ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #16

"Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen . . ."
Mary Oliver, "Mindful"

Vesica Piscis by Joe Goodwin (2015: Acrylic on canvas and board)

Presented at a conference on art and psyche in Siracusa, Italy - Vesica Piscis, by contemporary artist Joe Goodwin, is an exercise in synchronicity. The work, not then complete, was noted by the artistas having a 'glaring compositional problem,' in the form of empty space. The addition of an off-centre circle, overlapping the one already on the canvas, resulted in an important symbol of sacred geometry, representing the intersection of the world of the divine with the world of matter and also the beginning of creation. Given that the conference held an audience mostly composed of Jungian analysts, the process and experience was well understood. - Elizabeth, S. The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic. White Lion Publishing, 2020: 24.

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Amad, Thaer, Feroze Sidhwa, and Poh Si Teng. "“American Doctor”: New Film Follows U.S. Doctors to Gaza as Israel Bombs Hospitals, Kills Staff, Patients." Democracy Now (August 14, 2026) ["The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals. Director Poh Si Teng says the film rose out of her “deep despair” over what was happening in Gaza, including deadly Israeli attacks on her former Al Jazeera colleagues. American Doctor is her attempt “to bring Palestine back to the United States,” Teng says. We also speak with two of the subjects of the film: trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and emergency physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who is Palestinian American."]

Beaupre, Mitchell. "Flesh and Fluids: Jane Schoenbrun on fighting repression through Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Letterboxd (August 6, 2026) ["Our relationship to sex as a culture is so unhealthy. So, of course we try to compartmentalize it or keep it on our browser window and never share it with another human being. I don’t think that is serving us as a people. I think that repression is the enemy, and especially the enemy of the artist, and this is a movie against repression." —⁠Jane Schoenbrun]

Berry, Wendell. "The Work of Local Culture." What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990: 153-169 [Excerpts posted on Dialogic with links to the entire text: July 8, 2012]

Bird, Kai. "On Roy Cohn, a Founding Father of Donald Trump’s America." The New Yorker Radio Hour (August 28, 2026) ["During the height of Roy Cohn’s friendship with Donald Trump, according to the historian Kai Bird, “they were on the phone with each other a dozen times a day.” Bird’s new book, “American Scoundrel,” details Cohn’s profound influence on Trump—whom he met as a young real-estate heir in the nineteen-seventies—and how Cohn is “haunting” politics in our time. “I had written about Roy Cohn in [previous biographies] as this nefarious, minor, awful figure who was disruptive and divisive and unethical. And I suddenly realized that the establishment that I’d been writing about for forty years is gone. Their values and culture, the politics, the bipartisanship . . . that’s all gone,” he tells David Remnick. “Roy Cohn explains something about the dark side of America that I just didn’t understand.” They discuss Cohn’s early career as a prosecutor and his role as the “mastermind” of the McCarthy purges; his service as a lawyer and fixer for Mafia members, politicians, and celebrities; and an allegation of being involved in sex trafficking."]

Bui, Kevin. "Knives Out: Johnnie To's Election." Senses of Cinema #118 (May 2026) ["The specific intricacies of triad society have formed the backbone for many of To’s most acclaimed works since the creation of his Milkyway Image production banner, with films such as Chan sam ying hung (A Hero Never Dies, 1998) and Cheung foh (The Mission, 1999) probing the ways in which gang members juggle codes of loyalty and honour in their day-to-day duties, while others like PTU (2003) and Dai si gin (Breaking News, 2004) explore the group’s inextricably parasitic relationships with the police and the media. Premiering at Cannes in the spring of 2005, the synopsis of Hak se wui (Election, 2005) places it in the same breath as To’s other crime sagas. Another two years have passed, and it’s time for the elders of the Wo Shing to place their votes on who will be the organisation’s next chairman. A significant contingent voice their support for Lok (Simon Yam), a level-headed, ‘professional’ career criminal who would likely run the business with the discretion and finesse required to stay out of the warpath of the Hong Kong Police Force. But others in the committee make it known that they would rather have Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai) in charge; the much more volatile but otherwise effective candidate who they believe will strike fear back into the hearts of their enemies."]

Goldin, Hana Lee. "Books Have Always Been Destroyed. But Never Like This."  Card Catalog (August 25, 2026) ["Every one of these books, preserved to the letter, can now be read by no one. The scanned texts sit in Anthropic’s private collection, a library with no reading room and no public catalog. Models trained on that collection are built to avoid quoting it at length, because reproducing long passages for users is the copyright violation no court has excused. So the machines answer questions about books without ever showing the books themselves. When someone asks a model about a title that survives only in that collection, what comes back is a summary, written in the model’s words, with the original nowhere in reach. That arrangement changes something basic about how we can know things. Checking a claim against its source is the foundation of thinking for ourselves. When we can pull the book, find the page, and read the passage in context, we get to judge whether the summary was faithful and whether the quote meant what someone claims it meant. Remove the book and that judgment has nowhere to stand. We’re left taking the summary on trust, with no way to confirm and no standing to doubt. Whatever the model says the book said becomes, for all practical purposes, what the book said. That’s a transfer of authority from the page to the tool, from a source anyone could check to an answer nobody can. The transfer happens one unreachable book at a time. Maddeningly, every piece of this design is legal. Each one also removes a question that used to have an answer. The anonymous purchasing means nobody can list which books were destroyed, so nobody can rule out that some were the last copies anywhere. With the collection sealed, nobody can compare a stored text against the printed original it replaced, so even perfect fidelity can never be shown. As for whether the buying ever stopped, nobody outside knows that either, since the only reason anyone knows it started is that a piracy lawsuit dragged the records into the open. None of this took a conspiracy, only ordinary business decisions about what to disclose, all of them legal and every one of them closing a door."]

---. "The Unspoken Rules of Information Etiquette." Card Catalog (July 28, 2026) ["The rules of information etiquette can be traced by looking at where they get broken. Six come up over and over across every kind of exchange between people who know each other. Each is a norm we already follow most of the time, and every one registers as felt friction the moment it gets broken."]

Gullifer-Laurie, Isabella. "Through the Looking Glass: The Gold Diggers." Senses of Cinema #118 (May 2026) ["Sally Potter characterised her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983), as “a musical describing a female quest.” A labyrinthine, post-punk exploration of “the connections between gold, money and women,” Potter’s film is a mischievous, magic, anti-realist countercinema. It was poorly received in some quarters. “By any reasonable earthly standard,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times, “this thing – a 1983 oddity, sort of a feminist, deconstructionist, riddle-filled anti-musical, much of it set on the Icelandic tundra – is pure torture.” Indeed Potter’s film evinced a “promiscuous cross-breeding of avant-garde and mainstream” styles, mixing anti-capitalist satire with film theory about the male gaze, and Marxist conceptions of class and labour. “Perhaps,” as Sophie Mayer writes, it was the “determination to laugh in the face of power [that] upset those critics more than anything that the film says explicitly.” The Gold Diggers is challenging and erudite, a witty, ambiguous experiment resourced by inventive plans, schemes, and dreams."]

 Hinman, Ed. "The Barbarian in You: Vigor, Wonder, and Fellowship." The Personal Success Podcast #186 (August 24, 2026) ["Ed Hinman graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, played four years of college football, served eight years in the Marine Corps, earned a master's degree in history, and has spent the last seventeen and a half years in public figure protection at Gavin de Becker & Associates. On paper that reads like a straight line. It was not. In this conversation, Ed lays out the idea behind his book, The Barbarian in You: we inherited bodies and nervous systems built for vigor, wonder, and fellowship, and almost everything about modern life pulls us away from all three. Vigor is physical effort and the state change that follows it. Wonder is the spiritual and imaginative side, the part you reach through nature, art, reading, or belief. Fellowship is the one Ed says we are losing fastest, especially men. Ed explains why he redefines barbarian as anyone who lives with those three things, which is how a book about Julius Caesar and the Battle of Hastings also has chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and David Lee Roth. The turn in the conversation comes when Ryan asks where Ed's self-trust came from. Ed describes standing at a service academy career conference, surrounded by employers who wanted to hire him, feeling like a product on a shelf. He went home and told his wife he would rather eat baloney cereal than take one of those jobs. Ryan shares his own version of that moment, finishing an MBA and realizing he had completed somebody else's checklist. They also get into the part most conversations about this skip. Ed does not tell anyone to quit. He says there is honor in doing work you do not want to do so you can provide for your family, and then moves the question to the hours you actually control. What are you doing at home? The back half turns to men, fellowship, and resistance. Ed's advice on checking in on a struggling friend is two words long, and it is the most useful thing in the episode."]

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

Huh, Minj. "Embodied allegory in Sorry to Bother You: art, performance and movement in neoliberal capitalist ruins." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023 - 2024) ["In this paper, I examine how Riley brings art and politics together in Sorry to Bother You, specifically through embodied allegory. Such a deployment of allegory in recovering the bodies of the marginalized—in this case racially- and gender-marked laborers—resonates with how Annabel Patterson in Fables of Power (1991) shifts our attention towards Aesop as a “philosopher of materialism and the body” (38), an essential facet of Aesop which has long been eclipsed by “the legend of the witty Aethiopian slave” (34). To be sure, many episodes in Aesopian fables function as a critique of unequal power relations. The political message of these fables grasps wage laborers’ attention to this day when the urge to liberate oneself from the social hierarchy is still founded in capitalism, whose internal mechanism has an uneasy proximity to enslaved labor in pre-capitalist societies. I propose that Sorry to Bother You is a viable fable for this day and age, alerting us to the possible subversion of official values and dominant culture, and at the same time, encouraging us to attend to another device of allegory, which is the historical situatedness of its current author."]

Moon, Alexis. "Inherit the Wind: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner." Notebook (August 31, 2026)  ["“I think this act of taking something that we cannot typically see and then, through its movement, being able to confirm its existence—to show us and reassure us that it’s actually there—is very much akin to cinematic expression itself,” Kurosawa told The Film Stage. “So wind, to me, is not so much something that is spiritual, but I think of cinema as something that is there for us to be able to capture the wind … [it is] almost like cinematic expression itself. The finale is divorced from that which came before, seemingly standing outside of both time and space, with an ascension for the characters who have abandoned their agendas in favour of responding appropriately to the way the wind blows.”"]

Moor, Robert. "Tree Thinking." Wonder Cabinet (August 29, 2026) ['Can you imagine being a tree? Robert Moor has spent years trying—climbing into their canopies, studying their biology and learning to see trees in ways most of us don’t. He considers himself a “tree person.” Moor believes that when you spend a lot of time in trees, time slows down—and branching and pruning can become life lessons. He’s interested not just in how trees grow, but in what they might teach us about ourselves. In his book In Trees, he says his goal isn’t to anthropomorphize trees but to “arborize” humanity. Moor has taken his obsession with trees to unusual places: climbing to the tops of giant sequoias; traveling to Tokyo to meet master bonsai artists; becoming a “tree sitter” to protest an oil pipeline. He’s fascinated by “family trees” and Darwin’s Tree of Life, and by our own evolutionary history in the trees of Africa. He traveled to Ethiopia to see Lucy, the famous 3-million-year-old fossil skeleton, and to Tanzania to sleep in a chimpanzee nest. (It was a miserable experience.) He knows something about living among trees: 13 years ago, he and his husband moved from New York City to a cabin in the woods of British Columbia—and never left."]

Mrachacz, Lena. "Cinema as Commons: The Radical Act of Going to the Movies." Notebook August 24, 2026) ["A cinema as commons is not simply a different way of programming films. It is a different kind of social proposition altogether. What happens when a community gathers to watch a film it has chosen together, in a space it has collectively claimed, cannot be replicated by watching the same film alone. The film becomes a shared reference point, a starting place for conversation, a way of recognizing something in each other. The room produces a temporary public, and that public, however briefly, understands itself as one. People sit in the same room, encounter the same thing, and agree or disagree about what it means. That is very close to what democratic culture requires in order to function. It is also worth asking what those spaces are fighting against, or rather, what kind of relationship to cinema they are refusing. The dominant model of moving-image consumption today is not simply commercial; it is algorithmic. A small number of platforms now control not just distribution but also the conditions under which films get made, the data that determines what gets commissioned, the interface through which most people on earth encounter moving images. The logic is one of personalization: Every scroll, every pause, every abandoned film feeds a system designed to predict and preempt your next choice. What gets optimized, in the end, is your continued individual engagement with the platform. This is a form of enclosure of attention, of taste, of the very capacity to be surprised by something you didn’t already know you wanted. What gets lost is the condition of watching together in a room, with strangers and friends. This is why gathering matters. Streaming has made watching films easier, cheaper, and more solitary than at any point in cinema’s history. It has also made the act of gathering to watch something together feel, quietly, like a choice, one that requires a little more intention than it used to. But what the history of cinema as commons suggests is that this gathering was never incidental, that the room has always been part of the argument, as much as the film inside it. That idea is worth holding onto: a cinema that refuses to offer a service and insists on building a commons, and a public that understands itself as such. The cinemas carrying this impulse forward today are not simply alternatives to the multiplex but a response to a specific moment. It is not a coincidence that they are multiplying now, in a moment when public space is contracting, when political life feels increasingly managed from above, when the simple act of gathering together has started to feel like a position in itself. What these cinemas insist on, each in its own way, is that cinema can be more than entertainment delivered to an audience, that the room, and who fills it, and what happens after the lights come up, are themselves political questions worth taking seriously, and that those questions don’t resolve themselves once and for all. They have to be asked again and again, by every community. The cinema has always had the potential to function as a commons. In certain moments of political urgency, people have insisted on it. This is one of those moments."]   

Orleck, Annelise, et al. "Worker protections help (almost) everyone (Labor Rights)." Best of the Left #1263 (April 9, 2019) ["Today we take a look at the overwhelming benefits to society of labor, health and safety regulations and how the only people who don't come out ahead are those who have to pay for them."]

O'Sullivan, Suzanne. "The History of Bad Ideas: Overdiagnosis." Past Present Future (August 12, 2026) ["We come to the end of this series of bad ideas with a conversation with neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan about the problems of living in an age of diagnosis, when all medical conditions need a label and new labels appear all the time. What happens when the classification criteria for conditions like autism and ADHD get broader and broader? Are doctors or patients driving this? When does predictive testing do more harm than good? Why does advocacy for sufferers get in the way of good health? Is de-diagnosis achievable? The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan is available now https://bit.ly/3U1ZwOu]

Palmquist, Ben. "The 80 Year PR Campaign That Killed Universal Healthcare." Citations Needed #134 (April 21, 2021) ["Almost every wealthy country in the world has some type of universal healthcare system--except for the United States. With over 170 million of its citizens left to fend for themselves in a sprawling and complex maze of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, tax credits, child care subsidies, co-pays, deductibles and cost-sharing, the U.S. has not only the largest uninsured population, but also the most expensive system on Earth per capita. Why America doesn’t have a universal healthcare system has historically been explained away with a reductionist mix of pathologizing and circular reasoning. "America hates big government," "we love choice," "Americans distrust anything that reeks of socialism." And while this is true in some limited sense, it avoids the bigger question of why has American so-called "democracy" rejected the numerous proposals to enact a single payer or other forms of universal healthcare? While there may be some innate Protestant work ethic or rugged individual mentality at work here, there’s also been a decades-long multimillion dollar campaign funded by big business, doctor, pharmaceutical and hospital industry interests, and the insurance industry to convince the public to reject universal public healthcare. Indeed, if Americans were somehow intractably opposed to the notion––if they were hardwired to reject socialized medicine––these forces would never have had to spend so much money in the first place. On this episode, we explore the 80-year long campaign by capital to convince you to not support universal health programs, how these campaigns have historically fear-mongered against Communists, immigrants and African Americans, who benefits from a precarious, employer-controlled healthcare insurance system, and how this propaganda war on the American mind is anything but over. Our guest is Ben Palmquist, Director of the Health Care and Economic Democracy Program at Partners for Dignity and Rights."]

Richardson, Heather Cox. "The Right to Run For Office." Letters from an American (August 29, 2026) ["Republican lawmakers are attempting to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office, At least five Republican members of Congress want to prohibit them from holding federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships as well, Americans have struggled over questions of equality and immigration for more than a century, Anti-immigrant sentiment on the East Coast over Irish immigrants and on the West Coast over Chinese immigrants led to limits to their rights and created a caste system, Abraham Lincoln understood that giving up the principle of equality is an excuse for enslaving people and that we cannot make exceptions to the Declaration of Independence, Americans added the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to ensure that these exceptions could not be made, The Constitution's requirements for officeholders are the only allowable qualifications, neither states nor the federal government can add additional qualifications, The idea of discriminating against naturalized citizens is, in the words of law professor Pamela Karlan, "ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.""]

Scheonbrun, Jane. "On Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Film Comment (August 6, 2026) ["Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s third narrative feature, opens in theaters tomorrow. Dizzyingly meta-textual and deliciously, well, campy, the film stars Hannah Einbinder as an emerging queer filmmaker tasked with directing a reboot of a fictional ’80s slasher franchise titled Camp Miasma. She decides to visit the final girl of the original movie who is now an eccentric middle-aged recluse, played by Gillian Anderson, who’s living on the campgrounds where the first movie was shot. What unfolds is, in the of our critic Nathan Lee, a “gore-soaked, titty-bouncing, sexploitation fever dream girded by real conceptual brio.” Meditations on the perverse riddles of desire as well as the queer subtexts of many slasher films and the kind of strange identification they invite from the spectator are rendered with perfectly pitched horror theatrics and laugh-out-loud humor. Film Comment Editor Devika Girish spoke with Schoenbrun about this very rich text, trying to unpack the film’s layers—but not too hard, because if there’s one thing you can take away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, it’s that analysis is a boner-killer and mystery is hot."]

Stryker, Susan. "Changing Gender." LARB Radio Hour (August 28, 2026) ["Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Susan Stryker about her new book Changing Gender. Part cultural history, part grammar lesson, and part memoir, Changing Gender confronts not only the long historical slipperiness of gender and identity in U.S. culture, but also the ways in which the very language we use to describe and understand gender becomes a cultural battleground for meaning and identity. Stryker discusses the relatively recent origins of our thinking about "gender," the ways that thinking has been misunderstood and misappropriated for political skirmishes, and the difficulty of pinning down exactly what we're talking about when we talk about gender."]

Suri, Jeremi. "American Civil War." Lex Fridman Podcast (January 25, 2023) [Jeremi Suri discussing his latest book Civil War By Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy "The Civil War may have ended on the battlefield, but the fight for equality never did. In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before. In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point. What emerges is a vivid and at times unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself, but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history. "]

Torchin, Leshu. "Themed Playlist: The Female Gaze." Screen Culture (April 8, 2020) ["... a female gaze. This is a term often used as counterpoint to the male gaze, a term introduced by Laura Mulvey but which has enjoyed considerable escape velocity into popular culture. Whilst the male gaze centres a male spectator to identify with an active male protagonist in stories that speak to him, and which render female figures little more than an object or narrative device, a female gaze intervenes and expands and shatters this framework. A female gaze centres women and their desires. A female gaze can willfully displace the male gaze that derives pleasure from but refuses the agency of women on screen."]

Turner, Kyle. "Why Do Movies Look Like That Now?" AV Club (August 20, 2026) ["Cinematographers, colorists, and camera operators explain how shifting technologies and business expectations are blurring modern cinema's images together."]

Uzuner, Mustafa. "Universal Language: Grief is a Thing with Feathers." Off/Screen (July 2025) ["Matthew Rankin’s filmography is a kaleidoscope of surrealism, historical revisionism, and deadpan absurdism, rooted in a deep affection for what might be termed Canadiana—the quirks, contradictions, and mythologies of Canadian identity. From his early experimental shorts to his audacious feature debut, The Twentieth Century (2019), Rankin has carved a niche as a provocateur of national introspection, blending bureaucratic satire with Freudian psychodrama and visionary set design. Yet his latest film, Universal Language (2024), marks a striking evolution: a tender, cross-cultural ode to friendship, displacement, and the transcendent power of cinema. By tracing Rankin’s journey—from Québécois prime ministers and masturbating premiers to a Persian-inflected Winnipeg dreamscape—we encounter an artist whose work now bridges Canadian eccentricity with the humanist poetics of Iranian masters like Abbas Kiarostami. This synthesis situates Universal Language within transnational cinema, framing cultural hybridity not as a point of conflict but as an ongoing dialogue."]

West, Stephen. "Socrates and the Sophists." Philosophize This! #3 (June 23, 2013) ["This episode talks about how, in ancient Athens, teachers called sophists taught people how to argue well, even if they weren’t right. They believed truth was different for everyone. Socrates disagreed—he thought there were real answers about right and wrong. He spent his life asking people tough questions to help them think more clearly. People didn’t always like this, and eventually he was put on trial and sentenced to death. But his way of thinking inspired philosophy for generations." Further Reading: Socrates and the Sophists, Plato (2011); The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb (2000); Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Gregory Vlastos (1991)]

Fearful Symmetry - Music Mix #58

 Massive Attack; Elisabeth Fraser; Dinosaur Jr.; David Bowie; Belly; Dazy; E.R. Visit; Eliza McLamb; Jesca Hoop; Low Girl; Max Winter; The Cramps; Patti Smith; Fleetwood Mac; Herbie Hancock; Orua; Aesop Rock; Red Hot Chilli Peppers; Nirvana; Guided by Voices; Flobots; Iggy Pop; Heart; Routine Caffeine; Cream; Cardinals; Bruce Springsteen; Florence + the Machine; The Charlatans; Hillary Woods; Uncle Tupelo; Arcade Fire; The Church; Donovan; Chuck Prophet; Dominie Hooper; Okay Kaya; Alex G; Counting Crows; Dona Regina; Son Volt; The Beatles

Fearful Symmetry - Music Mix #58

Remembering Wendell Berry: August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026

 I was familiar with Wendell Berry's writings before I ever came to Kentucky. His work on community and place was an influence on the direction of my Ph'D work on the "politics of place"/"the power of stories" and the development of my own personal politics. I was fortunate to meet him a couple of times at events, but most memorable was the time he let us river rats camp out on the shore of his property one night during a multiday journey (we had requested the opportunity ahead of time). We were right below the "long legged house" :) RIP

Berry, Wendell. “The Work of Local Culture.” What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990: 153-169.

A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related. (Berry, 154)

A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. (Berry, 155)

This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper “prices of progress,” or made the business of folklorists. Nevertheless, local culture has a value, and part of its value is economic. This can be demonstrated readily enough. (Berry, 157)

... when a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another’s help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued. (Berry, 157-158)

... most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure and without listening to a single minute of sales talk. (Berry, 159)

But if, for example, there should occur a forty-eight-hour power failure, we would find ourselves in much more backward circumstances than our ancestors. (Berry, 159)

Professionalism means more interest in salaries and less interest in what used to be known as disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers—which may be true, but education cannot be improved, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition and of excellence—and this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed “career preparation” designed to facilitate the export of young careerists. (Berry, 164)

Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the costs of this education have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological. (Berry, 164)

The natural or normal course of human growing up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one’s parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That is the old norm. (Berry, 164-165)

The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a return and reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. In the present economy, however, where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation. (Berry, 165)

The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally, the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly. The only true and effective “operator’s manual for spaceship earth” is not a book that any human will ever write, it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures. (Berry, 166)

Lacking an authentic local culture, a place is open to exploitation, and ultimately to destruction, from the center. (Berry, 166)

Recommended Books That I Have Read: 2026

 (An ongoing year-long archive of what I have read and recommend to others)

Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. Picador, 2021.  ["A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court."]

Crabapple, Molly. Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Penguin/Random House, 2026. ["In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows. Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.” In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed? Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment." Print Version]

Everett, Percival. The Trees. Text Publishing Company, 2022. ["When hog thief Junior Junior Milam is found brutally murdered, the police of Money, Mississippi, are stumped. When his cousin is found dead in the same gruesome fashion, it’s time for the MBI—the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation—to step in. Special detectives Ed and Jim expect resistance from the local sheriff, the coroner and a string of racist White townsfolk. What they don’t expect is an inexplicable mystery: at each crime scene a second dead body was found—that of the same Black man. A man who looks eerily familiar. As similar murders are reported from Illinois to California, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. Provocative, fast-paced and morbidly funny, The Trees is an urgent novel of lasting importance, from an author with a finger on America’s pulse." Print version.]

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace, 2020. [Reread: "Case was the sharpest data thief in the matrix--until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction. Neuromancer was the first fully realized glimpse of humankind's digital future--a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations." Audio version.]

Harper, Jordan. A Violent Masterpiece. Mulholland Books, 2026. ["This epic crime novel tells a story of Los Angeles power brokers and those at the edge—and a single shattering incident that threatens to bring it all crashing down. Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein’s monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city. A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime … Jake Deal is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city’s chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud—until a job he can’t refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he’ll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt—and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA’s most powerful men, who call themselves “The Kids in the Candy Store.” Doug Gibson is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges—he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he’s hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he’ll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client “commits suicide” in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon—and become a warrior. Kara Delgado works for an underground private concierge company—a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties.She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara’s the only person who knows that Phoebe’s place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city. As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they’ll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion." Audio Version]

---. She Rides Shotgun. Ecco, 2018. ["A propulsive, gritty crime thriller about a girl marked for death who must fight and steal to stay alive, learning from the most frightening man she knows—her father. Eleven-year-old Polly McClusky is shy, too old for the teddy bear she carries with her everywhere, when she is unexpectedly reunited with her father, Nate, fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car. He takes her from the front of her school into a world of robbery, violence, and the constant threat of death. And he does it to save her life. Nate made dangerous enemies in prison—a gang called Aryan Steel has put out a bounty on his head, counting on its members on the outside to finish him off. They’ve already murdered his ex-wife, Polly’s mother. And Polly is their next target. Nate and Polly’s lives soon become a desperate life on the run, a series of narrow misses, of evading the bad guys and the police, of sleepless nights in motels. Out on the lam, Polly is forced to grow up early: with barely any time to mourn her mother, she must learn how to take a punch and pull off a drug-house heist. She finds herself transforming from a shy little girl into a true fighter. Nate, in turn, learns what it’s like to love fiercely and unconditionally—a love he’s never quite felt before. But can their powerful bond transcend the dangerous existence he’s carved out for them? Will they ever be able to live an honest life, free of fear? She Rides Shotgun is a gripping and emotionally wrenching suspense novel that upends even our most long-held expectations about heroes, villains, and victims. Nate takes Polly to save her life, but in the end it may very well be Polly who saves him."]

Hawkins, Scott. The Library at Mount Char. Penguin Random House, 2016. ["A missing God. A library with the secrets to the universe. A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away. Carolyn’s not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts. After all, she was a normal American herself once. That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father. In the years since then, Carolyn hasn’t had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father’s ancient customs. They’ve studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they’ve wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God. Now, Father is missing—perhaps even dead—and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded. And with it, control over all of creation. As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her, all of them with powers that far exceed her own. But Carolyn has accounted for this. And Carolyn has a plan. The only trouble is that in the war to make a new God, she’s forgotten to protect the things that make her human. Populated by an unforgettable cast of characters and propelled by a plot that will shock you again and again, The Library at Mount Char is at once horrifying and hilarious, mind-blowingly alien and heartbreakingly human, sweepingly visionary and nail-bitingly thrilling—and signals the arrival of a major new voice in fantasy." Audio version.]

Herbert, Frank. Dune. Penguin, 2005. ["Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the “spice” melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for.... When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream. A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction." Audio version]

Holt, Jim. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018. ["From Jim Holt, the New York Times bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?, comes an entertaining and accessible guide to the most profound scientific and mathematical ideas of recent centuries in When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction—and whether the universe truly has a future." Print version]

Jones, Stephen Graham. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Titan Books, 2025. ["A chilling historical horror set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. Perfect for fans of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab and Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice. Etsy Beaucarne is an academic who needs to get published. So when a journal written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure. As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather, and a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. The journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow. A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror." Audio version]

Labatut, Benjamin. The MANIAC. Penguin, 2024. ["From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI. Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control. A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species." Print version]

Langan, John. The Fisherman. Wood Horde, 2016. [Reread: In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it. Print version.]

Leede, C.J.  Headlights. Pan Macmillan, 2026.  ["An FBI agent with an uncanny ability to sense danger must hunt down a serial killer through the wilderness of Colorado, in this tense and gripping thrill ride by bestselling author CJ Leede. Perfect for fans of The Shining, Longlegs and Twin Peaks. Every instinct tells him to run. Every memory tells him he can’t. Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it's happening again. Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they've allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue. Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along – before he and the people he loves become the next victims." Audio Version]

Lytle, Mark Hamilton. America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon. Oxford University Press, 2006. ["In contrast with most histories of this period, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon does not treat the 1960s as a single historical moment or as successive waves of activism. Rather, it employs a chronological narrative to identify three distinct phases during which events of the era unfolded. The first began with the cultural ferment of the 1950s and ended with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. During the second phase, from 1964-1968, the "uncivil" wars began in earnest: Americans disagreed about new social and cultural mores, protests against the Vietnam War increased in size and vehemence, and American cities erupted in racial violence. From 1967 through 1968, all of these forces combined to divide Americans more deeply than they had been since the Civil War. In the third phase, Richard Nixon promised to bring Americans together. However, a host of new value and identity movements--environmentalists, consumer advocates, feminists, gay, Latino, and Native American activists--frustrated his design. Only after the Watergate scandals forced this polarizing figure from office did a measure of civility return to the nation's public discourse.America's Uncivil Wars captures the broad sweep of this tumultuous era, analyzing both the cultural and political influences on the movements of the 1960s. Paying particular attention to Latinos, Native Americans, feminism, and gay liberation, it integrates the politics of gender and race into the central political narrative. The book also covers such topics as McCarthyism; the FBI; rock and roll; teen culture in the 1950s; the origins of SDS, SNCC, and YAF; and the environmental and consumer movements. With its engaging narrative style and broad cultural emphasis, America's Uncivil Wars brings a fresh approach to our understanding of not only the 1960s but also U.S. history since 1945." Print version]

Mantel, Hillary. Wolf Hall. Fourth Estate, 2010. ["England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage." Print version]

Maughan, Tim. Infinite Detail. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2019. ["A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet. BEFORE: In Bristol’s center lies the Croft, a digital no-man’s-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, it’s become a center of creative counterculture. But it’s fraying at the edges, radicalizing from inside. How will it fare when its chief architect, Rushdi Mannan, takes off to meet his boyfriend in New York City—now the apotheosis of the new techno-utopian global metropolis? AFTER: An act of anonymous cyberterrorism has permanently switched off the Internet. Global trade, travel, and communication have collapsed. The luxuries that characterized modern life are scarce. In the Croft, Mary—who has visions of people presumed dead—is sought out by grieving families seeking connections to lost ones. But does Mary have a gift or is she just hustling to stay alive? Like Grids, who runs the Croft’s black market like personal turf. Or like Tyrone, who hoards music (culled from cassettes, the only medium to survive the crash) and tattered sneakers like treasure. The world of Infinite Detail is a small step shy of our own: utterly dependent on technology, constantly brokering autonomy and privacy for comfort and convenience. With Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan makes the hitherto-unimaginable come true: the End of the Internet, the End of the World as We Know It." Audio Version]

McRobert, Neil. Good Boy. Wild Hunt Books, 2025. ["After a boy vanishes on the outskirts of a small Northern town, a woman spies from her window a mysterious man digging a grave in the exact spot of the disappearance. However, when she confronts him, the man's true purpose is far more chilling than she could have imagined and the history of the town's fatal past unfolds. What has been hiding in this small northern town all these years?" Print version]

Montell, Amanda. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. Harper Collins, 2021. ["The New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how “cultish” groups, from Jonestown and Scientologists to SoulCycle and social media gurus, use language as the ultimate form of power. What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—these cultish groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to the specific language of fanaticism. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the linguistics and curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere. This smart, journalistic deep dive into the language of fanaticism reveals:From Jonestown to SoulCycle: An inside look at how the same linguistic techniques empower notorious cults, modern fitness studios, and even Instagram influencers. The Social Science of Influence: Why vague talk of “brainwashing” isn’t the full story, and how specific verbal tactics create intense communities and us-versus-them attitudes. How the same patterns of speech that build cults show up in MLMs, start-ups, and online, shaping the world you interact with every day. A fascinating exploration of the psychology of power and belief that answers the secret question we all have when we fall down the cult research rabbit hole." Audio version]

Moor, Robert. In Trees: An Exploration. Simon & Schuster, 2026. ["From the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller On Trails comes a wondrous new journey through the wilds of nature and the gnarls of history, exploring how trees—from the mightiest sequoia to the tiniest bonsai—can teach us to grow wise. One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home—unwittingly embarking on what would become a decade-long, globe-spanning adventure of intellectual and spiritual transformation. Pursuing the hidden wisdom of trees, he scales to the very top of a giant sequoia while filming a nature documentary with David Attenborough; he treks through swamps in Papua to reach a treehouse-dwelling tribe of hunter-gatherers; and he journeys to a remote research camp in Tanzania, where he spends a memorable night sleeping in a chimpanzee nest, seeking to understand our deep evolutionary history. Eventually, having gained a radical new outlook on both our gnarled past and our ever-branching future, he joins an intrepid clan of climate activists risking everything to halt construction of a new oil pipeline and save an ancient forest. Along the way, Moor learns the art of “tree-thinking,” which, he discovers, has the power to break open some of humanity’s oldest questions: What is the secret to truly growing old? How do we set down deeper roots in an increasingly chaotic world? Most importantly, how should we—as individuals, as communities, as stewards of the earth—live? A witty and relentlessly curious excursion through philosophy, history, and science, what begins as an ode to the miracle of trees blossoms into a joyous, daring, fiercely hopeful endeavor to "arborize humanity." Audio Version]

---. On Trails: An Exploration. Simon & Schuster, 2016. ["From a talent who’s been compared to Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, David Quammen, and Jared Diamond, On Trails is a wondrous exploration of how trails help us understand the world—from invisible ant trails to hiking paths that span continents, from interstate highways to the Internet. While thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet: How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others fade? What makes us follow or strike off on our own? Over the course of seven years, Moor traveled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds, from the miniscule to the massive. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks and the Internet. In each chapter, Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing. Throughout, Moor reveals how this single topic—the oft-overlooked trail—sheds new light on a wealth of age-old questions: How does order emerge out of chaos? How did animals first crawl forth from the seas and spread across continents? How has humanity’s relationship with nature and technology shaped world around us? And, ultimately, how does each of us pick a path through life? Moor has the essayist’s gift for making new connections, the adventurer’s love for paths untaken, and the philosopher’s knack for asking big questions. With a breathtaking arc that spans from the dawn of animal life to the digital era, On Trails is a book that makes us see our world, our history, our species, and our ways of life anew." Audio version]

Nayler, Ray Where the Axe is Buried. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2025. ["All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end. In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world. As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere. Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom." Audio version]

O'Neil, Tom. Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. Back Bay, 2020. ["A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to shocking new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this riveting reassessment of an infamous case in American history.Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order-their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi-prosecutor of the Manson Family, and author of Helter Skelter-turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions: Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him? And how did Manson-an illiterate ex-con-turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history." Print Version]

Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of Vikings. Penguin Books, 2022. ["The 'Viking Age' is traditionally held to begin in June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, and to end in September 1066, when King Harald Hardrada of Norway died leading the charge against the English line at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This book, the most wide-ranging and comprehensive assessment of the current state of our knowledge, takes a refreshingly different view. It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, and traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were. The narrative ranges across the whole of the Viking diaspora, from Vinland on the eastern American seaboard to Constantinople and Uzbekistan, with contacts as far away as China. Based on the latest archaeology, it explores the complex origins of the Viking phenomenon and traces the seismic shifts in Scandinavian society that resulted from an economy geared to maritime war. Some of its most striking discoveries include the central role of slavery in Viking life and trade, and the previously unsuspected pirate communities and family migrations that were part of the Viking 'armies' - not least in England. Especially, Neil Price takes us inside the Norse mind and spirit-world, and across their borders of identity and gender, to reveal startlingly different Vikings to the barbarian marauders of stereotype. He cuts through centuries of received wisdom to try to see the Vikings as they saw themselves - descendants of the first human couple, the Children of Ash and Elm. Healso reminds us of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of the past, of how much we cannot know, alongside the discoveries that change the landscape of our understanding. This is an eye-opening and surprisingly moving book." Audio version]

Rovelli, Carlo. There are Places in This World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness. Penguin, 2020. ["One of the most inspiring thinkers of our age, the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics transforms the way we think about the world with his reflections on science, history and humanity. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, history, philosophy and politics. Written with his usual clarity and wit, these pieces range widely across time and space: from Newton's alchemy to Einstein's mistakes, from Nabokov's butterflies to Dante's cosmology, from travels in Africa to the consciousness of an octopus, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism. Charming, pithy and elegant, this book is the perfect gateway to the universe of one of the most influential scientists of our age." Audio version.]

Sayles, John. Crucible. Melville House, 2026. ["From the Oscar-nominated filmmaker comes a complex and sweeping historical novel about Henry Ford — the Elon Musk of his day — and his attempt to rule not only an automotive empire but the rambunctious city of Detroit. It is an epic tale ranging from the 1920s through the second World War, featuring violent labor disputes, misbegotten jungle expeditions, a tragic race riot, and the gestapo tactics of Ford’s private army . . . Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement — Henry Ford's worst nightmare. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by him in thrall, the man who was formerly 'America's favorite tycoon' recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as 'strike insurance', and gives Harry Bennett, pugnacious as he is diminutive, free reign over the legion of barroom brawlers and ex-cons who make up the company’s 'Security Department'. The Model T mogul has also bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed. The novel's cast — Ford workers black and white and their families, young radicals, cynical newsmen, gangsters, Brazilian rubber tappers, cameos from boxer Joe Louis and muralist Diego Rivera — create the tapestry of differing points of view that John Sayles has become famous for, the events portrayed fundamental to the country we live in today." Print Version]

Simmons, Dan. Hyperion. Crown, 1989. [Reread: "On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in their hands." Print version]

---. The Fall of Hyperion. Spectra, 1995. ["The multiple-award-winning science fiction master continues the epic adventure that began in Hyperion, where the opening of the Time Tombs threatens to alter the very fabric of time and space, in the second novel in the Hyperion Cantos. The shadow of war has fallen on the Web. In the corridors of power on Tau Ceti Center, chaos reigns. Out of reach from the clashing empires, the artificial intelligences of the TechnoCore manipulate everyone and everything. And on Hyperion itself, where battle rages in the skies and on the streets, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same." Print Version]

Stern, Steve. A Fool's Kabbalah. Melville House, 2025. ["In the ruins of postwar Europe, the world's leading expert on the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism goes on a hair-raising journey to recover sacred books stolen by the Nazis . . . At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent. The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies. Steve Stern's A Fool’s Kabbalah, a novel featuring numerous real-life historic figures, reimagines Gershom Scholem’s quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin. At the heart of that legacy was the idea that humor is an essential tool of redemption. In a parallel narrative, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behavior, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village. As Menke’s efforts collide with the monstrous reality of the Holocaust, we see—in another place and time--evidence that Dr. Scholem, in defiance of his austere reputation, has begun to develop the anarchic characteristics of a clown. A Fool’s Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who, though poles apart, complement one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humor and a little magic." Print version.]

Taylor, Dennis E. We are Legion (We are Bob). S & S/Saga Press, 2025. ["Welcome to the Bobiverse. We are Bob. We are legion. And we never intended on this. Bob Johansson had a plan. After selling his software business, a leisurely retirement awaited him. And, if the cryogenic lab freezing his head succeeds, an even longer retirement in the distant future when his corpsicle gets reawakened. Everything was looking up for Bob. That is, until he’s killed crossing the street just moments after signing the papers. A century later, Bob wakes up, not in a utopia but an Earth on the precipice of war. America is run by an extremist government that stripped his rights as a frozen head, uploaded his consciousness into an AI, and selected him to search space for habitable planets as a self-replicating von Neumann probe. It’s not ideal, but if he declines, he’ll be switched off for good. With Earth in turmoil, space may actually be the safest place for Bob. But the government failed to mention that he isn’t alone...at least three other countries are looking to claim the next Earth, and they play dirty. Using his new abilities and the von Neuman technology he does what any engineer would do: He makes more Bobs—and a virtual cat—and sets to save humanity before it’s too late." Print version.]

Turner, Cadwell. No Gods, No Monsters. Blackstone Publishing, 2022. ["One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it. As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend's trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters. At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark? The world will soon find out." Audio Version]

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. Vintage, 2000. ["It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city’s Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.
Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae’s watch, chaos ensues. It’s an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong. The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism’s founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe Fulton’s work on the “black box,” a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever." Audio Version]

Winchester, Simon. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. Harper Perennial, 2024. ["With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when core skills of learning and memory seem to be stripped of all value—no need for math, no need for map-reading, no need for memorization—are we risking our ability to think? In this modern information age, as we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness? Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores the long history of knowledge and how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated it. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion—from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of the printing press, Google, and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium. Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder the crucial distinction between information vs. wisdom. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom? Does Rene Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum—“I think therefore I am,” the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment—still hold? And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?" Print Version]

ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #15

Leonardo da Vinci's (1452 - 1519) drawing of a male figue perfectly inscribed in a circle and a square, know as the Vitruvian Man (1490), illustrates what he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. Beloved for its beauty and symbolic power, it is one of the most famous images in the world.

  

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Babadi, Mehrdad. "Panahi's Laboratory: Ethical impasse in It Was Just an Accident." The Point (June 16, 2026) ["In Taxi (2015), Jafar Panahi stages a brief but haunting moment that, in retrospect, feels like the seed of his most recent film, It Was Just an Accident (2025). Near the end of Taxi, Panahi, playing the taxi driver, becomes visibly unsettled after picking up his friend Nasrin Sotoudeh, the prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and activist. When she asks what is wrong, he replies that he has just heard a voice he thought he recognized: the voice of his interrogator. Sotoudeh tells him that many of her clients report the same experience, a lingering effect of being blindfolded during prison interrogations. The conversation soon shifts elsewhere, almost casually. A decade later, Panahi has returned to that fleeting moment of fear and turned it into the central narrative and emotional core of It Was Just an Accident."] 

Barquin, Juan. "Committing to the Bit." Notebook (July 13, 2026) ["Just like Showgirls’ Nomi Malone can be both a stripper and a dancer, art can straddle the line between high and low, between funny and tragic. That is the beauty of drag and of camp: It allows us to unabashedly embrace and play with works that are reviled as much as those that are adored. What Early and his contemporaries are doing isn’t new by any means, but it does offer us a chance to explore other material in the same vein and the myriad influences without which they would not exist. Just as drag can pull from material as varied as memes and tossed-aside quotes, and classic films and musical hits from the last century, works like Maddie’s Secret follow suit in the way they build off of an existing canon. It isn’t just about queering that canon, though certainly queerness has a lot to do with the way these texts are interpreted and remixed. Rather, what these works do is show how a long cultural history can be positively and repeatedly reshaped into fresh stories whose comedy is inextricable from their sincerity. "]

Beaupre, Mitchell. "Moments of Grace: Mike Mills reflects on his feelings-forward approach to filmmaking." Letterboxd (July 21, 2026) ["“You can’t grab onto people,” Mike Mills told me the first time we spoke, before the release of C’mon C’mon in 2021. “Maybe you can get a slice, a sliver, a piece. For a film, that piece is huge. That piece is really dense, but it’s just a piece, and there are all these other contradictory things that you’re not going to be able to get.” Across his three most recent features—Beginners, 20th Century Women and C’mon C’mon—Mills has continued to chase those pieces, mining the deep reservoir of his personal relationships to bring to the screen myriad intricacies present in the dynamics between parents and children."]

Benjamin, Ruha. "On Imagination: A Manifesto." Poured Over (January 24, 2024) ["Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin reminds us that our imaginations already know what a better world looks like. From education to challenging our systems of oppression and more, this insightful work shows a new place for us all to start from. Benjamin joins us to talk about the split between imagination and technology, changing our narratives to tell new stories, the importance of community and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over."]

Coppins, McKay. "A Year in the World of Online Sports Betting." Radio West (July 7, 2026) ["The journalist McKay Coppins wasn’t a gambling man. But when his employer The Atlantic staked him $10,000 to bet on the 2025 NFL season, he couldn’t say no. Step one was getting permission from his bishop. Coppins is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which prohibits gambling. But since it wasn’t his money and it was for work, he got the go-ahead. And so began what Coppins calls his year as a degenerate gambler — because it wasn’t long before he started feeling, well, kind of addicted. He’s joining us to talk about sports betting, how it changed him, and how it came to be that last year alone Americans bet $160 billion on touchdowns scored, yards gained, buckets made and pretty much any other outcome you could imagine in sports." Guest: McKay Coppins | Staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of the podcast Deseret Voices. His story is called Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler.]

Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "The Golden Age of the American Idiot." Critics at Large (July 23, 2026) ["The new game show “Nation’s Dumbest,” flips the classic “Jeopardy!” script on its head. The format: twelve famous-ish contestants are peppered with basic logic and trivia questions. The twist is that those who perform well are sent home, with the last one standing receiving the title of “Nation’s Dumbest.” On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider how the figure of the idiot has evolved over time, from Shakespearean fools—whose position of apparent ignorance allows them to speak difficult truths—to more recent “happy fools” like Austin Powers and the goofy, stunt-obsessed heroes of the “Jackass” franchise. Once a laughingstock, the idiot has reached new heights of influence in the era of A.I. summaries and the infinite scroll. Resisting stupidity can feel like an uphill battle. “Whatever it is to be smart, I’m doing this Sisyphean thing of continuing to push it up the hill, and the rock feels heavy,” Cunningham says. “The question is: is society a wind at your back, or going in the opposite direction?”"]

---. "How Sinners Revives the Vampire." Critics at Large (May 1, 2025) ["The vampire has long been a way to explore the shadow side of society, and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s new blockbuster set in the Jim Crow-era South, is no exception. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss what “Sinners,” which fuses historical realism with monster-movie-style horror, illuminates about America in 2025. They trace the archetype from such nineteenth-century texts as “The Vampyre” and “Dracula” to the “Twilight” moment of the aughts, when Edward Cullen, an ethical bloodsucker committed to abstinence, turned the vampire from a predatory outsider into a Y.A. heartthrob. What do he and his ilk have to say today? “The vampire is the one who can unsettle our notions, and maybe give us new notions,” Cunningham says. “The vampire comes in and asks, ‘But have you considered this?’ ”"]

Embree, Desirae. "Porno, Disco, and Summer of Sam: Spike Lee on Sexuality." Senses of Ciinema (July 2026) ["At the time of its release Summer of Sam (1999) was seen as a notable departure for Spike Lee, whose body of work up to that point had been predominately focused on the Black community and American race relations, but it was actually a return to the events that had formed him as an artist. In the summer of 1977, New York City was caught in a paroxysm fueled by rapid social change and the city’s fiscal crisis but ignited by the freak coincidence of a record-breaking heatwave, a massive blackout that plunged the city into anarchy, and a serial killer whose reign of terror extended from the city’s nighttime streets to the front page of the Daily News. Unable to find a summer job while home from his second year at Morehouse College, Lee took an 8 mm film camera and hit the streets, documenting a city in crisis. He returned to Morehouse in the fall determined to become a filmmaker, editing the footage from that summer into his first film, a short titled Last Hustle in Brooklyn (1979). While Last Hustle in Brooklyn is presumed lost, Lee’s twelfth feature film shows us the summer that produced one of America’s greatest filmmakers as he remembered it 22 years later. While there are many portraits one could paint of 1970s New York, in Summer of Sam, Lee depicts a sex-soaked city caught between the free love ethos of the previous decade and the sex panic that would define the next. The 1972 red-carpet premieres of Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano) and Behind the Green Door (Artie and Jim Mitchell) had heralded the beginning of a “porno chic” era in which going to see an X-rated flick was a sign of one’s sexual sophistication. As the public’s appetite for adult entertainment grew, New York’s Times Square became ground zero for what the early antipornography group, Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), had described in 1963 as a “floodtide of filth…threatening to pervert an entire generation of American youth.”1 The question of perversion aside, the CDL’s prediction of a rapid swell in the adult industry was on the money. In 1965, there were nine businesses within the city designated for “adult use,” but by 1977, there were 245.2 Adult theatres and bookstores, video arcades, strip clubs, peep shows, live sex shows, massage parlours, and street-based sex work proliferated, turning Times Square into a commercial sex district that much of the city – including its burgeoning feminist antipornography movement – saw as less an indicator of sexual liberalism than of urban decay."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Artworks are People Too." Weird Studies #216 (July 22, 2026) ["'Now and then, a mysterious life and potency will flicker out of an artwork and confront you.' So began "Artworks Are People Too," a talk Phil presented at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute earlier this summer. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the implications of this idea that some artworks break the mould of the inanimate and act as persons in the world. Are artworks mere creations, or creatures too?"]

 German, Emmaia. "The Anti-Defamation League & The Racial State." This is Hell (July 7, 20260 ["Emmaia Gelman joins This Is Hell! to talk about her new book “The Anti-Defamation League And The Racial State”, published by University of California Press. Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. She is co-editor of, "The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader”. Emmaia also co-hosts the podcast "Unpacking Zionism." Emmaia is also co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere."]

Hearing, David. "We're All Mad Here." Notes From the End of Cinema (August 10, 2025) ["The children in Weapons are unsettling for their agency – they’re not running away from but towards something. This brings another quote from Minima Moralia to mind, where Adorno talks about the effect of children growing up in a culture that has rescinded the social and economic promises it made to their parents: “Today we are faced with a generation purporting to be young yet in all its reactions insufferably more grown-up than its parents ever were.” Even someone as pessimistic as Adorno didn’t foresee the horror of regular school shootings, and the way in which a lottery-like acceptance of the death of a handful of children every year is considered by the government as an acceptable price to pay for the ownership of assault weapons. It is often remarked that this generation of children carry an existential weight not felt by any since those who served in the World Wars, with the exception that rather than a worldwide monoconflict, what exists instead is a series of overlapping crises that foreclose on the very concept of the future itself. This generation of children do not have a specific conflict to renounce as much as existing in a world amid the convergence of many. In this sense, the running children at the start of Weapons also hint at something paradoxical: that these children are both inexperienced and also existentially careworn in a way beyond those who parent them – they shouldn’t be in the street, but they’re already entangled in danger before they leave the house."]

Herbert, Mark. "This Is England: Shane Meadows's 2-Toned Look at Skins and Ska (with Jack O'Connell)." MUBI Podcast (July 16, 2026) ["Rico gets a primer on the skinhead history—and ska-fueled soundtrack—behind This Is England: The 2007 indie hit about misunderstood kids in a misunderstood subculture. Guests include stars Jack O'Connell (Sinners, 2025) and Andrew Shim (A Room for Romeo Brass, 1999), producer Mark Herbert, and Neville Staple, frontman for '80s ska legends The Specials."]

Hudson, David. "Steven Spielberg and Disclosure Day." The Current (June 10, 2026) ["For a film that suggests incontestable proof that we are not alone in the universe could move all of humanity to set aside our differences and come together as one, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day has sparked a remarkably wide range of first reviews. However critical consensus takes shape in the years to come, Time’s Stephanie Zacharek finds that Spielberg’s thirty-fifth feature is “the greatest film he could have possibly made in this moment, at a time when humans worldwide are feeling bewildered and blindsided by a new order in which compassion, creativity, and respect for the natural world have become traits to be crushed, not nurtured. Disclosure Day is majestic, unnerving, and more than little wacky, though its pure unhinged quality is probably its secret sauce.”]

Iñárritu, Alejandro G. and Rodrigo Prieto.  "Alejandro G. Iñárritu & Rodrigo Prieto look back on AMORES PERROS." MUBI Podcast (July 9, 2026) ["Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (THE REVENANT) and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (THE WORLD OF WALL STREET) have a blast telling host Rico Gagliano about the making of their high-octane 2001 breakthrough AMORES PERROS—the story of a car crash, its victims, and their dogs. Topics include: the pair's early days as ad men, discovering star Gael García Bernal, the movie's literally toxic visual process...and where they got the cojones to pull it all off."]

Jagt, Tyler. "My Students Can't Read." The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 2, 2026) ["I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline. So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception. Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit."]

Klemperer, Victor. Language of the Third Reich. Continuum, 2010. ["Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his university post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. First published in 1957, The Language of the Third Reich arose from Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: 'It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism.' This brilliant book is by turns entertaining and profound, saddening and horrifying. It is deservedly one of the great twentieth-century studies of language and its engagement with history."]

Knausgård, Karl Ove. "Sentimental Value: Between Trauma and the Sublime." The Current (May 27, 2026) ["The question is, What good is this? Why should we sit there choked up watching two actors say they love each other? Because, of course, there is a difference between understanding something rationally and understanding something emotionally. Not least because we control the rational, while emotions are beyond our control. They just rise up, as if by themselves. Why? What do they want? Why did I cry when I saw the scene with the two sisters? I didn’t want to—if there’s one thing I hate, it’s losing control of my emotions, and I see crying as shameful, something I fight with everything I have. Probably because emotional outbursts were frowned upon when I was growing up. Not just in my family, but in the culture. Crying was something girls did. Emotions were not something you showed. No hugs. I have never told my brother, my mother, or my father that I love them, and they have never said it to me. So much of what went on in my family was left unsaid, unspoken, if not secret then at least well hidden. There is nothing wrong with that; it is a way of life that is as good as any other. But it was probably all this unspoken, all this unthought, that Sentimental Value circulated within and brought to life, through emotions, and that thus became clear to me, without me really wanting it to. Or in other words: Sentimental Value tries to loosen something hard, and something hard loosened in me when I saw it."]

Mecca, Dan. "Partially Devoured: Daniel Kraus on digging into Night of the Living Dead and unearthing the legacy of an undead classic." Letterboxd (May 12, 2026) ["A new book by Daniel Kraus that dives headfirst into George A. Romero’s horror-movie classic, Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World opens with a quote from Romero himself: “The first time you see a movie you say ‘I like it.’ You’re not quite sure why. Watch it a second time. You will either like it again or not like it. If you like it again, you will start to look at why you like it. That’s where the understanding comes from. I tell you, I promise you, the fourth time you watch it, you weep. The fifth time you watch it, you’re analyzing. The sixth time, all of a sudden, you get it.” bThis sentiment gleefully haunts Partially Devoured, a deeply personal work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angel Down, Whalefall and The Living Dead (that last one started by Romero and completed by Kraus following his death) that both dissects and demystifies Romero’s 1968 masterpiece. Structured like a DVD commentary in text form, Partially Devoured examines every second of Night of the Living Dead while expanding upon its complicated production history and interweaving cultural commentary with a memoiristic account of Kraus’s personal relationship with the film. Kraus was recently kind enough to speak with Letterboxd about Partially Devoured, his lifelong relationship with Romero’s filmmaking and the enduring legacy of Night of the Living Dead."]

Moyn, Sam. "Gerontocracy in America." Converging Dialogues (July 12, 2026) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Samuel Moyn about gerontocracy in America. They discuss how we live in a gerontocracy, coalitions, older institutions, avoiding ageism, oligarchies, elites and democracy, long term view, abundance, and many more topics. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has his law degree from Harvard University and his PhD in modern European history from University of California, Berkeley. He is fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His main interests are in international law, human rights, and 20th century European moral and political theory. He was recently named one of Propsect Magazine’s top thinkers in the world for 2024. He is the author of numerous books including, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of our Times, and the most recent book, Gerontocracy in America: How the old are hoarding power and wealth and what to do about it."]

Pagels, Elaine. "On the Historical Mystery of Jesus." The New Yorker Radio Hour (December 30, 2025) ["Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “The Devil Problem,” a Profile of the religion scholar Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author with “The Gnostic Gospels,” from 1979. Pagels’s latest book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” is a summation of her lifetime of research on Christianity, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. She tells Remnick how she found and lost faith in the evangelical movement, but retained a lifelong interest in religion. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world,” she feels, “has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.”"]

Rushkoff, Douglas. "What Camus Knew That Sam Bankman-Fried Didn't." Team Human (July 26, 2026) ["Rushkoff breaks down the intellectual hubris driving Silicon Valley: Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, and AI accelerationism. From Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapse to the tech oligarchs attempting to optimize human presence through code, Rushkoff exposes how treating human lives as simple spreadsheet inputs creates a dangerous ends justify the means worldview. Drawing on philosophers like Albert Camus, Spinoza, and Martin Buber — and even recent statements from the Pope — Rushkoff argues that true moral action isn't calculated in hypothetical future outcomes, but lived out right now in local, face-to-face human connection."]

Schuster, Aaron. "The Ethical Dignity of Anora." E-Flux (November 20, 2024) ["Contemporary cinema might congratulate itself on having a harder-hitting approach to capitalism as compared to the saccharine fantasy of Pretty Woman. But today’s highly successful genre of anti-capitalist movies and television is above all pacifying and reassuring: the capitalists are punished, the rich get their comeuppance, and the downtrodden achieve some measure of revenge. Even when this genre displays real genius (particularly in its comedy of manners—the analytic precision with which it dissects the speech and behavior of the hyper-privileged), it still partakes of this impotent morality. Succession, White Lotus, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Parasite, Saltburn, Industry: one can loathe the rich and love them too. This was put well by Martha Gill: 'We should recognize ‘eat the rich’ TV for what it is: not as any sort of cultural ‘reckoning’ for the prosperous and corrupt, but pure catharsis—a sort of inverted mirror of society. The more violently a culture squishes the undeserving wealthy on screen, the more it tends to valorize them in reality.' Truffaut once said that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film. What about an anti-rich film?"]

Towns, Brandon. "Radical Whimsy: Exploring the Creative Mind of Boots Riley." Roger Ebert (June 18, 2026) ["Boots Riley is the most dangerous man in Hollywood. He’s not a filmmaker. He is an enigma, a revolutionary fighting against capitalism with a pen and a lens. From his musical prowess as the frontman for the conscious hip-hop group The Coup to his community activism with the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and California’s Anti-Racist Farm Workers’ Union, Boots is the living embodiment of the phrase “artists must choose a side.” And he chose to fight for freedom. Riley is one of the few prevailing filmmakers who are deeply politically conscious, and his views ooze from script to screen. His filmography, best described as “Star Wars for Radical Politics,” focuses on helping people find the tools to change the world around them. By adopting comedy to smuggle his message past the capitalist gatekeepers and reach the masses, Boots creates his own film genre: radical whimsy. His work asks audiences how to create a movement that affects those in power."]

Tulleken, Chris van. Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food. W.W. Norton, 2023. ["A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body. It’s not you, it’s the food. We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There’s a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF. These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food. In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You’ll find no diet plan in this book—but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world’s leading experts from academia, agriculture, and—most important—the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris’s own addiction to UPF. In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won’t only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global scale."]