We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
"The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope. To possess a telescope without its other essential half - the microscope - seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension." - Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
Benjamin, Ruha. "The New Artificial Intelligentsia."Los Angeles Review of Books (October 18, 2024) ["Behind this duplicity lies a familiar calculus: if AI evangelists can convince us that AGI is possible, imminent, and dangerous, we might be compelled to entrust our fate to them. Hype and doom, in other words, are two sides of the same (bit)coin. “AI safety” principles, teams, and initiatives are proliferating in part to hoard power and resources and, ultimately, to engineer the future in their own image. The aim: To lull us into acquiescence so that they can carry on business as usual. I have analyzed elsewhere the harmful impacts of AI. In the rest of this essay, I focus on AI’s insidious inputs—the eugenic values and logics of those who create these systems, cloaking them in the rhetoric of salvation. Breathless buzzwords like “efficiency,” “novelty,” and “productivity” conceal a self-serving vision: the future imagined by AI evangelists is meant only for a small sliver of humanity. The rest of us will be left clamoring to survive on a boiling planet. Take the autonomous weapons systems raining hell on Palestinians—why else give them saccharine-sounding names like Lavender and the Gospel if not to make these deadly inventions seem benevolent? If we listen carefully to the good word of tech evangelists, we can hear the groans of those buried under the rubble of progress. Many of the same people behind the technologies wreaking havoc today—workplace algorithms intensifying the pace of work, facial recognition software leading to false arrests, automated triage systems rationing quality healthcare, and “smart” weapons ripping through flesh with a click—also brand themselves as humanity’s saviors. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pronounced that “it is a golden age. […] We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were … in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades.” In a 2015 essay for an interfaith magazine, PayPal and surveillance tech firm Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel argued, Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present. Likewise, the home page of Singularity University, a company founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, affirms the organization’s belief that “technology and entrepreneurship can solve the world’s greatest challenges.” As a group, the artificial intelligentsia promises to guide us into the Future™, positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they engineer the crises against which we must guard."]
Benton, Michael D. "Introduction and Discussion of The Battle of Algiers."Dialogic Cinephilia (April 5, 2026) [In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was released to critical acclaim as well as official condemnation. In France it was banned until 1974 when it was finally screened in a cut version. The film examines the early part of what is known as the Algerian War (1954-1962) when the colonized Algerian population threw off the century-long yoke of the French colonizers (they invaded Algeria in 1830). Pontecorvo’s film is unique in many ways.]
Chungyalpa, Dekila."On the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth."Wonder Cabinet (April 11, 2026) ["Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth. For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance. In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing was often female, and where land itself—especially the sacred Himalayan landscape of Sikkim—was alive with presence, meaning, and obligation. Today, she is a global conservationist and founding director of the Loka Initiative, building unlikely partnerships between climate scientists and religious leaders across traditions—from Buddhist monastics to Catholic clergy, Indigenous elders to Muslim clerics and Evangelical pastors. Her work suggests that the climate crisis is not only scientific or political—but spiritual."]
Crabapple, Molly. "The History of the Jewish Bund."American Prestige (August 12, 2026) ["Danny and Derek speak with artist and writer Molly Crabapple about her book on the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Here Where We Live Is Our Country. They discuss Molly's personal connection to the story, the Pale of Settlement and Jewish emancipation, the founding of the Bund in 1897, the Bund's armed self-defense against pogroms, its fraught relationship with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Bund's rivalry with Zionism, the flourishing of Bundist culture in interwar Poland, and the lessons of the Bund’s story for the Jewish left today."]
Davies, Jr., Akinola. "My Father's Shadow — Akinola Davies Jr. dreams of 90s Nigeria."MUBI (April 9, 2026) ["Akinola Davies Jr. never really knew his dad. But in MY FATHER’S SHADOW, his BAFTA-winning debut feature set in 90s Nigeria, the director imagines what it would be like to spend the day with him. Akinola tells guest host Simran Hans how he recreated his own hazy childhood memories, and about his ingenious methods for getting a pair of remarkable performances from two young kids who had never acted on screen before."]
Gilman, Nils. "How To Future-Proof Your Career In The Age Of AI."NOEMA (April 9, 2026) ["The most prized workers will be those who can decode a sea of outputs, spot the meaningful signal and translate it into action that others understand and trust."]
Goldin, Hanna Lee. "The Atlas of Learning."Card Catalog (August 11, 2026) ["A librarian’s map of where knowledge lives, and how to find our way through the research world."]
---. "From Ataris to AI: The Millennial Reckoning With Relentless Change."Card Catalog (March 3, 2026) ["This isn’t a single adjustment. It’s been the continuous condition of our entire adult lives. We didn’t watch the world change and then settle. We watched the world change, adapted to that change, and then watched it change again before the adaptation had even fully landed. We grew up inside the acceleration, and the acceleration has never stopped. On one side of us: an older generation that experienced technology largely as a series of arriving conveniences, things that made existing tasks easier rather than as the ground beneath their feet constantly shifting. On the other: a generation behind us for whom the internet isn’t a place you go but simply the texture of existence, who have no memory of a world that worked differently. We are the bridge generation: old enough to remember before, young enough to be living through the middle, and bearing the particular exhaustion of people who can see both shores but can’t quite stand on either."]
---. "In Praise of Serendipity."Card Catalog (April 2, 2026) ["On staying open to the unexpected: We teach search as technique: how to construct a query, which databases to use, how to evaluate a source. What we don’t teach is the limit built into all of those tools: they can only return what we already know to ask for. Everything we don’t know to ask for requires a different approach entirely. AI extends that limit further. A language model synthesizes from what we’ve already thought to ask about, which means it’s only as generative as the questions we bring to it. Some of the most generative questions arrive through wandering, through the accidental encounter that reframes what we thought we were looking for, and that’s something current AI tools aren’t designed to do. The library tradition has long understood that knowledge develops through exposure to the unexpected and through the slow accumulation of encounters that couldn't have been planned. Following a thread without knowing where it leads is how the connections start to form on their own. The practices above aren’t a romantic supplement to serious research. They’re part of how serious research has always developed. Serendipity has a research literature and a documented role in how knowledge develops. But the reason any of that matters is simpler: the world occasionally offers something we didn't know we needed, arriving from a direction we never would have thought to look. We stumble into it less than we used to, but it's still there when we make room for it."]
Goodman, Amy. "How Media Silences Anti-War Voices."Current Affairs (April 12, 2026) ["Amy Goodman is the longtime host of Democracy Now!, the independent news program she helped launch 30 years ago, which has since grown from a small network of community radio stations into a global media institution. She spoke to Current Affairs Editor-in-Chief Nathan Robinson and Digital Editor John Ross, alongside filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, about the new documentary Steal This Story, Please!, which traces the history of Democracy Now! and Goodman’s career in independent journalism." What makes Democracy Now! different from corporate media. Amy Goodman’s approach to journalism. How antiwar voices get sidelined in corporate media. Who corporate media really serves. Objectivity vs. taking a stance. What Democracy Now! adds to the historical record.]
Hapootlian, Amanda. "How One Playwright is Using Theatre to Expose the Surveillance State."ACLU (March 26, 2026) ["As the ACLU fights to protect people’s privacy, playwright Matthew Libby discusses his play about the private companies fueling the government’s surveillance of immigrants. ... Without safeguards, federal agencies will continue to exploit their partnerships with tech companies to sow fear and violate our rights, which is why the ACLU is advocating for Congress to pass legislation that would protect our privacy in the digital age. These bills include the ICE Out of Our Faces Act, which would ban ICE and other immigration agencies from buying, acquiring, or using facial recognition software and the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a bipartisan bill that would ban the government from buying our data from Palantir and other companies without a warrant. ... Matthew Libby, the creator of a new off-Broadway play called “DATA,” is using theater to fight against the surveillance state. He became inspired to write the play after seeing how Big Tech companies are used to supercharge President Trump’s deportation agenda. Below, we discuss how “DATA” pushes back against public-private surveillance partnerships, and how we should all speak out against this obscene government overreach."]
Horgan, John. "Do Voters Adore Trump Because They Dread Death?: “Terror Management” Theorist Sheldon Solomon Explains How Subliminal Fear of Death Can Affect Us on a Personal and Political Level."Scientific American (June 6, 2016) [An interview with the psychologist co-author of the book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Random House, 2015): "A transformative, fascinating theory--based on robust and groundbreaking experimental research--reveals how our unconscious fear of death powers almost everything we do, shining a light on the hidden motives that drive human behavior. More than one hundred years ago, the American philosopher William James dubbed the knowledge that we must die "the worm at the core" of the human condition. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, arguing that the terror of death has a pervasive effect on human affairs. Now authors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski clarify with wide-ranging evidence the many ways the worm at the core guides our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage. The Worm at the Core is the product of twenty-five years of in-depth research. Drawing from innovative experiments conducted around the globe, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski show conclusively that the fear of death and the desire to transcend it inspire us to buy expensive cars, crave fame, put our health at risk, and disguise our animal nature. The fear of death can also prompt judges to dole out harsher punishments, make children react negatively to people different from themselves, and inflame intolerance and violence. But the worm at the core need not consume us. Emerging from their research is a unique and compelling approach to these deeply existential issues: terror management theory. TMT proposes that human culture infuses our lives with order, stability, significance, and purpose, and these anchors enable us to function moment to moment without becoming overwhelmed by the knowledge of our ultimate fate. The authors immerse us in a new way of understanding human evolution, child development, history, religion, art, science, mental health, war, and politics in the twenty-first century. In so doing, they also reveal how we can better come to terms with death and learn to lead lives of courage, creativity, and compassion. Written in an accessible, jargon-free style, The Worm at the Core offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the choices we make in life--and a pathway toward divesting ourselves of the cultural and personal illusions that keep us from accepting the end that awaits us all."]
Johnson, David. "Monks, Mystics, and Madmen."The Observing I #102 (February 23, 2025) ["Have you ever tried sitting in complete silence with nothing but your own thoughts? No phone. No music. No distractions. Just you. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone, and that’s exactly the problem.In this episode of The Observing I, we dive deep into the lost art of solitude - why being alone has become something we fear, how history’s greatest thinkers and mystics embraced isolation, and how modern life is engineered to keep you constantly distracted. And if you think this is just another self-improvement gimmick, think again - because at the end of this episode, I’m challenging you to something radical: 24 hours without screens, without social media, without external input. Just you, alone, facing your own mind. Most people won’t do it.The question is: Will you?"]
Johnson, M. Sellers. "Americana Anderson: Nested Narratives in Asteroid City."Off Screen 30.2/3 (March 2026) ["Asteroid City is at once a familiar and a more daring Anderson film. Its general acclaim and eager expectations are reflected in its early reviews, as well as its nomination for the Palme d’Or this year (a third return for Anderson, following Cannes’ top prize considerations for The French Dispatch in 2021 and Moonrise Kingdom in 2012). The film certainly postures time-honored Anderson themes—unconventional families forging eclectic communities, solitary people sublimating their feelings of loneliness into comradery, and poetic gestures toward the unknown—but does Asteroid City’s quality of emotionality equate with its quality of style? While his works often are conceptually fantastic, it would appear in recent years that the artificial style that he has long been celebrated for now overwhelms his dramatic execution. However, instead of evaluating the film as a stand-alone project, perhaps it is best to gauge Asteroid City in the larger canon of Anderson’s projects. The film is certainly visually stunning and delightfully wry, as one might expect, but how does Asteroid City measure up in the larger scope of Anderson’s filmography?"]
Martin, Laura J. "The War on Weeds."NOEMA (May 14, 2024) ["Pesticides and herbicides made from fossil fuels that are freely available to unwitting consumers poison our land, our bodies and life all around."]
Merchant, Brian. "It's open season for refusing AI: There's been a wave of successful efforts to ban, reject and shut down AI."Blood In the Machine (April 3, 2026) ["In a November conversation at the Urban Consulate in Detroit, the great writer and thinker Tressie McMillan Cottom was asked by host Orlando P. Bailey, “Do you have a daring idea for us to ponder and sit with for our collective future?” McMillan Cottom replied with this: “When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse."]
Moor, Robert. "On Trees."The World in Time (April 10, 2026) ["“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees."]
Rubsam, Robert. "America's Cinematic Salvation."Liberties (March 2026) ["Coiled at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a shadowy club committed to the “racial purification” of the American populace. Meeting in luxury hotel suites and bland office towers, these lumpy, balding men — generals, politicians, titans of industry — want to rebalance the composition of their country, and possibly the world. They call themselves the Christmas Adventurers, and they profess a creed of strict racial hygiene, inducting only “white Americans by Gentile-born,” in the hope of segregating white Americans away from the refuse of the worldwide underclass. “You want to save the planet,” says head Adventurer Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn), “you start with immigration.” Does that sound so farfetched to you? Based on a Thomas Pynchon novel published in 1990, first conceived around the turn of the 21st century, and filmed entirely before the 2024 general election, Anderson’s film arrived in theaters last fall at a time when immigration had become the battlefield on which all of America’s domestic conflicts are being fought. In the past year, the president has signed an executive order illegally ending birthright citizenship, and has openly yearned to denaturalize, deport, and even detain abroad U.S. citizens. “Homegrowns,” he said last year, “are next.” These policies have been backed up and egged-on by a coterie of American white nationalists, among them Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, who believe that America’s “cultural coherence,” established by early generations of white Anglo-Saxon immigrants, has been fatally compromised by nearly 150 years of immigration from places all across the globe. The only real Americans, they believe, are the descendants of those early settlers, a group now called “Heritage Americans.” Everyone else is, at best, a second-class citizen — though, given the pitch of their ethnonationalist rhetoric, invader would probably be the more accurate term. Miller apparently believes the country would be better off with about 100 million residents — a task that would involve removing more than 240 million people. "]
Singh, Manvir. "Was Shamanism the First Religion?"Wonder Cabinet (April 4, 2026) ["Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience? Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds. How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions. Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?"]
Velocci, Beans. "Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary."New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies (April 11, 2026) ["In Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke UP, 2026), Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex’s incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it’s the categories that flex to make them fit. Beans Velocci is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania."]
Walter, Damien. "The Matrix and the Archetypes of Carl Jung."Science Fiction (December 2021) ["There’s a question about The Matrix I’ve been asking myself since the franchise established itself in the collective unconscious of humanity back in the early 00s. What is Sigmund Freud doing in these movies?"]
Williams, Adrienne, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru. "The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence."NOEMA (October 13, 2024) ["Tech companies that have branded themselves “AI first” depend on heavily surveilled gig workers like data labelers, delivery drivers and content moderators. Startups are even hiring people to impersonate AI systems like chatbots, due to the pressure by venture capitalists to incorporate so-called AI into their products. In fact, London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures surveyed 2,830 AI startups in the EU and found that 40% of them didn’t use AI in a meaningful way. Far from the sophisticated, sentient machines portrayed in media and pop culture, so-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems. In this article, we give examples of the labor exploitation driving so-called AI systems and argue that supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in discussions pertaining to AI ethics."]
Zero 7; Sophie Barker; TV on the Radio; FC Kahuna; Hafdis Huld; Portishead; Tame Impala; The Bangles; Gorillaz; Rush; Doom Gong; Black Sabbath; Frankie and the Witch Fingers; Routine Caffeine; Blond Cauldron; Cat Power; All Them Witches; Datarock; Orchestra Gold; Beth Hart; Slash; Eric Gales; Miles Kane; Andrew Bird; El Michels Affair; Roge; The Rolling Stones; Blue Oyster Cult; Taylor Swift; Miguel; Yazmin Lacey; SAULT; Hole; X-tal; A Tribe Called Quest; iLe; Os Mutantes; Mother Love Bone; Hether; Joyer; Joy Division; Soundgarden; Joelton Mayfield; The Wipers; The Smithereens; Nirvana
"Informative doc that tackles AI from a lot of different angles—its connective tissue to eugenics and techno-fascism, the techbro quest for the whole grail artificial general intelligence, its incredible increasing drain on public resources, and issues that may come to fruition in the future." - Kevflix and Chill Official description: "The AI origin story. The untold origins of artificial intelligence lie not in machines but in power, revealing the fantasies behind the hype that got us here and where we go next."
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Leonor Carrington, the great Surrealist artist and writer:
"Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth." - Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (1972) Excerpt published in the journal Transitions (1997)
Bessler, John and Carol Steiker. "We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment." Throughline (January 23, 2025) ["The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and what cruel and unusual really means. John Bessler, law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Author of The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights. Carol Steiker, law professor at Harvard Law School and author of Courting Death: the Supreme Court and Capital Punishment."]
Bessner, Daniel. "Imperialist Realism."This is Hell! (August 5, 2026) ["Historian and foreign policy analysis Daniel Bessner joins us to discuss his new book, Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century: "Imperialist Realism explores how Americans have come to accept their global empire not because they believe in its righteousness but because they believe no alternative to U.S. hegemony is possible. Imperialist Realism is a collection of essays elucidating the titular concept, which centers on a single question: What does it feel like to live in a moment in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the U.S. Empire? By analyzing the theory and practice of U.S. foreign policy, Imperialist Realism provides theoretical and empirical accounts of modern empire, liberalism, and global affairs. It combines pieces that explore everything from the ideas of individuals such as Barack Obama, George Soros, and Samantha Power to topics such as first-person shooters to issues such as left-wing foreign policy. In this way, Imperialist Realism examines the past, present, and future of U.S. foreign relations while drawing broader conclusions about the nature of empire in both its domestic and its international contexts."]
Castro, Collette de. "Consent Puzzles in the Oslo Stories Trilogy by Dag Johan Haugerud."Sense of Cinema #118 (July 2026) ["In France, Dreams, Sex and Love came out over three weeks in the summer of 2025. I was like a restless teenager in my discovery of these intricate, sustainable and secret worlds – breathlessly waiting until the next instalment for another revelation. To me, the triptych of films constitutes a utopian portrayal of consent in an ideal world, one in which consent is not based on power dynamics or gender and heterosexual norms but rather on desire and love. ... Perhaps this is why watching these films gave me the feeling I was a teenager again. The lack of film education about consent I was given back then was being remedied week after week watching these Norwegian films in which women had agency over their bodies and minds. I’m not saying they portray some kind of ideal consent model – the characters in them are flawed, human and struggling just as much as anyone. But the whole point is that there is never one answer. Consent is just a constant negotiation between actors in this play we call the world. The people in these films talk, and they talk – a lot – about what consent means to them, how they negotiate it in their own minds, and how other people’s limits can surprise them. In each film of the trilogy, a character is warned or questioned about crossing an invisible line. This comes up in a relationship between an employer and an employee; a student and a teacher; and a nurse and a patient. The characters all work out their consent puzzles on their own, without resorting to violence or institutional intervention. The careful consideration, exposure and eventual resolution of these consent puzzles is part of what makes these films so moving. They ask, how can one go into the dark woods of one’s desires without infringing on another’s freedom?"]
Carrasco, Salvador. "The Eternal Return: The Battle of Algiers at 60."Senses of Cinema #118 (July 2026) ["True to content-driven form, The Battle of Algiers has a nonlinear, circular structure that supports the metaphor of the eternal return applicable to colonialism, the resistance to it, and the consequences thereof. The film starts near the end of its chronological Act Three, in 1957 Algiers, the capital of a nation colonised by the French since 1830. The first spoken dialogue is a loaded question – “Couldn’t you have talked sooner?” – asked by a French soldier to an Algerian prisoner whom he and his army buddies have been torturing with a blowtorch, judging from the scorching scar on his chest. The question foreshadows the journey on which we’re about to embark. The Battle of Algiers is as much of a wakeup call as a film can be, as relevant now as when it first came out 60 years ago; as when it reemerged during the so-called War on Terror to help us realise that “terrorists” do not just happen overnight; and as in our present day, when the US and Israel have engaged in yet another unwinnable war, this time with Iran. As soon as it talks to us, The Battle of Algiers forces us to reassess our preconceptions of civilisation, morality, and freedom."]
Downes-Angus, John. "Time-Wasting, Truth-Wasting Exercises: Samuel Cohen’s anthology on book banning diagnoses a recent swell in censorship that’s problematic for more reasons than you’d think."Los Angeles Review of Books (March 9, 2026) ["On a citywide Zoom call with organizers in the United Federation of Teachers (the New York City teachers’ union), a chapter leader shared an organizing success story from her middle school. Her colleagues wanted to teach Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) to their seventh graders. The book is about a boy named Jonas who is chosen to inherit the pain, joy, and color of others, these memories kept from his society for the sake of maintaining stability. When realizing the injustice of this situation, Jonas saves them from their ignorance by returning the memories to them. It is a kid-friendly send-up of fascism, and the principal refused to allow teachers to teach Lowry’s book. Apparently, this book has been banned in the past because of its political commentary, its violence, its occasional sexual references, and its depiction of euthanasia. The principal took issue with none of these things. Instead, she objected to the fact that it is a book. The school had adopted a reading curriculum—HMH’s Into Reading—that excluded books in favor of test-aligned excerpts, so the principal argued that teachers could not teach any books at all. In past years, students had loved The Giver. And the teachers wanted to give the kids the experience of reading a novel like Lowry’s, so the chapter leader spearheaded collective action: they wore “Freedom to Read” shirts and other shirts associated with book bans, raised the issue up to the superintendent—and ultimately won. The kids read the book and loved it. I do not think this is what people think of when they think about book banning in the United States. But given the imperiled state of books and reading today, a more inclusive definition is desperately needed. People inclined to learn more about book banning should read University of Missouri English professor Samuel Cohen’s new edited volume Banning Books in America: Not a How-To. Cohen has put together a range of texts—essays, for the most part, but also an interview, an excerpt from a novel, and Cohen’s own syllabus for his course on banned books—that capture the titular subject in its many forms."]
Giordano, Sara. "Scientific objectivity is a myth – cultural values and beliefs always influence science and the people who do it."The Conversation (September 4, 2025) ["If removing all bias is impossible, then, how do people create knowledge that can be trusted? The understanding that all knowledge is created through cultural processes does allow for two or more differing truths to coexist. You see this reality in action around many of today’s most controversial subjects. However, this does not mean you must believe all truths equally – that’s called total cultural relativism. This perspective ignores the need for people to come to decisions together about truth and reality. Instead, critical scholars offer democratic processes for people to determine which values are important and for what purposes knowledge should be developed."]
Goldin, Hana Lee. "Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It."Card Catalog (February 24, 2026) ["40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it."]
---. "The Hierarchy of Sources: A Cheat Sheet - A guide to evaluating information sources in the AI age."Card Catalog (February 19, 2026) ["Why This Matters Now: The information environment you navigate today bears little resemblance to the one that existed a few decades ago. In the 1990s, getting your ideas in front of a large audience usually required convincing a publisher, a newspaper editor, a television producer, or some other institutional gatekeeper that your content was worth distributing. Those gatekeepers had biases and blind spots, and plenty of valuable perspectives were excluded from mainstream channels. But the friction involved in publishing meant that most widely circulated information had passed through at least one filter, however imperfect. That friction is gone. Anyone with an internet connection can now publish anything, to a potential audience of billions, at essentially zero cost. A teenager in their bedroom can create a website that looks as professional as a major news organization. A coordinated network can flood social media with fabricated stories faster than fact-checkers can respond. AI tools can generate plausible-sounding text, realistic images, and convincing audio and video at a scale that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. Meanwhile, the platforms that distribute this information have built their business models around engagement, which means their algorithms actively promote content that generates strong emotional reactions regardless of whether that content is accurate. Research has shown that false news stories tend to spread faster and reach more people than accurate ones, in part because fabricated content is often designed to provoke outrage or surprise. The economic incentives of the attention economy are misaligned with the goal of keeping people well-informed."]
---. "What a Librarian is Reading in Times of Moral Nausea and Psychological Despair."Card Catalog (February 17, 2026) ["What do you do when the problem isn’t misinformation, but accurate information that shatters everything you thought possible? When you have to expand your conception of what humans are capable of doing to each other, what systems are capable of enabling, what societies are capable of tolerating? When the facts themselves demand that you build a larger, darker, more complex model of how power operates and who it serves? These books don’t answer that question; they can’t. But they do offer ways to live inside the question without being consumed by it. They model how others have metabolized unbearable knowledge and continued. They provide practices for days when continuing feels impossible. They remind us that we’re not the first people to discover the world is not what we thought, and we won’t be the last. They model what becomes possible when you stop asking “how do I unknow this” and start asking “who do I want to be now that I know.” Some things change us permanently. These books are companions for that transformation. They’re maps drawn by those who traveled this territory before us and discovered that continuing mattered more than understanding, that staying present had value even without resolution. They’re proof that others have stood where you’re standing and found ways forward, too."]
Haskell, David George. "Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty."Wonder Cabinet (March 28, 2026) ["What can flowers teach us about survival? Celebrated biologist and writer David George Haskell reframes flowers as agents of transformation—creatures that turned conflict into collaboration and remade the living world. For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if we’ve misunderstood them entirely? In How Flowers Made the World, biologist and writer David George Haskell invites us to see flowers not as delicate embellishments, but as one of the most powerful forces in Earth’s history. When flowering plants emerged more than 200 million years ago, they didn’t just adapt to the world—they transformed it. Through strategies of beauty, attraction, and reciprocity, they turned rivals into partners, reshaping ecosystems and making possible the rich diversity of life we know today. In a lyrical, science-rich conversation, we explore: — Why Haskell calls flowers “nature’s revolutionaries” — How beauty, pleasure, and desire function as evolutionary strategies — The deep interdependence between flowers, animals, and humans — What flowers can teach us about resilience in a time of ecological crisis — How re-centering flowers might change the story we tell about life on Earth We live on a floral planet, Haskell says—and more than that, we are a floral species, utterly dependent on flowering plants for food, habitat, and survival. The lessons flowers offer—about creativity, cooperation, and transformation—may be exactly what we need to navigate a rapidly changing world. What would it mean to tell the story of life not through predators and conquest, but through seduction, partnership and bloom?"]
Holt, Jim."Mathematics on Ice."The London Review of Books 31.16 (August 2009) ["A surprising number of mathematicians, even quite prominent ones, believe in a realm of perfect mathematical entities hovering over the empirical world – a sort of Platonic heaven. Alain Connes of the Collège de France once declared that ‘there exists, independently of the human mind, a raw and immutable mathematical reality,’ one that is ‘far more permanent than the physical reality that surrounds us’. Roger Penrose, another unabashed Platonist, holds that the natural world is only a ‘shadow’ of a realm of eternal mathematical forms."]
Horgan, John. "Why Does Jim Holt Exist?"Scientific American (July 2, 2018) ["A connoisseur of science, math and philosophy takes on the really big questions."]
Hyde, David. "Thoreau Meets Ice."Open Source (April 2, 2026) ["In 1854, when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was captured in Boston and returned in chains to slave-owners in Virginia, despite riotous resistance on the dock in Boston, Henry David Thoreau himself was shattered. “At last it occurred to me,” he wrote, “that what I had lost was a country.” The question becomes: what would Thoreau say today if he learned that hard workers and taxpayers of long standing in this country and his state were being locked up and deported for want of immigration papers? Our guest Lewis Hyde says Thoreau would blame us, citizens, for the failure of our country and our Commonwealth to keep all its residents safe and secure in their adopted communities, regardless of their immigration status. Lewis Hyde’s essay, “ICE and our Immigrants: Lessons from the Abolitionists,” is forthcoming in the summer issue of Liberties quarterly. Thoreau’s essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” can be found in Hyde’s edited edition of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Milkweed Editions)."]
Johnson, David. "Not Yet: The Philosophy of Ernst Bloch."The Observing #143 (March 17, 2026) ["Not yet. Ernst Bloch was born in a factory town on the Rhine in 1885 and spent the next ninety-two years refusing to accept that the present tense was the final word on anything. He built an entire philosophy out of the gap between what is and what should be. He called it the not-yet. The Nazis called it incompatible. The East Germans called it a deviation. The students of 1968 called it exactly what they were looking for. This episode is about what happens when a man bets everything on a future he can’t prove, gets exiled, fired, suppressed, and walled out for doing it, and keeps betting anyway. It’s about hope as a philosophical structure rather than a feeling. It’s about the Vor-Schein, the pre-appearance, the light that the future casts backward into the present before it arrives. And it’s about the knock you hear at 3am when the rest of your brain has the good sense to be quiet, and what Bloch would tell you to do with it."]
Lukacs, Peter. "Can You Rewire Your Brain?'Aeon (February 3, 2026) ["Examples of neuroplasticity abound. During my neurology residency, one of my teachers, a highly specialised neuro-ophthalmologist, demonstrated the adaptability of the brain in a dramatic way. He recreated an informal experiment on himself by wearing glasses that flipped his visual field upside down. At first, he was disoriented. But within weeks, his brain recalibrated, and he was able to function normally in his environment. Even more remarkable was the re-adaptation that occurred when he removed the glasses; his world once again appeared inverted, and it took additional time for his perception to return to baseline. He later recreated another experiment by repeating the process with another set of glasses that reversed left and right, and he reported that this lateral inversion was far more difficult for the brain to compensate for than the vertical one. The experiment demonstrates how the brain adapts by recalibration rather than by restoring an original state, treating the altered input as normal over time. The ability to alter speech is another testament to the plasticity of the brain. One fascinating distinction in neuroscience is that speech and singing use different neural pathways. For example, some well-known singers stutter when speaking but not when singing. Elvis Presley famously had a stutter that disappeared when he sang. Ed Sheeran also stuttered as a child and tried many techniques to overcome it. Nothing worked, until, at age nine, he began rapping along to an Eminem album. Through repetition, his fluency improved. Similarly, the country singer Mel Tillis spoke with a stutter but sang fluidly. In each case, fluency emerges not through repair but through recruitment of alternative circuits."]
Maqiaque, Erin. "Their Own Private Genesis."The New York Review of Books (June 25, 2026) ["Too often we think of theology as some desiccated thing. For better or worse we now have other ways of understanding the complexity of human desire: neuroscience, psychology, pornography. We forget that for centuries, theological writing was our most sophisticated literature on sexuality—on desire, shame, pleasure, on why we want what we want and what all that wanting can mean."]
Marvin, Carolyn and David W. Ingle. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge University Press, 1999. [excerpt, first ten pages: Description - "This compelling book argues that American patriotism is a civil religion of blood sacrifice, which periodically kills its children to keep the group together. The flag is the sacred object of this religion; its sacrificial imperative is a secret which the group keeps from itself to survive. Expanding Durkheim's theory of the totem taboo as the organizing principle of enduring groups, Carolyn Marvin uncovers the system of sacrifice and regeneration which constitutes American nationalism, shows why historical instances of these rituals succeed or fail in unifying the group, and explains how mass media are essential to the process. American culture is depicted as ritually structured by a fertile center and sacrificial borders of death. Violence plays a key part in its identity. In essence, nationalism is neither quaint historical residue nor atavistic extremism, but a living tradition which defines American life."]
McClellan, Daniel. "The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues."New Books in Christian Studies (March 18, 2026) ["The Bible is arguably the world’s most influential book, but do we really know what it says? Every day across social media and in homes, businesses, and public spaces, people try to cut debate short by claiming that "the Bible says so!" However, they commonly disagree about what it actually does and doesn't say, particularly when it comes to socially significant issues. For instance, does the Bible say we should be on the lookout for an antichrist associated with the number 666? Does it say women shouldn’t wear revealing clothing? Does it say it’s okay to hit your kids? In The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025), Dan McClellan leverages his popular "data over dogma" approach, and his years of experience in the academy and on social media, to lay out in clear and accessible ways what the data indicate the Bible does and doesn't say about issues ranging from homosexuality, abortion, and slavery to monotheism, inspiration, and even God's wife. The Bible Says So is an invaluable resource for our fractious times. Interviewees: Dan McClellan is an award-winning public scholar of the Bible. He has over one million followers on social media and is a host on the Data Over Dogma Podcast. Dan received his PhD from the University of Exeter and is currently an honorary fellow at Birmingham University's Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion."]
Nestle, Marion. "On Food Choices and Food Politics."Against the Grain (August 4, 2026) ["Food affects all of us — but while it’s a necessity for our survival, it’s also a vast, sprawling industry spanning the globe, which generates enormous profits as well as significant damage to public health and the environment. Nutritionist and molecular biologist Marion Nestle sheds light on the choices we all must navigate when we enter the grocery store." Marion Nestle, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters North Point Press, 2025."]
Reynolds, Jason. "On Hopelessness, the Virtue of Stamina, and Showing Grace to Ourselves."On Being (March 19, 2026) ["I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown event last year. I got my chance at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Jason’s perspective is so urgent for the world we’ve now walked into: on giving ourselves grace to be hopeless, the virtue of stamina, and the hope that stays strong in him from his life in relationship with the very young in our midst — “the arbiters and purveyors of the future” — as well as an occasional stranger in a bar. Jason himself is preternaturally wise as well as talented and kind and humble. He’s become a friend across the years and is one of my favorite people in the world. Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author of over 20 books for children and young adults. From 2020–2022, he served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Among many honors, he has received the Newbery, Printz, and Coretta Scott King Awards, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2024. He is on the faculty at Lesley University for the Writing for Young People M.F.A. Program."]
Reynolds, Jason and Kessley Janvier. "On Being Young in America."On Being (May 8, 2025) ["A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the digital revolution and AI to the ecology and society, they have wisdom and instincts in their bones that will be essential if we are all to flourish and not merely survive this century. In November 2024, the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues brought Krista together with esteemed children’s and young adult writer Jason Reynolds and Georgetown student Kessley Janvier. The encounter between the three of them spans generations from the 20s to the 40s to the 60s and extended out to a room of people of all ages and walks of life. The wisdom that unfolded is as much about who we will be and how we will be as what we have before us to do, each in our own lives."]
Robertson, Derek. "Democracy Dies in the Techno-Dump."Liberties (January 2025) ["Thirty-five years ago, a Canadian named Ursula Franklin offered a dark prophecy. She predicted that unfettered technological development could strip us of the capacity to honor our fellow citizens’ very humanity. In such a world, she taught, democracy will become increasingly untenable — because liberal humanism is impossible to cultivate in a society dominated by atomizing, market-serving technologies. In January, 2025 America bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dark world she foresaw. (She called that world an “unlivable techno-dump”). And yet, given the extent to which digital technology shapes our lives — our politics, our pocketbooks, our schools, our sex — Americans care astonishingly little about it."]
Robinson, Nathan. "Turn the Lights Back On."Current Affairs (March 22, 2026) ["It has been tragic and depressing watching the effects of the blockade. This is already a poor country. People didn’t have much to start with. But now they can’t take buses, they can’t afford to run their cars (I have been told gas costs anywhere between 10 dollars a gallon and 40 dollars a gallon, if you can find it—this in a country where a nice meal will cost you about $20). Food in restaurants is starting to run out. Garbage is accumulating in the streets. I had to sprint to get through a city block where the flies were so thick it was a struggle to breathe without ingesting one. The entire supply chain appears to be breaking down. Tourism is drying up—few want to come and experience shortages and sanitation crises. Taxi drivers can’t drive their taxis. With the evaporation of tourists comes greater despair, since so many depend on this influx of foreign money. Everyone in Cuba is warm and friendly, but you can tell they’re desperate. At the large San Jose art market, sellers had booths overflowing with souvenirs, and hardly anyone was there to buy. The merchants were outcompeting each other on pushiness—it was obvious many of them would not make a single sale all day. I cannot believe how cruel what my country is doing is. To take bread from the mouths of the poor, to destroy livelihoods, to turn old people into beggars, to kill sick people. I knew we were capable of this—the history of U.S. foreign policy since World War II, from dropping napalm Vietnamese peasants to Tomahawk cruise missiles on Iranian schoolchildren, has been a history of unbelievable cruelty and violence. But as I look off the hotel rooftop at a blacked-out city, and realize that we could turn the lights on, if we wanted to, I feel such deep rage that the wealthiest country in the world would inflict this totally needless misery on its poor, tiny neighbor. A billionaire president is taking these destitute people’s last means of eking out a living—and for what?"]
Schuster, Aaron. "Kafka's Misdiagnosis."The Paris Review (March 20, 2026) ["The ways in which Kafka twists traditional forms according to his own disturbance are what introduce a new universal dimension for the Freudian age, the dimension of neurosis. Kafka invented a mythology for the twentieth century by neuroticizing the ancient myths: my own private Greece, my own private Judaism, even (given Kafka’s returns to Don Quixote) my own private literary modernism. The Abraham who can’t recognize himself in God’s call, or is just too busy to answer; the tardy messiah who arrives only the day after he’s needed; the not-so-great Alexander who cannot cross the Hellespont, arrested by the mere weight of his body (his warhorse, Bucephalus, makes more progress—studying hard, he becomes a lawyer in an age when there are no more Alexanders, when the reign of the master has been eclipsed by anonymous administration); the Sirens who don’t sing but rather silently gawk at an ear-plugged Odysseus; the office-comedy Poseidon turned into the harried supervisor of the seas, having exchanged cruising on the waves and his trident for paperwork and a pen—this is how Kafka revivifies the old myths, makes them speak to us again."]
Wilkins, Joe. "The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor."Futurism (August 1, 2026) ["When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good — but not entirely. Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added.) In the 160-some years since that amendment, a quieter type of forced servitude has lived on in the US: prison labor. From the debt peonage of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to the privatized contracting of the 21st century, prison labor is a massive money maker, generating $11 billion worth of revenue in 2022 alone."]
1 1/2 cups of unsweetened almond milk (or other nut milk) 1/2 cups whole pitted dates 1 banana 2 tbsp almond butter (or other unsweetened nut butter) 1 tbsp honey 1 cup ice 2 tbsp chia seeds (or hemp, or something similar) 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
[This list of ingredients is perfect as is, but also I like playing with this by using an extra ingredient on hand that I should use up: blueberries, hi-quality cacao, dragon fruit, papaya, guava ...]
Preparation note: mix the almond milk and dates in a sealable bowl and put in the fridge over night to soften the dates]
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal (for science and society). - source
Nestle, Marion. "A Food Expert’s Case That The Cyclospora Outbreak Was A System Failure."Where the Food Comes From (July 29, 2026) ["I am outraged by the Cyclospora outbreak. It has sickened thousands of people so far (>16,000?), and made some of them very sick. Cyclospora is different from other foodborne pathogens. It comes from human waste and cannot be removed by washing (although that helps some) or killed by chlorine. It can only be removed by microfiltration or killed by heat or, maybe, ultra-violet radiation. It needs to be prevented from getting into irrigation water. Lettuce producers have known about the Cyclospora hazard for more than a decade. They have not acted, and neither has the government."]
---. "The Money Behind Ultra-Processed Food."Capitalisn't (May 23, 2024) ["Critics of the food industry allege that it relentlessly pursues profits at the expense of public health. They claim that food companies "ultra-process" products with salt, sugar, fats, and artificial additives, employ advanced marketing tactics to manipulate and hook consumers, and are ultimately responsible for a global epidemic of health ailments. Companies are also launching entirely new lines and categories of food products catering to diabetes or weight management drugs such as Ozempic. Marion Nestle, a leading public health advocate, nutritionist, award-winning author, and Professor Emerita at New York University, first warned in her 2002 book "Food Politics" that Big Food deliberately designs unhealthy, addictive products to drive sales, often backed by industry-funded research that misleads consumers. This week on Capitalisn't, Nestle joins Bethany and Luigi to explore the ultra-processed food industry through the interplay of four lenses: the underlying science, business motives, influencing consumer perceptions, and public policy."]
---. "On Food Choices and Food Politics."Against the Grain (August 4, 2026) ["Food affects all of us — but while it’s a necessity for our survival, it’s also a vast, sprawling industry spanning the globe, which generates enormous profits as well as significant damage to public health and the environment. Nutritionist and molecular biologist Marion Nestle sheds light on the choices we all must navigate when we enter the grocery store." Marion Nestle, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters North Point Press, 2025."]
---. "The Politics of Food Choices."Food, Ethics, and Society. ed. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Oxford University Press, 2016: 596 - 601.
---. What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. Macmillan, 2025. ["What to Eat Now is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense guide to the most important food questions on our plate today. How do we make informed dietary choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities? In the twenty years since Marion Nestle’s groundbreaking What to Eat first came out, food has undergone a radical change. The emergence of techno foods, the growth of corporate organics, and a surge of interest in food-delivery services reignited by the pandemic are just a few of the things that have altered how we think about how we eat. The typical American supermarket carries more than thirty thousand products. How do you choose? Misinformation, disinformation, and corporate misdirection play a crucial and hard-to-see role in how the average shopper thinks about and chooses food. In an aisle-by-aisle guide, Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and a founding figure in American food studies, takes us through the American supermarket. With persistence, wit, and common sense, she establishes the basics of good nutrition, food safety, and ethical and sustainable eating, and gives readers a close-up look at the web of interests—from supermarket slotting policies to multinational food corporations to lobbying groups—that food has to navigate before it gets to your shopping basket. Above all else, What to Eat Now is a defense of real food and of the value of eating deliciously, mindfully, and responsibly."]
Nestle, Marion, et al. "Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health (University of California Press, 2020)."New Books in Food (January 13, 2021) ["Marion Nestle describes her new book as “a small, quick and dirty reader for the general audience” summarizing some of her biggest and most influential works. Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know About the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health published September 2020 by University of California Press, was written in conversation with Kerry Trueman, a blogger and friend. Trueman’s questions served as prompts to organize Nestle’s 800-1000 word summaries in approachable and engaging prose. Readers familiar with Nestle’s groundbreaking Food Politics will recognize many of the ideas and information, but this new pocket-sized and affordable volume serves as an introduction for undergraduate students or readers new to Food Studies. However, Nestle does cover some new material in her explanation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially the campaign for Zero Hunger. Nestle also summarizes how nutrition advice has changed in the last few years by thinking about food in categories ranging from unprocessed (corn on the cob) to ultraprocessed (Nacho Cheese tortilla chips). This reevaluation makes it easier to identify foods that are acceptable to eat without excessive focus on micronutrients. In the conversation, Nestle addresses the ethics of marketing food to children, food as a human right and access in the Covid era, the possibility of a National Food Policy Agency, the politics of food banks, and the promise of regenerative agricultural practices. Nestle concludes by talking about the pleasures of food and eating and how to establish a “loving relationship” with food that doesn’t include fear, guilt, or anxiety about nutrition. Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, and the author of books about food politics, most recently Unsavory Truth."]
Stewart, Jon. "A Conversation with Marion Nestle: Straight Talk About Obesity, Nutrition, and Food Policy."Permanente Journal (Fall 2006): 62-65. ["Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, does not lack for opinion about the role of the food industry in the etiology of America's obesity crisis. She freely expresses her point of view as one of the most outspoken and influential voices in the national debate on public health nutrition and food policy. Dr Nestle has devoted much of her professional life to the nutrition issues that individuals, institutions, and policymakers are struggling with today: how to make better choices about what we eat."]
White, Dan. "A candid conversation with Marion Nestle: How corporations and politicians decide what you eat."UC Santa Cruz Campus News (February 18, 2026) ["A few hours before delivering the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture, the longtime nutrition scholar and tireless consumer advocate Marion Nestle gave a far-ranging, informal interview at The Humanities Institute (THI.) Nestle discussed the political structure of the American food system, arguing that corporate influence—from agricultural subsidies to supermarket slotting fees—shapes what people eat far more than personal choice does."]
Die Spitz; Wombo; The Kilans; Cardinals; Dad Bod; Wilbere; Nadezhda; Freak Slug; Black Sabbath; The Brothers Johnson; villagerrr; Merce Lemon; Feeble Little Horse; Tame Impala; Gorillaz; De La Soul; Neneh Cherry; The Call; Bob Marley and the Wailers; Ziggy Marley; Sex Pistols; The Clash; Siouxsie and the Banshees; Joy Division; Soft Cell; Nirvana; David Bowie; bar Italia; Elias Ronnefelt; Iceage; The Last Dinner Party; The Lovely Eggs; Sonic Youth; The Dream Syndicate; The Mountain Goats; Anathema; The Presidents of the United States of America; Hot Chip; 4 Non Blondes; Folk Bitch Trio; Stevie Wonder
Yasmin Hamdan; Orange 9mm; The Hello Crows; Princess Nokia; Andrew Bird; Lucius; Rage Against the Machine; Disappeared Completely; The Strokes; No So; Weakened Friends; Not for Radio; Wilby; Jessie Baylin; Badlands; Guitar; The xx; Turnstile; Hayley Williams; Modes Mouse; Magdalena Bay; The Last Dinner Party; Briston Maroney; American Football; Branden Yates; Grandaddy; Between Friends; The Moss; Blackwater Holylight; Alabama 3; Wizard; Kevin Morby; Erin Rae; Melody' Echo Chamber; Ben Kweller; Waxahatchee; Dehd; Dry Cleaning; Smerz; Kenny Hoopla; Hannah Cohen; New Dad; Chanel Beads; Freak Slug; TOPS; Automatic; feeble little horse
