Bascompte, Jordi and Rodrigo Cámara-Leret. "Plants, Languages, and the Loss of Medicinal Knowledge." Many Minds (October 7, 2021) ["Our planet is home to an astonishing diversity of plants—close to 400,000 species. Over the millennia, indigenous communities around the world have been studying those plants, experimenting with them, using them as a sort of free-growing pharmacy. Certain species, prepared in certain ways, might be used for digestive ailments; others for the skin, teeth, or liver. But this vast trove of medicinal knowledge is now under threat. Under two threats, really—we’re losing plant species and we’re losing indigenous languages and cultures. My guests this week are Dr. Rodrigo Camara-Leret and Dr. Jordi Bascompte, both of the University of Zurich’s Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies. Rodrigo is a Senior Researcher there, and Jordi is a Full Professor. We discuss their remarkable recent paper titled ‘Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge‘, published this past summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In the paper, Rodrigo and Jordi analyzed data from three hotspots of biocultural diversity—New Guinea, the Northwest Amazon, and North America. They were trying to better understand the nature of indigenous medicinal knowledge, the threats it is facing, and how we might best protect it. This is one of those papers that immediately grabbed me. It’s deeply, unclassifiably interdisciplinary; it takes on an urgent question with a clever approach; and it tells us something we genuinely didn’t already know. As I already said, our global stores of ethnobotanical knowledge are under threat—and from different directions. What Jordi & Rodrigo’s work shows is that, in order to protect that knowledge, we need to focus on protecting indigenous languages. Before we get to it, just wanted to mention that, as it happens, Jordi was just very recently awarded the prestigious Ramon Margalef prize for his groundbreaking contributions to the field of ecology. So it was an extra special honor to have him on this episode."]
Coombs, Wayne. "Analysis: The Pharmaceutical Colonization of Appalachia." The Daily Yonder (February 7, 2018) ["To fight the opioid epidemic, first we need to identify the enemy. Research on the theory of historical trauma – affecting entire populations and regions – could point us toward more effective treatment."]
Cooperrider, Kensy. "WEIRD: Adventures of an Acronym." Many Minds (July 1, 2020) ["The topic is the acronym WEIRD—maybe you’ve heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It’s become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was first introduced 10 years ago. On this episode I talk about its origins and the far-reaching influence it’s had since."]
Cullors, Patrisse and Ken Rosenberg. "Bedlam: Film Shows How Decades of Healthcare Underfunding Made Jails 'De Facto Mental Asylums.'" Democracy Now (December 27, 2019) ["Are prisons and jails America’s “new asylums”? A new documentary looks at how a disproportionate number of underserved people facing mental health challenges have been swept into the criminal justice system, where they lack adequate treatment. Nearly 15% of men and more than 30% of women in jails have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder. For many of them, jail is their first point of entry into mental health treatment. The documentary “Bedlam” was filmed over five years in Los Angeles County’s overwhelmed and vastly under-resourced Emergency Psychiatry Services, a jail warehousing thousands of psychiatric patients, and the homes — and homeless encampments — of people who are living with severe mental illness. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will air on PBS “Independent Lens” this April. The film features many people, including Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who share their personal experiences with family members’ chronic psychiatric conditions that have pushed them into the path of police officers, ER doctors and nurses, lawyers and prison guards. We speak with Cullors, who shares her experience with seeking help for her brother Monte, who has lived with schizoaffective disorder since he was a teenager, and director Ken Rosenberg, an addiction psychiatrist affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City whose own sister struggled with schizophrenia."]
Davies, Surekha and Natalie Lawrence. "Monsters and Their Makers." Many Minds (October 22, 2025) ["It seems we’ve always had monsters among us. We’ve long been enthralled by dragons and giants, by the likes of Frankenstein and Godzilla and Dracula, by witches and werewolves and countless others. They roam our maps and creation myths; they crop up in our dreams, in our children’s books, in our political rhetoric. Where do these beings spring from? What do they do for us? How have they changed over time? And, ultimately, what do our monsters say about their makers? My guests today are Dr. Natalie Lawrence and Dr. Surekha Davies. Both are historians of science and authors of recent books on monsters: Natalie’s book is Enchanted creatures: Our monsters and their meanings. Surekha’s book is Humans: A monstrous history. Here, Surekha, Natalie, and I talk about monsters as category breakers and boundary walkers—and about how monstrosity is in the eye of the beholder. We walk through a menagerie of monsters—from the apocryphal blemmyes of old travelogues, to a hairy-faced girl in 16th century France, to the figure of Caliban in The Tempest. We discuss the psychological and cultural forces that generate monsters. And we talk about whether anyone would want to live in a world without them. Along the way, we touch on the “monstrification” of social groups; psychoanalysis; our primal fear of snakes; curiosity cabinets; therianthropes and the Cave of the Three Brothers; the relationship between monstrosity and geography; our long fascination with so-called monstrous births; the Muppet Show; dinosaurs and sea creatures; and the question of what monsters might do for children in particular."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "On David Lynch." Weird Studies #184 (February 5, 2025) ["David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the weird. To honor his memory, they decided to devote an episode to Lynch's work as a whole, with special attention paid to Eraserhead—the nightmarish debut that announced his singular vision to the world. A study in dread, desire, and the uncanny, Eraserhead remains one of the most disturbing and mysterious works of American cinema. In this episode, we explore what makes it so powerful and how it connects to Lynch’s larger artistic project."]
Finnerty, Paraic, Linda Freeman and Fiona Green. "Emily Dickinson." In Our Time (May 11, 2017) ["Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of Emily Dickinson, arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation of her grew. With her distinctive voice, her abundance, and her exploration of her private world, she is now seen by many as one of the great lyric poets. "]
G'Sell, Eileen. "Uncanny Intimacies, Abject Desires." Film Quarterly (September 1, 2026) ["This article introduces the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25.” What did Mulholland Drive (2001) say about female fantasy, suffering, and desire at the turn of the twenty-first century, and how might that matter today? Rather than debate Mulholland Drive’s degree of feminism or the extent to which David Lynch himself proved able to create feminist cinema, the authors of this dossier approach the film as an intricate text that frustrates traditional interpretive approaches based on the specter of the “male gaze” and the assumption of coherent, consistent character subjectivities. Consulting canonical feminist and philosophical texts as well as contemporary queer theory, sound studies, and star studies, the dossier authors write from the perspective of differing generations and disciplines, offering a lively array of critical reads."]
Lim, Dennis. "Rouge: Love Out of Time." Current (June 21, 2022) ["Rouge (1987) opens with a shock of beauty—or rather two shocks, in the forms of the young lovers whose doomed romance is about to unfold. In a wordless prologue, a woman (Anita Mui Yim-fong)—clad in a black, dragonfly-patterned cheongsam and framed in close-up against an expanse of floral wallpaper—locks eyes with the viewer, looking into the camera as if it were a mirror. A makeup ritual is in progress: she paints on her eyebrows, then holds a piece of red dye paper to her pursed lips, turning them scarlet. A fade to black transports us to a bustling restaurant where courtesans mingle with suitors, and where one patron (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing) is making a literally head-turning entrance. Ascending the stairs, seemingly beckoned by a siren song from above, he passes two women whose eyes coyly linger on him; he turns to acknowledge their gazes, his smile suggesting he knew he would have that effect. As he enters a room in which a courtesan is serenading a table of guests, the music stops, as if catching its breath."]
Luhrmann, Tonya and Kara Weisman. "Why Some See Spirits." Many Minds (April 28, 2021) ["Have you ever seen what seemed to be a spirit? Or heard a voice from an unseen source? Or maybe just sensed a presence and found yourself with goosebumps all over? These kinds of experiences can be incredibly powerful— life-altering, in fact—but they don’t happen often, and they don’t happen to everyone. So what drives this individual variation? Why do some of us have these extraordinary experiences while others never do? Could it be something about our personalities? Or our cultures? Could it have to do with the way we understand our minds? My guests on today’s show are Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, and Kara Weisman, a postdoc at UC-Riverside (formerly in the Psychology department at Stanford). Along with nine collaborators from across institutions, Tanya and Kara recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) titled ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths.’ This episode is nominally in our “behind the paper” series, but really it tells the story of not just this one paper but a much larger project: The Mind and Spirit project. The project was an unusual effort in scope: it included anthropologists and psychologists; it involved fieldwork in Ghana, Thailand, China, Vanuatu, and the US and practitioners of different faith traditions; it used both in-depth interviews and large-scale survey testing with thousands of participants. The particular paper we’re discussing today probed the basic idea that so-called “spiritual presence events”—those tingly, jarring, extraordinary experiences that some of us have—could be due to two main factors, factors that vary across individuals and cultures. The first proposed factor is how people understand the mind-world boundary. People who conceive of the mind as fundamentally leaky or “porous” might be more likely to have these kinds of experiences. The second proposed factor is how likely people are to get absorbed in their sensory experiences, to lose themselves in music, art, nature, movies, and so on. In our conversation, Tanya, Kara, and I talk about the deeper history behind this work; we break down what the constructs of porosity and absorption mean exactly and how they chose to measure them; we discuss the challenges and rewards of cross-disciplinary collaboration; and we talk about why I really need to read more William James. I wanted to feature this paper the moment I learned about it—it’s such an impressive piece of research on several levels. It’s also just certifiably cool. It’s dealing with cultural differences. It’s dealing with individual differences. And it’s dealing with variability in, to use the authors’ words “something as basic as what feels real to the senses.”"]
Marso, Lori Jo. "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): David Lynch, Simone de Beauvoir, and 'Feeling Like a Feminist'" Film Quarterly 80.1 (2026): 36 - 41. ["This article, part of the dossier “Mulholland Drive at 25,” argues that the “sweet dreams” of the women characters in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) invite viewers to “feel like feminists.” Engaging the writings of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex alongside Beauvoir’s 1959 essay on the myths of Brigitte Bardot, Marso finds subversive feminist dreamscapes in Lynch’s film. Feminist sweet dreams exist within the onscreen interactions of Betty/Diane with Rita/Camilla as the two women characters simultaneously navigate the demands of patriarchy and the mythic expectations for “becoming woman.” Lynch’s film demonstrates both gaps and overlap between gendered fantasies and ugly realities, inviting disorienting and uncomfortable feelings for viewers. These feelings, Marso suggests, can be interpreted and mobilized towards “feeling like feminists” such that viewers seek and find a feminist future within current conditions."]
Maclay, Willow Catelyn. "Loving the Monster." MUBI (2026) [Program notes written to accompany Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. An exploration of trans representation in the movies.]
Preciado, Paul B. Can the Monster Speak? Trans. Frank Wynne. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024. ["To introduce myself, since you are a group of 3,500 psychoanalysts and I feel a little alone on this side of the stage, to take a running jump and hoist myself onto the shoulders of the master of metamorphosis, the greatest analyst of the excesses that hide behind the façade of scientific reason and of the madness commonly referred to as mental health: Franz Kafka. In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote ‘Ein Bericht für eine Akademie’ – ‘A Report to an Academy’. The narrator of the text is an ape who, having learned human language, is appearing before an academy of the greatest scientific authorities to report to them on what human evolution has meant to him. The ape, who claims to be called Red Peter, explains how he was captured during a hunting expedition organized by the firm of Hagenbeck, transported to Europe aboard a steamship, is trained to perform in music halls, and how he later sprang into the community of human beings. Red Peter explains that in order to master human language and be accepted in the European society of his time, he had to forget his life as an ape. And how, in order to endure this oblivion and the violence of human society, he became an alcoholic. But the most interesting thing in Red Peter’s monologue is that Kafka does not present this process of humanization as a story of emancipation or of liberation from animality, but rather as a critique of colonial European humanism and its anthropological taxonomies. Once captured, the ape says he had no choice: if he did not wish to die locked up in a cage, he had to accept the ‘cage’ of human subjectivity. Just as the ape Red Peter addressed himself to scientists, so today I address myself to you, the academicians of psychoanalysis, from my ‘cage’ as a trans man. I, a body branded by medical and juridical discourse as ‘transsexual’, characterized in most of your psychoanalytic diagnoses as the subject of an ‘impossible metamorphosis’, find myself, according to most of your theories, beyond neurosis, on the cusp of – or perhaps even within the bounds of – psychosis, being incapable, according to you, of correctly resolving an Oedipus complex or having succumbed to penis envy. And so, it is from the position assigned to me by you as a mentally ill person that I address you, an ape-human in a new era. I am the monster who speaks to you. The monster you have created with your discourse and your clinical practices. I am the monster who gets up from the analyst’s couch and dares to speak, not as a patient, but as a citizen, as your monstrous equal."]
Prentice, Deborah and Robb Willer. "Pluralistic Ignorance: The psychology behind why people defend the norms they secretly despise." You Are Not So Smart #181 (July 30, 2020) ["The false belief that the majority supports an unpopular norm slows down the process of ending it and sways policy makers, employers, advertisers, and the rest of society to act as though they live in a world that isn’t really there. And When change is on the horizon, pluralistic ignorance keeps people on the fringe, the sort of people whose beliefs and attitudes will be phased out by that change, clinging to their outdated worldviews for longer than they would otherwise. It also keeps their opponents feeling less supported than they truly are while pushing people in the middle to favor the status quo. In the end, a make-believe status quo changes the way everyone acts and thinks. As sociologists Hubert J. O’Gorman and Stephen L. Garry once put it, in situations like these, people often “unintentionally serve as cultural carriers of cognitive error.” Pluralistic ignorance has been blamed for everything from excessive drinking on college campuses to the persistence of racial segregation well into the 1970s. So, how do you deal with such a strange and mind-twisting phenomenon? Well, for some norms, the solution is simple, though it can take a lot of organization and effort. You must ask everyone what they really think and feel, and then you broadcast that to everyone in some way. You must make the private public. You must make it safe to say what is really on your mind — or you simply reveal that it was safe to do so all along. Many scientists bring up the parable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story by Hans Christian Andersen, a vain emperor hires two tailors who tell him they’ve made a suit of clothes so fine that it appears invisible to people who are unfit for their job or are very dumb. The trick, of course, is that the tailors haven’t made anything at all. All the emperor’s lackeys and subjects act as if his clothes were beautiful and amazing out of fear of appearing stupid or unfit, until finally a child points out that the emperor is walking around naked. At that point, everyone sighs in relief and feels safe to say what they were thinking all along. Stories with similar plots go back to antiquity, so the idea has been with us for a long time. The takeaway is usually: if someone has the courage to speak up, then the spell will be broken."]
Roth, Ben. "Eugene Tssui: (R)Evolutionary Imagination." Doors of Perception (August 30, 2026) ["Eugene Tssui (pronounced ‘sway’) is a polymath on a mission to bring about a world of beauty, imagination and moral accountability. Instead of working against the planet, his design philosophy is one of restoration and kinship with all of life, recognizing Nature as the supreme teacher. As an architect, clothing and industrial designer, musician, athlete, professor, author and inventor —Tssui works in one continuous field of experimentation, constantly challenging what conformity and unquestioned assumption have declared settled. In his flamboyant suits and capes, he looks like a galactic ambassador out of a Star Trek movie, yet his creations are deeply rooted in this world: a building’s shape inspired by the body of a tardigrade, or termite mound. That uncompromising faithfulness to his ideal is also why so few of his buildings were ever built. Discovering Tssui in this video a few days ago served as a powerful reminder of how narrow the corridors of possibility are that we normally navigate. So much of our life comes down to picking from what the market has already made and put in front of us, while imagination and creation — the most human faculties we have — wither away. Turning toward the world and creating with it, we fall in love with it again."]
Rovelli, Carlo. "On the Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework." Literary Hub (September 21, 2026) ["A child born in a village naturally thinks that the whole world is like that village. He expects to encounter outside it the same mores, the same way of dressing, the same language. When he finds that the world is otherwise, he is amazed. This amazement is the beauty of learning. And this is science. It is not always easy, however, to free ourselves from the ideas and outlook of our native village. Even learning that in Rome cats are called gatti, and in New Delhi billee, does not prevent us from having a hard time thinking that the proper, true name of the feline is not “cat.” Reality is more complex and more varied than we think. We instinctively mistake local peculiarities for universal truths. We do not easily realize that the things which seem obvious to us are just aspects of “the garden that makes us so ferocious,” as Dante calls the Earth when he views it, at the end of Paradiso, far below and tiny, from the heights of the heavens of fixed stars. The peculiarity of the surface of the Earth, the village in which we happen to be born, generates prejudices in us that are not easy to recognize. If we do not want to be like the child that only knows its own village, we must learn to separate ourselves from these prejudices."]
Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000: 1-9. ["Vandana Shiva charts the impacts of globalized, corporate agriculture on small farmers, the environment, and the quality of the food we eat. With chapters on genetically engineered seeds, patents on life, mad cows and sacred cows, and the debate on shrimp farming, this is an impassioned and inspiring book that will shape the debate about genetic engineering and commercial agriculture for years to come."]
Singh, Manvir. "The Shaman, The Witch, and the Folktale." Many Minds (July 15, 2020) ["Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh. Manvir recently finished his PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and will soon begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Manvir studies human culture. In particular, he focuses on certain cultural practices and products that spring up over and over again across the world’s societies—often in strikingly similar form. To explain these similarities, Manvir appeals to the human mind. He argues that our universal mental machinery plays a powerful role in molding our cultural traditions and products. We start by diving deep into the topic of shamanism. We talk about why humans around the world have long put their trust in shamans—and why they still do today. We discuss why it is that, to secure that trust, shamans everywhere enter trance states, deny themselves worldly comforts, and undergo harrowing initiation rituals. We then move beyond shamanism. We talk about why we believe in witches and why we like stories about orphans and other sympathetic characters. We consider why people the world over know a lullaby when they hear one. Part of what I admire about Manvir’s work is his balanced interest in both universal cultural patterns and fine-grained particulars. He’s interested in the forest, definitely, but also in the trees. And, trust me, there are a lot of fascinating trees here."]
Shlaim, Avi and Jamie Stern-Weiner. "Israel's Road to Genocide." Eurozine (August 26, 2026) ["In inflicting overwhelming force on Gaza’s civilian population with the intention of expelling it abroad, Israel’s devastating response to the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023 was consonant with, and rooted in, decades of state practice and ideology."]
Smalley, Gregory J. "2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)." 366 Weird Movies (March 25, 2015) ["Arthur C. Clarke said that Stanley Kubrick’s instructions in crafting 2001: A Space Odyssey were to create not merely a standard science fiction story of discovery, but rather “a theme of mythic grandeur.” The use of “Odyssey” in the title aptly suggests a space journey, which does of course occur; but it also reflects the mythological impact of Homer’s epic poem, which became one of the pillars of Greek civilization. While Richard Strauss’ fanfare that begins the familiar trumpet and timpani theme of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” certainly evokes the grandeur of the mysterious monolith that first appears to the uncomprehending apemen, it’s no accident that Kubrick selects a piece of music written to honor a philosophical fable about the necessity of creating new myths. By the 1960s, Darwin’s theory of evolution and other scientific advances had been eating away at the old European spiritual order for a century. In the space age, telescopes and satellites had, for the first time, turned little specks of light in the sky into real neighbors–the barren moon, the mysterious giant Jupiter shrouded in clouds of colored gas—that, incredibly, mankind might some day visit. Humanity’s definition of the universe and our place in it was changing, and Kubrick saw that our stock cosmic iconography was in desperate need of an upgrade. Enter 2001: A Space Odyssey, a cinematic rocket ride into the unpredictable sublimity of the future, a new myth of high modernity."]
Tolson, Franita. "Nomology (The Constitution)." Ologies (July 2, 2019) ["If you've never read The Constitution, you're like most of us. What does it even say? Most of Americans aren't law scholars, which is why we sat down with a Dean of USC's Gould School of Law, Professor Franita Tolson, to have her give us the crib sheet on the most important document in the free world. What's up with the amendments? What are the articles? What does it mean to be an American? What rights do we have? How did we get them and how do we keep them? We also discuss what it was like having Barack Obama as her law professor, if she reads the Apple Terms & Conditions, the Civil Rights Movement, Hamilton, whether Trump can be impeached, how to get familiar with the best SCOTUS gossip and Shonda Rhimes. By the end of the episode, you'll be able to wink at the Constitution and say "I get you" and you also might be engaging in more peaceful protests or applying to law school or hanging Professor Tolson's portrait on your wall."]
Tuerkheimer, Deborah. "'I Am Jane Doe': Cornell Case Reignites Debate over Rape Culture, Frats & Prosecuting Sex Crimes." Democracy Now (October 5, 2026) ['Revelations of sexual assault at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024 and how the university responded have sparked national outrage, reigniting a public debate about “the extent to which fraternities, the extent to which athletics really support this kind of culture that allows perpetrators to escape with little or no accountability,” says law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer. In 2024, seven male students avoided criminal prosecution after allegedly drugging and gang-raping a female student at the Chi Phi fraternity house. Cornell is now under intense scrutiny for its handling of the original investigation, which found that the student identified as Jane Doe was sexually assaulted by two of seven men, resulting in expulsions for two and lesser consequences for the other five. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has admitted that his office at the time did not independently investigate the case when it declined to bring charges. The DA has now reopened the case, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul has named Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to investigate how the case was handled. 'Around the country, we see a pattern of investigators, police officers and even prosecutors deciding at the outset that the allegations are not worth pursuing, and dismissing the case before any kind of investigation gets off the ground,' says Tuerkheimer."]
West, Stephen. "Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut." Philosophize This! (August 29, 2026) ["Today we talk about Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five. How war stories can distort the reality of war, how trauma can fracture our experience of time and identity, and why Billy Pilgrim becomes attracted to the strange philosophy of the Tralfamadorians. Hope you love it. :)"]
Zingales, Luigi and Bethany McLean. "Is Silicon Valley Turning Fascist?" Capitalisn't (April 3, 2025) ["Silicon Valley’s traditionally Democratic tech leaders are turning toward President Donald Trump, but are the reasons as straightforward as lower taxes and favorable regulations? Perhaps not, if we consider the influence of a convoluted political philosophy called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Washington and Silicon Valley power players, including Vice President JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, have all cited the philosophy’s ideas and one of its leading developers, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin was reportedly present at Trump’s inaugural gala as an informal guest of honor. In a nutshell, Dark Enlightenment rejects liberal democracy as an outdated software system incompatible with freedom and progress. Instead, it argues for breaking up the nation-state into smaller authoritarian city-states, which Yarvin calls “patchworks.” These patchworks will be controlled by tech corporations and run by CEOs. The theory is attached to another idea called accelerationism, which harnesses capitalism and technology to induce radical social change. In fact, Yarvin proposed a plan he called “RAGE”—or “Retire All Government Employees”—as far back as 2012. So, how did this obscure and oxymoronically named philosophy reach the highest echelons of business and political power? Bethany and Luigi trace the theory from its origins to its practical manifestations in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Silicon Valley’s race to develop artificial intelligence, and the growing push for “Freedom Cities” unfettered from federal regulations. Are the people embracing Dark Enlightenment espousing its ideas because they genuinely believe it is the way forward for humanity? Or do they believe it because it's a way for them to make money? What does it mean for capitalism and democracy if the administration runs the federal government like a tech company?"]
Zinn, Howard. "On His Life and Times." Against the Grain (September 28, 2026) ["Historian and activist, teacher and playwright — Howard Zinn told a different history of the United States, one of struggle between those on the bottom against those on top."]
