Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Manipulation." Overthink (January 21, 2026) ["Should we be sympathetic towards manipulators? In episode 157 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about manipulation. They discuss what makes up a manipulative personality, why manipulators see social interaction as inherently combative, and what you can do when you find yourself entangled with a manipulator. They also explore what Niccolo Machiavelli tell us about the role of manipulation in politics. Should political leaders always be kind? Or, as Machiavelli says, do they need to learn to “be bad”? And what can we say about manipulation outside of politics? Does manipulative behavior require awareness and intention? Are all forms of manipulation inherently bad? And where do we draw the line between manipulation and other types of social influence?"]
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."]
Benton, Michael D. "The Power of Stories." The Ryan Watts Life Coaching Podcast (September 4, 2023) ["Great conversation about the psychology of our personal narratives and beyond. Michael Benton is an associate professor of humanities and film studies at Bluegrass Community and technical College in Lexington, Kentucky. Narrative Psychology focuses on how we perceive the events of our lives through stories. One of the most powerful ways we can experience transformation is by changing our stories. This can be done in many ways."]
"The U.S. has spent $260 billion a year countering China militarily since 2012, following then-President Obama's "pivot to Asia". Anti-Asian and anti-Chinese American racism has intensified along with the militarized U.S.-China rivalry.
In the two years since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the U.S. government has spent $21.7 billion on military aid to Israel.
The U.S. has spent an additional $9.65 – $12.07 billion on military operations in Yemen and the wider region since October 7, 2023, for a total of $31.35 – $33.77 billion and counting in U.S. spending on the post-10/7 wars.
As of October 3, 2025, 67,075 people in Gaza have been killed and 169,430 people injured according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. These 236,505 casualties constitute more than 10% of the pre-war population in Gaza.
At least 5.27 million people have fled or been forced to leave their homes (as of early September 2025) in the post-Oct.7, 2023 wars in Gaza, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and the West Bank. This total includes an estimated 1.85 million children under 18.
Military spending produces an average of 5 jobs per $1 million. The same investment in other sectors creates more employment - nearly 13 jobs in education, 9 in healthcare, and 7-8 in infrastructure and clean energy.
From 2020 to 2024, private firms received $2.4 trillion in contracts from the Pentagon, approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4 trillion.
The expanding tools of political influence used by the arms industry include extensive lobbying, millions in campaign donations, the revolving door, funding think tanks, and involvement in government advisory committees.
U.S.-backed Israeli military operations since Oct. 7, 2023 will lead to far higher indirect death than direct death rates.
Over the course of the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), 24% of U.S. women service members and 1.9% of men experienced sexual assault.
The “Military-Industrial Complex” is enmeshed with Silicon Valley. A growing portion of Pentagon spending goes to large tech firms.
War contributes significantly to climate change: The U.S. Defense Department is one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.
Americans are inundated with cultural products that promote militarism – many of them influenced by the Pentagon. From movies to sporting events, the entertainment we consume normalizes war, reducing reflection about U.S. policy choices and their consequences."]
Goldin, Hana Lee. "The Libraries That Weren't Supposed to Exist - Basement libraries and buried archives: a brief history of reading against the state." Card Catalog (April 23, 2026) ["Underground libraries are still being built. In the United States, PEN America has documented nearly twenty-three thousand instances of school book bans since 2021, concentrated largely in Florida and Texas, and reports from affected districts describe informal lending networks forming among parents and students to keep removed titles in circulation. In Ukraine, librarians have evacuated and hidden collections during the Russian invasion. In Afghanistan, underground schools have continued teaching girls since the Taliban banned their education in 2021. Each of these cases traces the same arc the earlier ones did: a restriction is imposed, and a group of readers decides the loss is not acceptable and finds a way to keep access available. The same four kinds of information control that authoritarian regimes apply deliberately also occur in democracies, produced by different mechanisms but with overlapping effects. Restriction in a democracy is rarely outright prohibition; it shows up as the steady removal of titles from school and library collections, licensing and liability pressure on publishers, and content removals across platforms. Distortion in a democracy isn’t state propaganda; it’s the combination of algorithmically amplified content and coordinated disinformation campaigns that erodes the shared factual ground a news ecosystem requires to function. Surveillance in a democracy is conducted mostly by private companies rather than the state, but the data collected on reading habits and search histories changes what people are willing to look up. And the long-term narrowing of what people find it possible to think shows up as the consolidation of information access through a few corporate platforms, which decides, increasingly, what most people encounter at all. These pressures differ from outright authoritarianism in scale and mechanism, but they still affect what most people end up reading. Four practices drawn from underground libraries give readers ways to keep access to books and ideas stable if information channels should narrow. Each takes on a different angle of the narrowing, and together they form the basis of a reading life that holds up under institutional pressure."]
---. "Steel-Manning Can Be More Useful Than Fact-Checking." Card Catalog (April 14, 2026) ["We steel-man an opposing argument for one of two reasons: either to discover that the opposing position has merit we hadn’t recognized (which makes our own understanding more accurate), or to be able to argue our own position from a much stronger and more grounded place (because we’ve already engaged with the best the other side has to offer rather than the worst). Both of these outcomes make us better thinkers. Neither requires us to abandon our original view. There’s a practical test for whether a steel man has been done well: if we can restate the opposing position back to someone who holds it and they respond with something like, “Yes, that’s what I believe,” then we’ve succeeded. We’ve demonstrated that we understand their position on its own terms, not a distorted or simplified version of the position. Once we’ve reached that point of genuine understanding, the conversation changes. We know exactly which specific points we disagree on and which points the other side has right, which means we can focus our pushback on the real points of divergence instead of wasting energy on misunderstandings. And the person we’re engaging with is far more likely to listen to our counterarguments, because we’ve shown that we took the time to understand theirs first. Steel-manning someone’s position doesn’t mean we’ve conceded anything. It means we’ve done the intellectual work of comprehending why they believe what they believe, so that if we still disagree, our disagreement is precise and informed rather than reactive. We’re not meeting them halfway; we’re making sure we know exactly where the halfway point is before we decide where we stand."]
---. "We Were Never Supposed to Know This Much: On the cost of knowing everything, everywhere, all at once." Card Catalog (March 17, 2026) ["In 1992, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published research connecting primate brain size to social group size. What he found was striking: the human neocortex is sized for a stable social world roughly the size of a village, intimate enough that we can track the histories, alliances, and emotional states of everyone in it. Beyond that scale, the cognitive architecture starts to strain. We were simply never built to hold more. For most of human history, that was more than enough. We lived in communities where bad news had edges: a neighbor’s illness, a failed harvest, a conflict close enough to matter and local enough to address. The information environment was scaled to what a human nervous system could hold, process, and respond to in a meaningful way. Bad news came with a corresponding set of possible actions. Knowing about a problem and having some capacity to do something about it were rarely that far apart. What’s happened since is not just a change in the volume of information, but a structural rupture in that relationship between knowing and doing. The internet didn’t simply give us more news. It collapsed every geographical and temporal boundary that had previously kept information at a manageable human scale. We now receive, in a single morning, detailed accounts of suffering from dozens of countries, political crises on multiple continents, and a running feed of expert opinion about all of it, alongside advertisements and the hot takes of strangers. All of it is real and all of it deserves moral seriousness. The brain receiving it, though, is the same one that evolved for a village, and it’s being asked to perform as a global news desk, a grief counselor, and a political analyst simultaneously. There’s also a subtler problem: the feed isn’t a mirror of the world. It’s a distortion. Research consistently shows that engagement-based algorithms amplify emotionally charged content, particularly anger and outrage, over content that is neutral or resolution-focused. A story about a crisis keeps us scrolling longer than a story about a resolution. The world as it appears in our feeds isn’t proportional to the world as it exists. It’s been filtered through an optimization function that rewards activation, which means we’re not just receiving more information than we were built for. We’re receiving a skewed version of it."]
Harlan, Jan. "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY — Stanley Kubrick finds heavenly music on vinyl ." MUBI Podcast (May 7, 2026) ["Stanley Kubrick decided to score his sci-fi spectacular 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY with classical tracks — something he did against the advice of just about everybody, and to the detriment of at least two composers’ mental and physical health. Guests include Kubrick’s longtime executive producer Jan Harlan."]
Johnson, David. "Terence McKenna and the Problem of Enchantment." The Observing I (April 21, 2026) ["There are certain figures who stay with us not because they were entirely right, but because they gave language to something we were already feeling. Terence McKenna was one of those figures. He continues to exist in the cultural imagination because he seemed to speak directly to a part of the human being that modern life does not know what to do with. The part that resists reduction. The part that feels, often quietly, that the ordinary story we are given about reality is somehow too small. Too flat. Too dead. The part that suspects consciousness is stranger than we are told, that meaning is deeper than utility, and that the world may still contain forms of mystery that our institutions have forgotten how to name. He didn’t speak like an academic, but he didn’t speak like a conventional spiritual teacher either. He sounded like someone standing at the edge of the known world and sending back his field notes. About mushrooms. About language. About time. About shamanism. About the collapse of modernity. About the possibility that consciousness was not a side effect of matter, but something far more central and participatory than our dominant culture was willing to admit. And whether you agreed with him or not, there was something undeniably alive in that voice."]
Robinson, Rebekah. "Animal Rights Activists Target Wisconsin Facility Accused of Breeding Dogs for Medical Experiments." Democracy Now (April 20, 2026) ["Police fired tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets at hundreds of animal rights activists in Wisconsin on Saturday as they attempted to rescue about 2,000 dogs from a facility that breeds beagles for medical experimentation. The crackdown by Dane County sheriff’s deputies left scores of activists injured; 25 people were arrested. Protesters were attempting to enter a property owned by Ridglan Farms, which agreed last fall to surrender its state breeding license and stop selling dogs to other laboratories by July 1 as part of a deal to avoid prosecution on animal mistreatment charges. A state judge found Ridglan Farms likely broke Wisconsin animal cruelty laws by housing beagles in brutal conditions, performing surgeries without anesthesia, and leaving wounds untreated, along with other violations. The protesters who participated in Saturday’s action were “teachers, veterinarians, students, software engineers,” says Rebekah Robinson, a Wisconsin resident and longtime animal rights activist who was arrested during the action. “These were ordinary citizens who were trying to help these Ridglan dogs, to go in and take them to safety, get them the veterinary care that they needed. And what we were met with was overwhelming police brutality.”"]
Scheiber, Noam. "Radical Politics Inevitable as College Grads Screwed." Breaking Points (April 17, 2026) [A discussion of his book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class: "In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their qualifications. They are frustrated that the time and money they invested in a degree have failed to bring about the opportunities they were promised. The anger of this college-educated working class began to boil over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Chaya Barrett, an astute college grad and eight-year Apple employee who had helped organize her coworkers at an Apple store near Baltimore. While following Barrett and her cohort as their seemingly spontaneous rebellions spread far and wide—from college-educated workers at Apple stores and Starbucks cafés, through video-game studios, and even to Hollywood writers’ rooms—Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect. With striking empathy, Scheiber paints a vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo. He describes how recent developments like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza have further fueled its discontent, and he explains why the college-educated working class will continue to demand change in the workplace, in cities like New York, and in national politics for years to come."]
Scottl, Jordan Florillo. "Energy and Desire: The Jungian Libido." Psychology Today (September 9, 2024) ["Jung used the word libido to describe the psychic energy, life force, or passion that drives us forward. This concept is called chi, qi, prana, and manna in other traditions. It includes sexual appetites, of course, but also our instinctive creative, intellectual, and spiritual growth trajectories. Kelly McGannon, writing for the Jung Society of Washington, summarizes Jung’s concept of libido in this way: "This energy, which moves through all of life, is like water… It has a “natural penchant” and crackles with its own intelligence—it wants what it wants. You can’t will it to move or force it to take a particular direction… This energy acts fastidiously, insistent upon the fulfillment of its own conditions.”"]
Vallor, Shannon. "The History of Bad Ideas: Value-Free Tech." Past Present Future (July 6, 2025) ["For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about the myth that technology can be value free. It’s easy to see why Silicon Valley is so keen on the idea that it’s never the fault of the tech, only of the people who use it. But why do we let them get away with it? Where did this idea come from? How has it also poisoned arguments about gun laws and nuclear weapons? And what can we do to fight it and try to get technology that works with – not against – basic human values?"]
West, Stephen. "The Rival Moral Approaches of the Modern World - Alasdair Macintyre." Philosophize This! #245 (April 12, 2026) ["Today we talk about the book Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry by Alasdair Macintyre. We talk about each of the different sets of assumptions people bring to moral debates that often contain the true location of the disagreement."]
