus King; Sammy Rae & The Friends; Earthgang; Little Dragon; Sudan Archives; Patrick Wilson; Shiner; Sloan; Sons; The Cords; The Macks; Trestles; Dodie; Bush; Kate Bush; Prewn; Taylor Swift; Smashing Pumpkins; Scorpions; Cream; Wet Leg; Fever Ray; Miles Caton; DC6 Singers Collective; Don Tolliver & Ludwig Goransson; Cedric Burnside; Sharde-Thomas Malloy; Nikki Lane; Oasis; Stone Temple Pilots; Ava Luna; Cal in Red; Cheap Perfume; Rush; Creative Writing; HAERTS; Hammy Down; Caroline Rose; Idlewild; Arthur Buck; Lovejoy; Parent Teacher; Pigeons Playing Ping Pong; Genevieve Artadi; Real Bad Man; TOBi

 Que sais-je? - Music Mix #54 

Michael D. Benton: Introduction to and Discussion of The Battle of Algiers

Michael D. Benton: Introduction to and Discussion of The Battle of Algiers

(Originally published in Uprooting Criminology: April 14, 2014)

In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was released to critical acclaim as well as official condemnation. In France it was banned until 1974 when it was finally screened in a cut version. The film examines the early part of what is known as the Algerian War (1954-1962) when the colonized Algerian population threw off the century-long yoke of the French colonizers (they invaded Algeria in 1830). Pontecorvo’s film is unique in many ways:

1) Its focus is on the early intensification of the Algerian resistance when they began to focus on guerilla warfare in the city of Algiers as the most effective tactic against the French colonizers.

2) It also effectively portrays the French Legion’s military response. Torture as a method of information-gathering and intimidation, as well as, the concerted hunting down of resistance fighters.

3) The film uses mostly non-professional actors who had actually been a part of the Algerian resistance against the French.

4) The film is naturalistic in its portrayal of the operations of revolutionary cells and their guerrilla tactics.

5) The film provides powerful images of the colonizing forces usage of media to communicate their messages. Perhaps, not as obvious, is the resistance resort to “terror” as their only possible tactic to communicate their message.

6) It ends with the seemingly victorious moment for the colonizers when the French Legion has won the Battle of Algiers and decimated the guerrilla cells. However, as the last scene vividly demonstrates, they may have won the battle, but the French in their victory had poured gasoline onto the flame of resistance that would lead to their eventual defeat in the larger war.

The film is considered to be so realistic in its depiction of the resistance against colonizing forces, that the Pentagon in 2003, during the Bush Administration’s initiation of its “War on Terror,” held screenings for their officers in order for them to understand the resistance they would probably face. The film is also very effective in thinking about the later Abu Ghraib scandals and provides insights into the recent USA-France joint invasion of Mali.

Discussion questions:

• In The Battle of Algiers there is a powerful scene that examines the hypocrisy of Western ideology. This is when Colonel Mathieu is hosting the media to announce the capture of the resistance leader. The French celebrated the “heroic” resistance against the NAZI occupation, how were they now complicit in the same acts of the NAZIs (directly relating to the comment from one of the reporters during this scene)?

• Albert Memmi, the Tunisian writer, in his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized, makes the claim that colonization is in essence “one variety of fascism” (63). Do you agree or disagree?

• France had just been defeated in another colonial war (The First Indochina War of 1945-1954 in Vietnam ), do you think this has something to do with their brutal determination to defeat the Algerian resistance.

• The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte considers the violence of the colonizer and the colonized to be different. What response do you have to this claim through a discussion of the violence perpetrated by both sides in the film? Is violence necessary, as Sartre claims, to the decolonization movement? Feel free to bring in observations from other decolonization movements.

• This film continues to resonate with 21st Century events in North Africa and the Middle East (in particular the Abu Ghraib scandals, the American empire’s endorsement of torture as a policy, and the American-French invasion of Mali). Are there lessons to be learned about the experiences of the colonizer and the colonized in this film?

Hana Lee Goldin: Librarian/Critical Thinking/Media Literacy (Azimuths)

Hana Lee Goldin's website Card Catalog

Goldin, Hana Lee. "A Non-Exhaustive List of Sources for When You Need Real Information, Not Just Content." Card Catalog (February 5, 2026) ["How to find trustworthy sources for breaking news, health questions, financial decisions, and local elections."]

---. "Building Your Own Verification Toolkit." Card Catalog (January 27, 2026) ["A guide to the tools and databases librarians use, plus a personal fact-checking workflow you can run in under 60 seconds."]

---. "From Ataris to AI: The Millennial Reckoning With Relentless Change." Card Catalog (March 3, 2026) ["This isn’t a single adjustment. It’s been the continuous condition of our entire adult lives. We didn’t watch the world change and then settle. We watched the world change, adapted to that change, and then watched it change again before the adaptation had even fully landed. We grew up inside the acceleration, and the acceleration has never stopped. On one side of us: an older generation that experienced technology largely as a series of arriving conveniences, things that made existing tasks easier rather than as the ground beneath their feet constantly shifting. On the other: a generation behind us for whom the internet isn’t a place you go but simply the texture of existence, who have no memory of a world that worked differently. We are the bridge generation: old enough to remember before, young enough to be living through the middle, and bearing the particular exhaustion of people who can see both shores but can’t quite stand on either."]

---. "The Four Layers of Information Reality." Card Catalog (February 10, 2026) ["A framework for understanding how information becomes belief."]

---. "Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It." Card Catalog (February 24, 2026) ["40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it."]

---. "The Hierarchy of Sources: A Cheat Sheet - A guide to evaluating information sources in the AI age." Card Catalog (February 19, 2026) ["Why This Matters Now: The information environment you navigate today bears little resemblance to the one that existed a few decades ago. In the 1990s, getting your ideas in front of a large audience usually required convincing a publisher, a newspaper editor, a television producer, or some other institutional gatekeeper that your content was worth distributing. Those gatekeepers had biases and blind spots, and plenty of valuable perspectives were excluded from mainstream channels. But the friction involved in publishing meant that most widely circulated information had passed through at least one filter, however imperfect. That friction is gone. Anyone with an internet connection can now publish anything, to a potential audience of billions, at essentially zero cost. A teenager in their bedroom can create a website that looks as professional as a major news organization. A coordinated network can flood social media with fabricated stories faster than fact-checkers can respond. AI tools can generate plausible-sounding text, realistic images, and convincing audio and video at a scale that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. Meanwhile, the platforms that distribute this information have built their business models around engagement, which means their algorithms actively promote content that generates strong emotional reactions regardless of whether that content is accurate. Research has shown that false news stories tend to spread faster and reach more people than accurate ones, in part because fabricated content is often designed to provoke outrage or surprise. The economic incentives of the attention economy are misaligned with the goal of keeping people well-informed."]

---. "In Praise of Serendipity." Card Catalog (April 2, 2026) ["On staying open to the unexpected: We teach search as technique: how to construct a query, which databases to use, how to evaluate a source. What we don’t teach is the limit built into all of those tools: they can only return what we already know to ask for. Everything we don’t know to ask for requires a different approach entirely. AI extends that limit further. A language model synthesizes from what we’ve already thought to ask about, which means it’s only as generative as the questions we bring to it. Some of the most generative questions arrive through wandering, through the accidental encounter that reframes what we thought we were looking for, and that’s something current AI tools aren’t designed to do. The library tradition has long understood that knowledge develops through exposure to the unexpected and through the slow accumulation of encounters that couldn't have been planned. Following a thread without knowing where it leads is how the connections start to form on their own. The practices above aren’t a romantic supplement to serious research. They’re part of how serious research has always developed. Serendipity has a research literature and a documented role in how knowledge develops. But the reason any of that matters is simpler: the world occasionally offers something we didn't know we needed, arriving from a direction we never would have thought to look. We stumble into it less than we used to, but it's still there when we make room for it."]

---. "Steel-Manning Can Be More Useful Than Fact-Checking." Card Catalog (April 14, 2026) ["We steel-man an opposing argument for one of two reasons: either to discover that the opposing position has merit we hadn’t recognized (which makes our own understanding more accurate), or to be able to argue our own position from a much stronger and more grounded place (because we’ve already engaged with the best the other side has to offer rather than the worst). Both of these outcomes make us better thinkers. Neither requires us to abandon our original view. There’s a practical test for whether a steel man has been done well: if we can restate the opposing position back to someone who holds it and they respond with something like, “Yes, that’s what I believe,” then we’ve succeeded. We’ve demonstrated that we understand their position on its own terms, not a distorted or simplified version of the position. Once we’ve reached that point of genuine understanding, the conversation changes. We know exactly which specific points we disagree on and which points the other side has right, which means we can focus our pushback on the real points of divergence instead of wasting energy on misunderstandings. And the person we’re engaging with is far more likely to listen to our counterarguments, because we’ve shown that we took the time to understand theirs first. Steel-manning someone’s position doesn’t mean we’ve conceded anything. It means we’ve done the intellectual work of comprehending why they believe what they believe, so that if we still disagree, our disagreement is precise and informed rather than reactive. We’re not meeting them halfway; we’re making sure we know exactly where the halfway point is before we decide where we stand."]

---. "We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet." Card Catalog (April 9, 2026)  ["Every cognitive technology in the historical record produced capacities that exceeded what anyone anticipated, because the technology changed not just what people could do but how they thought about doing it. We’re inside that process now, which means we can’t see its full shape any more than the first literate Greeks could see what reading would eventually make possible. What we can do is engage deliberately, bringing real questions to these exchanges and holding our own reasoning as the standard against which we measure what comes back. The capacities that emerge from this transition will be shaped by exactly that: not by the tools themselves, but by the quality of thinking we bring to using them."]

---.  "We Were Never Supposed to Know This Much: On the cost of knowing everything, everywhere, all at once." Card Catalog (March 17, 2026)  ["In 1992, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published research connecting primate brain size to social group size. What he found was striking: the human neocortex is sized for a stable social world roughly the size of a village, intimate enough that we can track the histories, alliances, and emotional states of everyone in it. Beyond that scale, the cognitive architecture starts to strain. We were simply never built to hold more. For most of human history, that was more than enough. We lived in communities where bad news had edges: a neighbor’s illness, a failed harvest, a conflict close enough to matter and local enough to address. The information environment was scaled to what a human nervous system could hold, process, and respond to in a meaningful way. Bad news came with a corresponding set of possible actions. Knowing about a problem and having some capacity to do something about it were rarely that far apart. What’s happened since is not just a change in the volume of information, but a structural rupture in that relationship between knowing and doing. The internet didn’t simply give us more news. It collapsed every geographical and temporal boundary that had previously kept information at a manageable human scale. We now receive, in a single morning, detailed accounts of suffering from dozens of countries, political crises on multiple continents, and a running feed of expert opinion about all of it, alongside advertisements and the hot takes of strangers. All of it is real and all of it deserves moral seriousness. The brain receiving it, though, is the same one that evolved for a village, and it’s being asked to perform as a global news desk, a grief counselor, and a political analyst simultaneously. There’s also a subtler problem: the feed isn’t a mirror of the world. It’s a distortion. Research consistently shows that engagement-based algorithms amplify emotionally charged content, particularly anger and outrage, over content that is neutral or resolution-focused. A story about a crisis keeps us scrolling longer than a story about a resolution. The world as it appears in our feeds isn’t proportional to the world as it exists. It’s been filtered through an optimization function that rewards activation, which means we’re not just receiving more information than we were built for. We’re receiving a skewed version of it."]

---.  "What a Librarian is Reading in Times of Moral Nausea and Psychological Despair." Card Catalog (February 17, 2026)  ["What do you do when the problem isn’t misinformation, but accurate information that shatters everything you thought possible? When you have to expand your conception of what humans are capable of doing to each other, what systems are capable of enabling, what societies are capable of tolerating? When the facts themselves demand that you build a larger, darker, more complex model of how power operates and who it serves? These books don’t answer that question; they can’t. But they do offer ways to live inside the question without being consumed by it. They model how others have metabolized unbearable knowledge and continued. They provide practices for days when continuing feels impossible. They remind us that we’re not the first people to discover the world is not what we thought, and we won’t be the last. They model what becomes possible when you stop asking “how do I unknow this” and start asking “who do I want to be now that I know.” Some things change us permanently. These books are companions for that transformation. They’re maps drawn by those who traveled this territory before us and discovered that continuing mattered more than understanding, that staying present had value even without resolution. They’re proof that others have stood where you’re standing and found ways forward, too."]

---. "What 'Do Your Own Research' Actually Means." Card Catalog (April 7, 2026) ["A step-by-step methodology for evaluating any claim and exploring any subject."]

---. "When Your AI Asks How You're Feeling: A Field Guide to Engagement Manipulation." Card Catalog (February 12, 2026) ["AI systems use dark patterns to keep conversations going longer than necessary. Learning to spot them protects your time and attention."]

ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #9

Joe Kent served 11 tours as a ranger in the Special Forces primarily in Iraq. His wife Shannon was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria while serving. Kent became politically active and was later a fervent supporter of Trump. He was appointed the head of the National Counterterroism Center under Tulsi Gabbard the director of national intelligence. For that role he was confirmed by the US Senate in July and had the highest security clearance. On March 17th, Kent resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, citing disagreement over U.S. involvement in the Iran war and the influence of Israel and the Israeli lobby in domestic politics. This is an episode about his first interview after that resignation.






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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger of a Single Story." TED Global (2009) ["Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."]

Alexander, Rahne, Keith Gordon, and Mike White. "Head On (2004)." The Projection Booth #789 (March 4, 2026) ["Collision as courtship. Self-destruction as intimacy. Fatih Akın's Head-On (2004) opens with two suicide attempts and spirals into a sham marriage between Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), German Turks who weaponize matrimony to escape themselves. What begins as a performance of tradition mutates into volatile love, violence, prison, exile, and a reunion that refuses catharsis. Keith Gordon and Rahne Alexander join Mike to unpack Akın’s fusion of Sirkian melodrama, Fassbinder fatalism, and arabesk despair."] 

Banai, Hussein.. "War with Iran." Open  Source (March 6, 2026) ["We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, on the first weekend of the war, which President Trump says could go on for weeks. But to what end? On whose say-so? At what risk? Hussein Banai, known as Huss, is our guest—the guide we turn to partly because he was born and schooled in Iran. He is informed but not official, a professor of international studies at Indiana University in Bloomington."]

The Corporation (Canada: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot, 2003: 145 mins) ["Did you know that the legal system recognises a corporation as a person? What kind of ‘person’ is it then? What would happen if it sat down with a psychologist to discuss its behaviour and attitude towards society and the environment? Explored through specific examples, this film shows how and why the modern-day corporation has rapaciously pressed itself into the dominant institution of our time, posing big questions about what must be done if we want a equitable and sustainable world. What must we do when corporations are psychopaths?"]

Coviello, Peter. "Infrastructures of Escape." Filmmaker Quarterly 79.3 (2026)
["One Battle is not, as Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) rather successfully was, an “adaptation” of Pynchon. It is, I think, something looser, and weirder, and altogether better: an extended riff, that is also an extended reading, that is also—and here the heart swells—something like a fan’s notes, a loving tribute executed in the idiom of film. There are plenty of things to say about its formal accomplishments and deficits—about the textured 70 mm photography, the pivot from Vineland’s 1960s/1980s setting to the calamitous present tense, the badly fumbled ending, its casting, its plotting, the astounding kinetic vivacity of a film that’s engrossing over the whole course of its nearly three-hour run. But most of what I mean to say is that I fucking loved it. Whatever else Anderson may do in his reading, I think he gets impeccably and upliftingly correct that Pynchon is at heart a comic humanist and a vitriolic antifascist. And then, with a grace and ingenuity all his own, Anderson translates that signature novelistic disposition—the delirious sentences, off-kilter plots, lunatic counterfacutals—into a rollicking big-screen entertainment. I don’t know that it’s the easiest thing, just now, to make a credibly antifascist piece of mass culture. Anderson has done that, and Pynchon helped him do it. I’d like to give an account of what this means."]

Dennison, Stephanie and Alfredo Suppia. "The Secret Agent: gripping thriller reminds us why academic freedom needs protecting." The Conversation (February 19, 2026) ['One of the features that makes The Secret Agent, set predominantly in 1977, particularly compelling in this regard is its treatment of universities, as battlegrounds where memory, power and democracy collide. The film’s main character Armando, played by Oscar-nominated Moura, is not, in fact, a secret agent and has no obvious links to opposition movements. He is an academic forced into hiding after clashing with big business interests aligned with the authoritarian regime who want to get their hands on his research."]

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

Doctorow, Cory. "How to Stop “Enshittification” Before It Kills the Internet." Capitalisn't (December 11, 2025) ["There’s a word that’s gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “enshittification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders. We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed. For Doctorow, "enshittification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors. Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior. Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution."]

Drimmer, Sonja and Christopher J. Nygren."Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education." Publiic Books (December 16, 2025) ["Though half a century ago, still, the demonstration resonates now. Today, it may seem to many that the cluster of technologies marketed as “AI” is entirely new, and, logically, that objection to it must likewise be unheard-of. But, as the demonstration shows, not only is “AI” not especially new; protesting it has a long history. Inspired by the collective objection represented in this photo, we are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education. We envision a resistance that is, by its very nature, a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction."]

Gemünden, Gerd. "When the Fantastic Meets Reality: An Interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho." Film Quarterly 79.3 (2026) ["O agente secreto (The Secret Agent, 2025), the latest feature by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, has been billed as a political thriller, but is better described as a stylish and frolicsome romp through Brazilian and North American film history that celebrates all that cinema is capable of. While beholden to the narrative of deception that propels many conventional thrillers, the film smoothly navigates an array of genres (the Western, noir, horror, even the family story) while nodding toward John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and other US horror films of the 1970s. Set in 1977, during the military dictatorship, The Secret Agent casts its tale of corruption and repression as a black comedy, presenting a strange and discomforting story in which nothing is what it seems, and in which the many subplots and detours matter more than the story’s central conceit, which revolves around a researcher called Marcelo (an alias; his real name is Armando) on the run from hired hitmen. In a metanarrative set in the present, two university students transcribe audiotapes that record the story of Marcelo/Armando—one of several ways in which The Secret Agent engages with the notion of the archive and links the past to the present."]

Holt, Jim. "The Grand Illusion." Lapham's Quarterly (ND) ["Does time have a future? Yes, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be."]

Iacono, Carlo.  "Books and Screens."  Aeon (February 19, 2026) ["Amy Orben, a psychologist studying technology panics, identifies the ‘Sisyphean cycle’: each generation fears new media will corrupt youth; politicians exploit these fears while deflecting from systemic issues like inequality and educational underfunding; research begins too late; and by the time evidence accumulates showing mixed effects dependent on context, a new technology emerges and the cycle restarts. What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology. These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications. This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints."]

Johnson, David. "The Doors of Perception." The Observing #3 (January 20, 2023) ["In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between observation and perception, how our own prejudices and preconceptions overlay what we experience, and what we can do to change that."]

Kemp, Luke. "Where are We Going? Societal Collapse - The Future." Past Present Future (March 8, 2026) ["In the fourth and final conversation in this series David talks to Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse, about where we might be heading. Where does the greatest risk of global collapse lie? Who is ultimately responsible for our fate? What makes states and corporations the agents of doom? How can we humans fight back?"]

---. " Where Are We Going? Societal Collapse – The Modern Age." Past Present Future (March 1, 2026) ["In today’s episode David talks to Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse, about the strengths and weaknesses of modern states and modern structures of authority. Are modern states any different from the criminal enterprises of coercion that preceded them? Does democracy change the dynamic of societal collapse? What are the lootable resources of the modern age? And why are all states essentially empires?"]

Larsen, Rasmus Rosenberg. "There are No Psychopaths." Aeon (February 27, 2026) ["Virtually everything you think you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on?"]

Modinger, John H. "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." Military Review (July/August 2022) ["The contention of Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is that senior military and political leaders routinely lied to the American public. If the title of the book has a familiar ring to it, that is no accident. It plays on the title of another dramatic release of information that revealed U.S. political and military leaders were lying about the state of affairs in Vietnam. With the release of The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg provided a war-weary people a trove of documents that clearly showed the American government and its military had been complicit in a long-running attempt to deceive the American public about the true situation in the Vietnam War. The fact of the matter was the war was going poorly, but leaders offered up a steady diet of sunshine and rainbows detached from the reality on the ground to sidestep uncomfortable questions and prolong the war—up until then America’s longest."]

Morrison, Grant. "The Enemies of Humanity are Wielding Occult Power." Team Human #360 (March 11, 2026) ["The tech elite are wielding occult power, but we have the imagination. Douglas Rushkoff sits down with legendary comic writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison for a deeply urgent conversation about reclaiming reality. Morrison argues that magic isn't just the supernatural; it's a mundane, everyday tool of collective agreement that we are all already using. While billionaires use algorithmic binding spells to predict our moves and trap us in a boring, materialist nightmare, we possess the ultimate counter-measure: our collective imagination.Finding the others is no longer enough. It's time to stop being NPCs in someone else's sterile simulation and start authoring our own pro-human reality."]

Muncer, Mike and Juliet Sugg. "MAN-MADE MONSTERS #26: Crash (1996) & Titane (2021)." The Evolution of Horror (February 19, 2026) ["Juliet Sugg joins Mike to discuss two transgressive body horror movies where flesh, sex, death, flesh and metal collide: David Cronenberg's Crash and Julia Ducournau's Titane."]

Pickard, Victor. "The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media Empire." On the Media (February 27, 2026) ['Host Micah Loewinger speaks with  Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss why what’s happening at CBS, The Washington Post, and Paramount is simply the latest stage of a phenomena called "media capture," and what we can do to free ourselves from its binds."]

Puhak, Shelly. "The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster." New Books in Women's History (February 17, 2026) ["There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families-is a vicious killer. Some even say she bathes in the blood of her victims. When the king's men force their way into her manor house, she has blood on her hands, caught in the act of murdering yet another of her maids. She is walled up in a tower and never seen again, except in the uppermost barred window, where she broods over the countryside, cursing all those who dared speak up against her. Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster (Bloomsbury, 2026) Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness-a world where nothing is ever as it seems. In this exhilarating narrative, Puhak renders a vivid portrait of history's most dangerous woman and her tumultuous time, revealing just how far we will go to destroy a woman in power."]

Rovelli, Carlo. "All Reality is Interaction." On Being (March 12, 2020) ["Physicist Carlo Rovelli says humans don’t understand the world as made by things, “we understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses — happenings.” This everyday truth is as scientific as it is philosophical and political, and it unfolds with unexpected nuance in his science. Rovelli is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory and author of the tiny, bestselling book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. Seeing the world through his eyes, we understand that there is no such thing as “here” or “now.” Instead, he says, our senses convey a picture of reality that narrows our understanding of its fullness."]

Rushkoff, Douglas. "My Dinner With Jeffrey: What the Epstein Files Tell Us About All of Us." Team Human #356 (February 28, 2026) [""Why are you in the Epstein files?" It is a question Rushkoff received from his own daughter, and in this raw monologue, he gives the full answer. His name appears in the CC field of emails from his former literary agent alongside Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and yes, Jeffrey Epstein. But the story of why those names were grouped together reveals something much darker than a mailing list. Rushkoff recounts a disturbing mid-90s dinner party where he was physically grabbed by a host and scolded for "wasting his plus-one" on a brilliant female intellectual instead of "eye candy" to decorate the room for the male elites. He traces the lineage of this misogyny directly to the "scientism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, whose theories of humans as "meat machines" and "survival vehicles for genes" provided the perfect philosophical cover for sociopaths like Epstein to commodify and abuse women. This is not just a story about a predator; it is an indictment of the permission structure built by the scientific and tech elite. A worldview that dismisses human soul, consent, and morality as mere delusions."]

---. Will AI Eat the Earth?" Team Human (March 6, 2026) ["The digital world promises a frictionless existence of infinite growth, convenience, and total scale. But what happens when that virtual map starts consuming the real territory? Rushkoff reflects on his recent appointment to the Club of Rome and their legendary 1972 warning: The Limits to Growth. From the massive water and energy drained by AI data centers to Jeff Bezos' intentional dismantling of the Washington Post, Rushkoff breaks down how the tech elite are using the digital simulation to extract the last remaining value from the physical world. The oligarchs want a frictionless reality where they own the platform and avoid the messy negotiations of actual human connection. But reall life, and real democracy, requires friction. It requires the awkward, inefficient, and vital collisions of human beings sharing a local space. It is time to stop confusing the map with the territory. Find the others. Embrace the friction."]

Saini, Angela. "Junk Science: How belief in biological racial difference pollutes the world of science, from eugenics to genetics." American Scholar (August 9, 2019) ["For our 100th episode, we welcome back science journalist Angela Saini, whose work deflates the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum. With far-right nationalism and white supremacy on the rise around the world, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2019, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us."]

What Do You Really Want Out of Life? - Music Mix #9 (Revised)

Robyn Hitchcock; Camper van Beethoven; Cracker; The Rolling Stones; The Shins; Songs: Ohia; Kristin Hersh; Throwing Muses; Goldfrapp; The White Stripes; Radiohead; Babe Rainbow; Raspberries; David Bowie; Soccer Mommy; Ten Years After; Ian Noe; Cole Chaney; Cody Lee Moomey; Miranda Lambert; Mannequin Pussy; The Rumjacks; Blue Oyster Cult; Talking Heads; Yo La Tengo; The Turtles; Belle and Sebastian; Tame Impala; Lou Reed; The Yardbirds; Stephen Trask; Neko Case; Air; Jimi Hendrix; Stereolab; Jacqueline Taieb; PJ Harvey; The Cure; Mark Saunders; The Smashing Pumpkins; WILCO; Pink Floyd; Mitski; Arcadde Fire; Silver Jews; Erykah Badu; Sonic Youth; The Black Keys; Mazzy Star; Oasis; Frankie Goes to Hollywood; Led Zeppelin; Portishead; Aerosmith; Deep Purple; Alice Cooper; Steely Dan; Mega; Patrick Watson; Warren  Zevon; Kacey Musgraves 

What Do You Really Want Out of Life? - Music Mix #9 (Revised)

ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #8

The most transformative form of learning is to educate yourself about a subject and then develop that knowledge for sharing with others. In the process of sharing your knowledge and discussing it with others, you relearn it in a thorough way, while also beginning to see it through many other perspectives. - Michael Benton

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“For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hard-liners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears. Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behavior by narrow-minded individuals.” -- Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (2012 winner of Oscar for Best Foreign Film; 2017 nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film)

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The popular stereotypes in film and on TV of sexual deviants and gender outlaws, those who lived outside the boundaries of accepted behavior, were usually portrayed as self-hating, degenerate outsiders. It was clear in these examples that these choices would lead to a life of quiet desperation, or, of quick extermination. These gender outlaws, like popular Western outlaws, were always at risk of being taken down by self-prescribed regulators of social codes. Like Brandon Teena (Boys Don’t Cry https://youtu.be/mYpUhVvfGeg ), they were always vulnerable to attack, violation, and murder for their perceived transgressions of the social order.

This extreme anxiety led to the construction of a psychological defense system that relied upon a smooth and seamless internalization of social myths about gender and sexuality, so effective that I forgot that I had ever thought or felt differently. Even more disturbing, I have had to recognize that my self-destructive internalization of restrictive sexual and gender roles led to my own complicity in reproducing the violence and oppression of our society. I was no longer the kind, sensitive kid who wanted to create something beautiful; instead, I was the angry, anti-social bully who was going to make others pay for my pain. Like Zachary growing up in the working-class male world of Quebec (C.R.A.Z.Y. https://youtu.be/sCvQ2OpCj8A ), I sought to erase my empathy for others and adopted the hard tough guise. Slowly, later in life, through the patient guidance of caring people who taught me about love, I learned to recognize my betrayal of my inner self in order to fit into society’s strict gender roles. As I once again began to open myself up to my creative side, I also became very interested in how other artists understand and portray identity issues. This helped me to recognize the warring selves inside me and allowed me to put them into dialogue with each other, with positive role models in my community, and with the cinema I study. -- Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)

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Alston, Philp. "Extreme Poverty in America: Read the U.N. Special Monitor Report. The Guardian (December 15, 2017) ["Philp Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has spent 10 days touring America. This is the introduction to his report."]

Amadae, S.M. "Where are We Going? Nuclear War Part 1." Past Present Future (February 15, 2026) ["For the first in a new series of conversations exploring the future that faces us all, David talks to S. M. Amadae about what nuclear weapons and the prospect of nuclear war have done to the human condition. Was 1945 the decisive watershed in the history of humanity? What made the possibility of nuclear conflict different from previous ideas of catastrophe? How did we reconcile ourselves to the horrifying consequences of what we had built?"]

Bergland, Renee. "The Enchanted Science of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin."  Wonder Cabinet (February 28, 2026) ["Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin both saw nature as alive with mystery – and treated wonder as a way of knowing. Literary scholar and science historian Renee Bergland, author of "Natural Magic," is our guide to the forgotten kinship between the reclusive poet and the celebrated naturalist. Dickinson and Darwin never met, but they had at least one close friend in common. Both were both fascinated by fossils. Both wandered the woods and swamps near their homes, studying insects and documenting rare plants. They shared a vision of the interconnectedness of all life. We know that Dickinson, with her background in botany, geology, astronomy and chemistry, was enthralled by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. And it certainly seems possible that Darwin, with his degree in theology and his lifelong love of poetry and literature, might have admired the American poet whose close observations and delicate perceptions echoed his own. Bergland’s dual biography, just out in paper, is vivid, sparkling intellectual history – a window onto a time when scientific thinking still embraced emotion and wonder as modes of perception. Could the belief in “natural magic” that infused Dickinson’s and Darwin’s ideas restore our own faith in a universe alive with meaning? Our conversation about the poet who studied natural history and the naturalist who loved poetry suggests a way forward – by reclaiming their shared ecological wonder."]

Bonneval, Karine, Paco Calvo and Tom Greaves. "Plants." The Forum for Philosophy (April 2019) ["Philosophers have long assumed that plants are inferior to humans and animals: static, inert, and unreflective. But recent scientific advances suggest that we may have underestimated plants. They can process information, solve problems, and communicate. We explore what plants can teach us about intelligence and agency, and ask whether plants think."]

Boshernitsan, Rimma. "Our Emerging Planetary Nervous System." NOEMA (February 17, 2026) ["Human intelligence is beyond mere calculation. What makes us uniquely human isn’t our processing power, but our capacity to discern what matters — to sense the whisper beneath the data. Our intuition is our oldest inheritance, emerging from the quiet place technology can never reach: a consciousness capable of care. This knowing lives in the body, not merely the mind. Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist explains that the brain’s right hemisphere frames reality in terms of salience before the left hemisphere attempts to label it. In ambiguity, that framing becomes essential. Attention isn’t trivial — it’s where selection happens, where meaning emerges from noise. Where pause isn’t absence, but rather a different kind of presence. Intelligence begins with choice. As the philosopher Forrest Landry argues, it’s not how much we know, but what we choose to care about amid complexity. That is the ethical function of human intuition: to choose alignment, to decide what matters in the moment when information overwhelms us and the stakes shift beneath our feet. This intuitive attention becomes infrastructural when embedded in practice. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s research shows that communities that iteratively refine rules governing land and seasons often outperform centralized models — especially when governance is rooted in local knowledge and mutual accountability. And Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that Indigenous practices — whether tending sweetgrass or reading fire patterns — encode centuries of attunement as collective wisdom. This isn’t mystical; it’s strategic. Global assessments confirm that this isn’t just a cultural preference, but a measurable practice."]

Butler, Judith. "This Is Wrong - On Executive Order 14168." London Review of Books 47.6 (April 3, 2025) ["It’s not surprising, then, that Executive Order 14168 includes among its dictates the need to correct any ‘misapplications’ of Bostock v. Clayton County. Indeed, the order shifts the basis of ‘an individual’s immutable biological classification’ away from genitalia to gametes: ‘“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell ... “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.’ Why this shift? And what does it mean that the government can change its mind about what is immutable? Is the ‘immutable’ mutable after all? The existence of intersexed people has long posed a problem for sex assignment since they are living evidence that genitalia can be combined or mixed in certain ways. Gametes must have seemed less problematic. There is a larger one and a smaller one: let that be the immutable difference between female and male. There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’ They remind us that ‘sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.’ Interplay, interaction, co-construction are concepts widely used in the biological sciences. And, in turn, the biological sciences have made considerable contributions to gender theory, where Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, has long argued that biology interacts with cultural and historical processes to produce different ways of naming and living gender."]

Bydon, Mohamad. "Miraculous new treatments for spinal cord injuries." Big Brains (February 19, 2026) ["In this episode of Big Brains, Dr. Bydon walks us through the extraordinary, multi-stage surgery at UChicago that not only saved the boy’s life but helped him regain the ability to breathe, talk and move his fingers and toes. He examines the future of surgery for spinal cord injury patients—from minimally invasive surgery techniques to robotic surgery and AI to stem cell therapy—is even helping some paralyzed patients regain movement and even walk again after their injuries."]

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

Ehrlich, David. "Yes Review: Nadav Lapid’s Furiously Orgiastic Satire of Modern Israel Asks How People Can Live Normally." IndieWire (May 22, 2025) ["Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. 2019’s eruptive “Synonyms” was a semi-autobiographical identity crisis about a man who flees to Paris because he’s convinced that he was born in the Middle East by mistake, while 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” was a similarly personal scream into the wind — this one rooted in the blue-balled impotence of artistic resistance amid an exultantly genocidal ethnostate. Spasming with anger where Lapid’s previous features (“Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher”) searched for hope, both of these movies were fringed with a sense of resignation that they fought tooth-and-nail to shake off. As a result, I naturally assumed that his follow-up feature — written in Europe before the events of October 7, 2023, and then furiously reworked around them as Lapid conceded to the futility of escaping his background — would either be the wildest film that Lapid has ever made, or the most defeated."]

"Examples of Censorship from National Parks Conservation Association et. al. v. Department of the Interior, et. al." Democracy Forward (February 17, 2026) ["In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing the rewriting and sanitization of American history and science at national parks. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed suit on May 20, issuing a secretary’s order that launched the implementation of the president’s directive within the National Park Service (NPS). These orders have forced NPS staff to remove or censor exhibits that share factually accurate and relevant history and scientific knowledge. The National Park Service escalated its implementation of the Secretary’s order in January 2026, with interpretive signs — detailing the contributions of historically marginalized populations, atrocities perpetuated against particular communities, and the long term impact of scientific developments — either removed or flagged for removal. Those reportedly include the following examples:"]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Magic Mirror: On J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring." Weird Studies (February 25, 2026) ["This is the first of three episodes on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to be released in the course of the next several months. Focusing here on The Fellowship of the Ring, our hosts discuss the first leg of Frodo's journey into darkness, paying special attention to Tolkien's prose style, his modernism, his commitment to a truly magical realism, and his penchant for the weird and the tragic."]

Goldin, Hanna Lee. "A Non-Exhaustive List of Sources for When You Need Real Information, Not Just Content." Card Catalog (February 5, 2026) ["How to find trustworthy sources for breaking news, health questions, financial decisions, and local elections."]

---. "When Your AI Asks How You're Feeling: A Field Guide to Engagement Manipulation." Card Catalog (February 12, 2026) ["AI systems use dark patterns to keep conversations going longer than necessary. Learning to spot them protects your time and attention."]

Hirschel-Burns, Tim. "Assaults and Batteries: Nicolas Niarchos digs up the hidden costs behind your rechargeables." Los Angeles Review of Books (February 24, 2026)  ["The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, a new book by journalist Nicolas Niarchos, paints a semi-apocalyptic vision of that cobalt’s origins: corrupt bargains between politicians and foreign companies, displacement and environmental destruction, cave-ins that bury miners alive. The book comes as part of a surge of interest in the unsavory trade-offs behind the energy transition (other notable members of this emerging genre include Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism from last year and Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives from 2022). As Niarchos puts it, the energy transition exchanges “cleaner power at home for pollution and suffering elsewhere.”]

Kouddous, Sharif Abdel. "Israeli Soldiers Killed Gaza Aid Workers at Point Blank Range in 2025 Massacre: Report." Drop Site (February 23, 2026) ["A minute-by-minute reconstruction of the massacre by Earshot and Forensic Architecture found Israeli soldiers fired over 900 bullets at the aid workers, killing 15."]

Nestle, Marion. "The Money Behind Ultra-Processed Food." Capitalisn't (May 23, 2024) ["Critics of the food industry allege that it relentlessly pursues profits at the expense of public health. They claim that food companies "ultra-process" products with salt, sugar, fats, and artificial additives, employ advanced marketing tactics to manipulate and hook consumers, and are ultimately responsible for a global epidemic of health ailments. Companies are also launching entirely new lines and categories of food products catering to diabetes or weight management drugs such as Ozempic. Marion Nestle, a leading public health advocate, nutritionist, award-winning author, and Professor Emerita at New York University, first warned in her 2002 book "Food Politics" that Big Food deliberately designs unhealthy, addictive products to drive sales, often backed by industry-funded research that misleads consumers. This week on Capitalisn't, Nestle joins Bethany and Luigi to explore the ultra-processed food industry through the interplay of four lenses: the underlying science, business motives, influencing consumer perceptions, and public policy."]

Petcu, Lulia Teodora. "Shielded by Power: Jeffrey Epstein, The Justice System and the Persistence of Elite Privilege." Diggiti (December 12, 2025) ["This paper examines Jeffrey Epstein’s case through C. Wright Mills’ concept of the power elite to explore how elite privilege shapes accountability in the justice system. Epstein’s wealth, political connections, and social networks illustrate how elites are insulated from legal consequences, while media coverage and public discourse reveal fragmented trust in institutions."]

Pickard, Hannah. "Addiction." Overthink (February 24, 2026) ["To what extent is drug addiction voluntary? In episode 162 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with philosopher Hanna Pickard about her book, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. They discuss how the “broken brain model” of addiction emerged to combat the moral model of addiction and explore the consequences of both of these models. What drives some people into addiction? What does it mean to say that addiction is a brain disease? How should responsibility and blame fit into our understanding of this condition? And how do we identify when somebody’s patterns of drug use have crossed the threshold into addiction?" Works Discussed:: Alan Leshner, “Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters”; Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction; Hanna Pickard, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction]

Pistor, Katerina. "How Inequality Distorts the Law." Capitalisn't (February 19, 2026) ['If we want to understand why capitalism feels broken, do we need to stop looking at the economy and start looking at the legal code that underpins it? In our system, capital is often described as money, machinery, or raw materials. But Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor argues that capital is actually a legal invention. An asset, whether it's a plot of land, an idea, or a promise of future pay, only becomes capital when it is given the right legal coding. Pistor suggests that lawyers are the true coders of capitalism. They use the law to "enclose" assets, from land to user data, giving owners the power to exclude others and monetize that value. She argues for injecting principles of "fairness and reciprocity" back into private law, ensuring that contracts aren't just tools for the powerful to extract value from the weak. Luigi Zingales suggests that large corporations have become so powerful we may need a new branch of "quasi-public law" to govern the asymmetry between an individual consumer and a corporate giant. This episode explores the deep, often invisible architecture of our economic system and asks whether we can ever truly tame corporate power without rewriting the rules of the game."]

Robinson, Nathan J. "Critics of “Don’t Look Up” Are Missing the Entire Point." Current Affairs (December 26, 2021) ["It’s not about Americans being dumb sheep, but about how billionaires manipulate us into trusting them, how the reckless pursuit of profit can have catastrophic consequences, and the need to come together to fight those who prevent us from solving our problems."]

Robson, Leo. "Godardorama." New Left Review (February 17, 2026) ["Richard Linklater’s shrewd and absorbing film catches this ‘feeling of freedom’ that Godard invoked. Shot in black-and-white with a French-speaking cast, it tells the story of the making of À Bout de Souffle, which Godard, a critic and reporter with a handful of shorts to his name, shot for little money over twenty days in the late summer of 1959. There was no script, only a set-up, derived by François Truffaut from a news story. Michel, after stealing a car from an American soldier at Marseilles Old Port, shoots a policeman who was trying to flag him down, then hitches a ride to Paris, where he steals money from his girlfriend Liliane and hangs around with his ‘favourite’ girlfriend Patricia, an American student and aspiring journalist, until she decides to turn him in. À Bout de Souffle is now a monument, as reflected in the existence of Linklater’s portrait, but its central properties are casualness and offhand intimacy. The director Roger Vadim claimed that when he bumped into Godard shortly before production began, all he had was a few phrases scrawled on the inside of a matchbook, among them ‘She has an accent’ and ‘It ends badly. Well, no. Finally it ends well. Or it ends badly.’"]

Solnit, Rebecca. "Hope After the End." Wonder Cabinet (February 14, 2026) ["How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us. But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book "The Beginning Comes After the End," writer and activist Rebecca Solnit makes the case that something is dying, all right — because something better is being born. A rising worldview that embraces antiracism, feminism, environmental thinking, Indigenous and non-Western ideas, and a vision of a more interconnected, compassionate world. Solnit is an engaged writer and intellectual in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. Her new book picks up where her earlier bestseller “Hope in the Dark” left off — with an argument against despair and historical amnesia. In this conversation, we explore the extraordinary scale of progressive social, political, scientific and cultural change over the past century, the roots of Solnit’s stance of “pragmatic, embodied hope,” her thoughts on “moral wonder, “ and her years in San Francisco’s underground punk rock scene. She also tells us what she’d put in our own wonder cabinet: an AIDS Memorial Quilt square sewn by Rosa Parks."]

Suh, Elissa. "Against Nature: Feral Eating and Feminist Performance." Notebook (February 20, 2026) ["In cinema, the image of a woman eating is seldom incidental: Romcoms are rife with Bridget Joneses who cannot control themselves. By contrast, for men, eating is often a display of authority or menace, of power rather than pathology. Perhaps this additional scrutiny can work as an advantage. When a camera watches women eat, it opens the possibility of performance before they even speak, turning their appetite into a subtle assertion of oneself—a rejection of expectations or a claim to private desires. How or what she eats marks her difference: It can measure her position in the world or the distance she keeps from it. Like Vitti, these women can be feral, which is above all a mark of refusal; they are not domesticated, not assimilated, but fragile and dangerous, out of bounds."]

Suton, Koraljka. "Villeneuve’s Arrival: A Deep Exploration of the Importance of Language, the Nature of Time and the Dichotomy of Human Existence." Cinephilia and Beyond (November 18, 2024) ["Being a linguist, Louise knows very well that language is the foundation of civilization. It is “the glue that holds a people together,” as she states in her book, making it possible for us to communicate effectively and find common ground. Language helps us bring forth our internal landscapes in ways that are extremely basic and deeply profound. Much like music, it enables us to convey and share with one another the intricacies that make up the human experience, which, in turn, gives us a chance to feel seen and understood. This striving for true understanding is not just inherent in Louise’s vocation as a linguist but is also one of her core qualities as a person. Unlike the majority of the world and its leaders, she is not the least bit interested in playing zero-sum games but rather seeks to utilize our ability for meaningful interpersonal connection so as to arrive at a win-win. Even though the aliens in Arrival are as unhuman-like as it gets, both in terms of language and appearance, Louise’s primary objective is, and remains throughout the film, to truly understand them. And, in doing so, bridge the gap between the ‘self’ and ‘other’. How does she do it? By connecting with them—being to being. This delicate unfolding is touching and awe-inspiring to behold."]

Thrasher, Steven W. "From Gaza to Minneapolis We Are Still Being Told to Disbelieve Our Eyes." Literary Hub (February 4, 2026)  ["The far more dangerous problem has been western news outlets and governments pretending that horrors that actually did happen did not occur. Journalists, more than 270 of them, gave their lives to show the world the genocide in Gaza. So did more than 300 United Nations workers and more than 1,500 healthcare workers. As did tens of thousands of Palestinians, many who pleaded with the world for help, human-to-human, mother-to-mother, child-to-child, using their phone cameras to prove to the world the depth of their desperation and persecution. There is little excuse for not knowing what happened in Gaza; everyday, it was as if the screams of 10,000 Anne Franks had been beamed right into the pockets of millions of Americans during World War II. And the people of the world largely believed their fellow humans in Gaza, when they heard them scream and cry. But the news media and the governments of the West pretended that what was happening was not, in fact, happening. They proved that the denial of verifiable reality is as dangerous as manufactured propaganda. They physically beat, expelled and even deported students who said the genocide was unacceptable. They fired journalists and blacklisted professors who reported what anyone could see, if they chose to. They cancelled the visas of artists who spoke the truth."]

Breaking Points: On America and Israel Attacking Iran

Propaganda = Persuasion Without Consent (Music Mix 53)

 Daniele Luppi; Parquet Courts; Karen O; Pond; Tracy Bryant; Rising Appalachia; Savoy Motel; La Luz; Wolf Alice; Porcupine Tree; New Candys; Delerium; Sarah McLachlan; Pixies; Fontaines D.C.; The Cars; Kate Bush; Emma Ruth Rundle; Die Spitz; Highly Suspect; SAULT; De La Soul; Shintaro Sakamoto; Frank Zappa; Jethro Tull; The Budos Band; Tunde Adebimpe; Turnstile; Nektar; Ghostface Killer; Adrian Younge; Raekwon; RZA; Cardinals; The Smile; Elton John; Steely Dan; Minnie Riperton; Fiona Apple; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; Tool; The Beatles; Beans; Blonde Redhead; Stick Figure; Max Winter; Bill Callahan; Modern Woman; Maxine Funk; James Gang

Propaganda = Persuasion Without Consent (Music Mix 53)