"... the real play of pop was that it had the ability to liberate everyone: not just gay men, lesbians and trans people, but young heterosexual men and women who didn't accept the standard definitions offered, indeed imposed, by the dominant culture. It wasn't just about freedom for gay people; it was about freedom for all." - Jon Savage The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream (quoted in Earnest, Jarrett. "Pop & Pleasure & Freedom." The New York Review of Books (May 28, 2026). The publisher's description of Jon Savages's book "A monumental history of the gay influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979: award-winning author Jon Savage takes us on a fast and captivating journey through the history of pop music as seen through the eyes of queer artists. Jon Savage, the author of the canonical England’s Dreaming, explodes new ground in this electrifying history of pop music from 1955 through 1979. In demonstrating that gay and lesbian artists were responsible for many of the greatest cultural breakthroughs in the last half of the twentieth century, he shows that it was their secretly encoded music—appealing to a closeted but greatly oppressed public—which led to the historic dismantling of discriminatory gay laws and the fusion of queer and straight culture. Fittingly, Savage’s kaleidoscopic work begins with the pomp-and-pompadour appearance of Little Richard, whose relentlessly driving sound, replete with gospel shrieks and sexual contortions, enthralled a generation of 1950s stultified white teenagers. Things soon went mainstream, as Elvis enthralled a nation with his seductive low moans and bump-and-grind twists, heavily derivative of Black music, while James Dean and Rock Hudson became the face of 1950s Hollywood; yet this explosion of queer expression remained covert and could not be accepted for what it was. While music, with supporting roles from cinema and fashion, became the key medium through which homosexuality could be clandestinely enacted, overt expressions of gay behavior were met with arrests and crackdowns. While hippies reveled in 1967’s “Summer of Love,” gays remained “harassed by police, demonized by the media and politicians, imprisoned simply for being who they were.” J. Edgar Hoover, himself a closeted homosexual, continued to spy on homosexual deviants; CBS’s Mike Wallace aired an invidious show about homosexuality; and the New York police continued to raid gay bars. Yet the music itself produced a cultural eruption that simply could not be stanched. While Bette Midler sang “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys” to a Continental Baths audience of 600 gay men, all naked except for towels, David Bowie “blew the whole topic wide open” and “became the most totemic pop star of his generation.” Even though roadblocks remained, the gear-grinding crunch of the music signaled that the gay civil rights movement could no longer be suppressed. Ending the narrative with the sudden collapse of disco, The Secret Public asserts then that the genie was out of the bottle, that queer culture had finally entered the mainstream, producing a transcendent vision of pop culture that could never be marginalized again."]
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Abebe, Nitsuh. "Why ‘Smart’ Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice." The New York Times Magazine (May 14, 2026) ["How Wi-Fi-connecting, app-based tech led to a backlash in the name of simplicity. The 21st-century tech industry has accomplished a lot of cool things, but among the most remarkable may be a trick of language: It managed to make the word “smart” feel repulsive and the word “dumb” sound appealing. How else to explain the news that more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a “dumbphone?” (That’s a cellular handset with only basic features — perhaps an old-school flip phone with push-button T9 texting, or perhaps a purpose-built minimalist device like the Light Phone.) Sure, that fact alone might have more to do with our deep ambivalence about the effect of smartphones on our attention and our society. But how about all the people searching the internet for the right “dumb TV” — i.e., one that just displays the signal you feed it, instead of running some proprietary operating system? How about all the people stumping for dumb watches or recommending dumb coffee makers?"]
Blackie, Sharon. "Why We Need Fairy Tales Now." Wonder Cabinet (May 9, 2026) ["“Stories are spells,” Sharon Blackie says. “They change things.” Maybe that’s why fairy tales — old, new, fractured and retold — are having a resurgence. As uncertainty rises and old ways disintegrate, fairy tales offer a roadmap to cultural transformation and re-enchantment. Sharon Blackie is one of our foremost fairy tale interpreters. In her new book, “Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now,” she reclaims the subversive fairy tale heroines of the past. Not passive, well-behaved princesses — think Tatterhood instead of Cinderella, the Fox Wife instead of Sleeping Beauty — figures from centuries-old European folk tales that were whispered over hearths and spinning wheels, and handed down from one generation of women to the next, not as children’s entertainment but a blueprint for survival, maps for soul retrieval and cultural regeneration. The brave, smart heroines and wise old women in these tales offer us an alternative, “post-heroic” model of psychological development, Blackie says. A code of ethics based on kinship with the more-than-human world of animals and plants, and a celebration of old-fashioned virtues like compassion, kindness and reciprocity. Fairy tale heroines, Blackie says, don’t slay dragons — they make them part of the team. Fairy tales are part of our collective unconscious, a storehouse of archetypes and images that predate the modern world. There's a bridge back to the enchanted landscapes and animist sensibilities of our ancestors — a gateway to wonder. In this conversation, Blackie shows us how to unlock their power and find our way back the imaginal world."]
Burnett, Graham. "Rewilding Attention." Wonder Cabinet (May 23, 2026) ["We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of "The Friends of Attention," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the German Romantics, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Henry James — to argue that we've lost touch with older, richer forms of attention. And he makes the case that reclaiming it will require more than screentime apps or digital detox – it’ll take collective resistance. Plus: why your Pilates class, your evening needlework, or your walk with the dog might already be forms of radical attention — and how reframing everyday activities can make ordinary life feel richer, more mysterious and more full of wonder.“Book: Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.”]
Chungyalpa, Dekila. "At the Center of All Things is Interdependence." Center for Humans and Nature (May 17, 2021) ["It turns out Darwin’s theory of evolution was incomplete. Evolutionary biologists such as Elizabet Sahtouris have concluded that the survival of the fittest is but one stage of the larger evolutionary cycle and that without intra- and inter-species cooperation built into the process, a purely selfish and competitive species is likely to die out.[1] Forest ecologists such as Suzanne Simard have demonstrated that trees communicate with one another through their underground root and fungi networks and when one of them is ailing, other trees push nutrients through their root system to help it recover.[2] As a field conservationist, I have seen again and again that greater species diversity ensures natural sustainability in all life forms and creates more resilience within ecosystems. Resilience is the byproduct of building community around the precept of interdependence, and this is both a demonstrable scientific fact and a spiritual truth and awakening. The John Wayne model has pushed so many of us in a direction where we create complex economic calculations to convince people, corporations, and governments of the monetary value of nature. However, we now know that while the world’s 370 million Indigenous peoples make up less than 5 percent of the global human population, they manage and protect 80 percent of the global biodiversity because their traditional ecological knowledge reaffirms the inherent sacred value of nature and interdependence amongst all living beings. It is time for a paradigm shift. The beauty of knowing that the Earth is a closed system is to understand—without hubris—that we are all part of the same phenomenon, Life. We are all the same: We hope good things happen to us. We care for the people that love us. We are immersed in the communities that surround us. And we exist due to the biophysical interplay of nature. When we take a few steps back, we can see how all species are part of one vast community, living and breathing in tandem with one another, acting in ways that are compassionate rather than competitive. Embracing interdependence as the central organizing principle is to dissolve that boundary between ourselves and “the other” and to expand the circle of community so that there is no “other” left; there is only us made whole."]
Cooper, Ziva and Caroline Melly. "Cannabinology (Marijuana)." Ologies (April 8, 2026) ["Part 1: Gummies vs. pre-rolls. THC vs. CBD. Indica vs. sativa. Hemp vs. marijuana. Dad grass vs. modern trees. This extended 2-part deep dive with UCLA’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids director Dr. Ziva Cooper and Smith College cannabis anthropologist Dr. Caroline Melly covers the storied history of the weed’s trek across continents, the endocannabinoid system, the “bliss” molecule, brain receptors, cancer therapeutics, edible mishaps, the munchies, legalization, titration, addiction, kief, hash, dabs, shatter, strains, and so much more."]
Crabapple, Molly. "Here Where We Live Is Our Country." Open Source Radio (May 28, 2026) ["We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old Bund as forgotten but not gone in the wider world today. The question may be whether the Bund’s humane ideals will have another chance against the lawlessness and cruelty of the 2020s. We know Molly Crabapple as a one-off writer and artist, pens and paintbrushes at the ready, a sort of global muckraker in the rough places of the world. Last time she was here, she was just back from civil war in Syria. This time, she’s just back from unearthing history, World War I time, through an epidemic of hellish and deadly pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Bund, created in Poland, was a tough-minded working-class alliance demanding full rights for Jews at home. It was irreconcilably embattled against the rising young Zionist movement that would establish a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Molly Crabapple took it on herself—and learned the Yiddish language as part of the job—to research and write the whole story of the Jewish Bund: the old politics in it, the modern emotions that it still stirs, starting with the restored memory of her own family. And she’s made a monumental book of it under the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country."]
Flight, Thomas. "He Went to Prison For Directing, Then Kept Making Movies." (Posted on Youtube: April 2026) ["After being banned from directing for 20 years, Jafar Panahi just... kept making movies, working in secret and slowly developing a clandestine style of filmmaking that built towards the politically engaged and relevant It Was Just an Accident. This video looks at what makes the Iranian director's work so uniquely powerful, and how he engages with political narratives without falling into the trap of propagandistic storytelling."]
Henderson, Rebecca. "Can Capitalism Save the World It’s Destroying?" Wonder Cabinet (May 2, 2026) ["Can capitalism save the world it's destroying? Rebecca Henderson thinks so. An economist at Harvard Business School and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, she has advised some of the world's biggest corporations and argues that capitalism itself — and what drives corporations — urgently needs to change. She's clear-eyed about capitalism's failures — the inequality, the exploitation, the environmental destruction — which is precisely what drives her passion for reforming it from within. And as a climate activist, she's haunted by the consequences if we fail to act. But this conversation goes deeper than economics. Henderson opens up about hitting a personal wall in her climate work — and the unexpected turn that brought wonder back into her life."]
Johnson, David. "No Exit, No Problem: Pema Chödrön’s Inner Frontier." The Observing I (June 6, 2026) ["When things fall apart, the first temptation is to rebuild the story. Pema asks what happens if we stay with the wreckage for one breath longer."]
Kristoff, Nicholas. "The Silence That Meets The Rape of Palestinians." The New York Times (May 17, 2026) ["It's a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape. Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and Netanyahu rightly called on ''all civilized leaders'' to ''speak up.'' And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children -- by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards. There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel's ''standard operating procedures'' and ''a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.'' A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs ''systematic sexual violence'' that is ''widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.''"]
Riley, Boots. "Why Capitalism is Built on Theft." TIFF (Posted on Youtube: May 22, 2026) ["In this conversation, Boots Riley breaks down why “boosters” or people who shoplift and resell goods in their communities are often treated as villains while the larger systems that create poverty and inequality go unquestioned. Drawing from his experiences as a broke rapper, filmmaker, and activist, Riley connects class struggle, labor movements, art, and capitalism in a way that’s provocative, funny, and deeply personal. He also shares an incredible story from Rage Against the Machine’s legendary Wall Street performance with Michael Moore, including the surreal moment when Wall Street workers started chanting “Suits for Rage.” The contradiction at the heart of that moment becomes a larger conversation about politics, culture, power, and why so many people feel trapped between the world they want and the one they live in. From Sorry to Bother You to labor organizing, filmmaking, and the politics of art, this is one of Boots Riley’s most fascinating interviews yet."]
Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. "Pantheism and the Godness of Nature." Wonder Cabinet (April 18, 2026) ["What if nature isn’t just alive—but divine? Pantheism, once branded heresy, is finding new adherents among those who don’t consider themselves religious but still sense something sacred and wondrous in the living world.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of philosophy and religion, traces the long, contested history of wonder—from medieval mystics to modern seekers. She reflects on the Overview Effect, that disorienting moment when astronauts gaze back at Earth and feel both its fragility and its radiance. And she talks about the obsession that tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have for space exploration, which may be the new frontier of awe—even a new religion. But awe is never simple. It can be as unsettling as it is beautiful, as terrifying as it is astonishing. It breaks us open even as it draws us in—leaving us to reckon with a world that is stranger than we thought." This interview led to me getting her book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters for my cross-country drive this summer: "Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking."]
Schieber, Noam. "Is The College Promise Broken?" Capitalisn't (April 16, 2026) ["For decades, Americans were promised that a college degree guaranteed a secure spot in the middle class. But instead of entering corporate management, many graduates are finding themselves trapped in low-paying service roles with crippling debt. Is this widening gap between expectations and financial realities fundamentally reshaping the modern American workforce? New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber joins the podcast to unpack the core arguments of his new book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class” about this labor shift. He argues that the psychological injury of these broken promises is sparking a unique wave of workplace activism. The systemic failure of the college wage premium poses urgent questions for the future of American capitalism. If millions of highly educated citizens feel cheated by the system, the resulting political and economic destabilization could be severe." Another interview with Noam Scheiber about his new book on Breaking Points. ]
Tarnoff, Ben. "Whither the Nerd-Bully." The New York Review of Books (May 28, 2026) ["As the journalist Anupreeta Das explains in her new book Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, by century’s end the “king of software had been dethroned.” When Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975, he was only twenty years old. Over the subsequent decades he led the personal computing revolution, alongside his frenemy Steve Jobs. After Microsoft went public in 1986, he became the country’s youngest billionaire (at thirty-one) and the first who hailed from tech. In this respect, as in many others, Gates was an innovator. Other people had made money from computers, but he was the first to attain the kind of wealth and power that invited comparisons to John D. Rockefeller. In the 1990s it dawned on the American public that digitization could alter the deep structures of the economy and that high technology might prove to be the breeding ground for monopolies on the scale of the great trusts of the Gilded Age. In 1995 the most valuable publicly traded company in the United States was General Electric. Five years later it was Microsoft. With a new kind of monopoly came a new kind of monopolist. As Das argues, Gates was an “early template” for a species of capitalist overlord that has since become excruciatingly familiar: the nerd-bully, whose oddness and rudeness are the necessary effluent of his genius. Computerization meant that the commanding heights of the economy would come to be occupied by men who had spent their formative years getting stuffed into lockers, and were now determined to exact their revenge."]
Vatsal, Radha. "What to Watch Now: Mad Max Fury Road (2015)." Crime Reads (June 10, 2026) ["In Fury Road, set in a post-apocalyptic future, the tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) controls the water supply for a swathe of oppressed people. He orders his one-armed Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to trade water for gasoline and other supplies. She drives off in her “war rig” – but takes Joe’s wives/breeders along with her in order to lead them to freedom. When Joe realizes what’s going on, he assembles his troops, and the no-holds-barred chase through the desert begins. What’s brilliant about the movie is how efficiently it builds characters and how all the Jerry-rigged vehicles and weaponry used in the chase contribute to the world-building of this harsh future. The action never stops to explain the politics or the people to the viewer—you pick up information about them through the action, through their names, and their costumes. Every little detail adds a layer."]
Williams, Terry Tempest. "A Glorian is a Moment of Grace." Emergence (May 29, 2026) [An interview about her new book A Glorian is a Moment of Grace: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary: "'Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us. I am searching for grace.' In this time of political fragility, climate chaos, and seeking beauty wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. They are not distant deities, but the ordinary, often overlooked presences--animal, plant, memory, moment--that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us--about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds--is immense. Journeying through encounters with the Glorians in the red rock desert of Utah during the pandemic to Harvard University where she teaches in the Divinity School, Williams weaves a story of astonishing personal and societal insight. As she grapples with the unsettled state of the world, she turns not to despair but to deep reflection. She sees how the Glorians are calling us to attention, not as an army, but as fellow inhabitants of our sacred, threatened home. They remind us of the power of contact between species and the profound courage--and awareness--it will take to dream a more cohesive future into being. Wise and lyrical, The Glorians is a testament to the power of witness, a field guide to finding grace in the unexpected, and a moving invitation to engage with one another and our surroundings with renewed intention. In a modern world filled with increasing noise and anxiety, Terry Tempest Williams offers honest sustenance for the mind and spirit and distinguishes herself again as a trusted voice to whom we can turn to more fully understand our times."]
Winter, Tim. "The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Islam." Past Present Future #153 (January 24, 2024) ["Today’s episode in our history of revolutionary ideas explores the world-altering impact of Islam from the seventh century onwards. David talks to the leading Islamic scholar Tim Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad) about what changed – and what didn’t – with the appearance of Islamic law, Islamic culture and Islamic ideas of community. Was Islam really egalitarian? How could a universalist religion encompass so much variety? Why did it spread so fast? And what caused it to split so soon?"]
Winterer, Caroline. "Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the American Soul." Wonder Cabinet (April 25, 2026) ["T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone. Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing mysterious fossils and giant bones they didn't even have names for yet. Almost overnight, something remarkable happened: the New World became old. The United States went from infant start-up nation to the blueprint for all of creation. Stanford historian Caroline Winterer traces this deep time revolution in her book How the New World Became Old — and she shows us how profoundly it shaped American identity. We still think of dinosaurs as fun, as children's toys and museum spectacles. Few of us realize how deeply they underwrote a national mythology — one that fueled American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, Christian nationalism and genocide. This is a story about wonder and awe. And it teaches us that those emotions are neither simple nor neutral.Caroline’s book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America."]
