Take responsibility for your education/understanding. Learning is not passive. Any teacher/mentor worth the title knows that they are at best facilitators for your learning. Good teachers lay out a map, point out the paths for potential discovery, detours and connections. Remember education or instruction (of any type - if it has a narrative, it is constructing a worldview) is never objective - pay attention to the way that knowledge is presented/represented to you. - Michael D. Benton
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"Aftershock: The War on Terror – Episode 1: With Us or Against Us." The LRB Podcast (November 21, 2025) ["In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of emergency and initiated what would become an unprecedented expansion of US power. Public debate narrowed: there were new limits on what was acceptable, and not acceptable, to say. The London Review of Books published a number of pieces that challenged this consensus, forcing its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, to defend the paper on national radio."]
Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Surfing." Overthink #149 (November 25, 2025) ["Hang loose! ... Ellie and David talk about all things surfing. They explore the long history of wave-riding across the globe, from Peru to West Africa, and consider how surfing helps us to reimagine social issues and what surfing reveals about the connection between flow and freedom. Is surfing the pinnacle of human life? How has the sportification of surfing directly contravened surfing’s anti-capitalist ethos? Why is the average surfer an image of white masculinity? And how is this image tied to indigenous erasure?"
Works Discussed
Daniel Brennan, Surfing and the Philosophy of Sport
Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Aaron James, Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry Into a Life of Meaning
Peter Kreeft, I Surf, Therefore I Am: A Philosophy of Surfing
Aileen Moreton Robinson, “Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach”
Peter J. Westwick and Peter Neushul, The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing
Wade in the Water: A Journey Into Black Surfing and Aquatic Culture (2023)]
Ball, Krystal and Saagar Enjeti. "Zionism Deemed HATE SPEECH In INSANE Social Media Censorship." Breaking Points (Posted on Youtube: January 27, 2026) [MB - TikTok's new American owner's are censoring any reference's to ICE shootings in Minneapolis, the word Zionism, any critique of Israel or mention of the Palestinian genocide, or any mentions of Jeffrey Epstein. An example of the growing censorship and propaganda regime in America.]
Bria, Francesca and José Bautista. "The Authoritarian Stack." Autonomy Institute (October 2025) ["This project maps the "Authoritarian Stack"—a network of firms, funds, and political actors turning core state functions into private platforms. Based on an open-source dataset of over 250 actors, thousands of verified connections, and $45 billion in documented financial flows. ... "The Pipeline Made Visible: Unlike old authoritarianism built on fear and force, this new system rules through code, capital, and infrastructure — making resistance feel architecturally impossible. It’s a self-reinforcing loop: Ideology fuels venture capital → capital captures the state → the state feeds the same private systems that built it. A new model of power — privatized sovereignty. Each layer reinforces the others. Ideology justifies investment. Investment captures state power. State power secures contracts. Contracts build infrastructure. Infrastructure becomes indispensable. Indispensability generates returns. Returns fund more ideology."]
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)." Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: U. Of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3-25. ["'This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.' Monsters are our children.They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge - and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them."]
Dudas, Jeffrey R. and Stephen Dyson. "Is 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple the Most Important Film of the Year?" The Pop Culture Professors (January 21, 2026) ["A parable of humanism and dehumanization centered on two charismatic leaders, the movie hits its marks intellectually and aesthetically. We consider its themes and ideas, and ask whether this movie and its predecessor – last year’s 28 Years Later – will be come to be considered significant works in contemporary popular culture."]
Fontainelle, Earl. "Methodologies for the study of Magic." The Secret History of Western Esotericism (September 20, 2017) [MB - OK, quick, what comes to your mind when you hear the word magic? I like the way Earl Fontainelle looks at these subjects from multiple angles. Here in order to start off an exploration of understandings/histories of magic, he breaks down the etymology, histories, and disinformation surrounding the word/concept. Highly recommended for those that practice magic, those that think magic is silly/dangerous, those that have deep religious beliefs (especially of a Manichean nature), those that are rigidly atheist (I would say fundamentalist), and definitely those that are wrapped up in fanatical ideologies (the type where whole groups of beings/cultures are the enemy and need to be wiped out). What is good or bad - how do we decide? what are the consequences of those decisions? What comes to your mind when you think of magic - what happens when we actually explore a concept and think about the multiple ways it is framed?]
Galimi, Rossana. "The ageing female body between feminist video art and horror cinema." NECSUS (Autumn 2025) ["Contemporary horror cinema continues to construct the ageing female body as a privileged source of fear and repulsion, as seen in films such as The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015), Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), or X (Ti West, 2022), where what Dolan terms ‘designed abjection’ is employed to pathologise the ageing female body, underscoring the impermanence of youthful beauty. X, for instance, cast the same actress (Mia Goth) in the double role of Maxine, the film’s young and promiscuous Final Girl, and of the abject old killer, Pearl. As noted by Rose Steptoe, Maxine’s sexual activity and youthfulness are punished not by death, as required by the slasher formula, but by survival, which will inevitably lead her to age and embody that very abjection. Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine provides a productive framework for understanding the ageing female body as a locus of abjection: initially associated with the maternal and reproductive body, the monstrous-feminine embodies the threat to the symbolic order through its excess and proximity to death, and can therefore be extended to later life. The ageing female body, marked in horror cinema by material decay and loss of reproductive capacities, acts both as a reminder of mortality and, as underlined by Erin Harrington, ‘a threat to the phallocentric order that centralises reproduction as the use-value of the female subject’. Within this visual and discursive landscape came the release of The Substance in 2024, a film whose exceptional success in the realm of both female-directed cinema and body horror can be linked to its ability to capture the zeitgeist about women and ageing. Coralie Fargeat’s second film features Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, stunning and athletic fitness television star who is sidelined by her broadcasting network upon reaching her 50th birthday. Offered a chance to try the titular substance, a biotech formula that creates a younger, improved version of oneself, she sees it as an opportunity back to youth, beauty, and visibility. However, the process comes with strict rules: only one version of Elisabeth can live at a time, while the other lives in a sort of coma for a week, otherwise the system begins to collapse. Reflecting on the biomedical commodification of youth and the co-optation of ageing female bodies by biotechnologies and practices of self-monitoring, the film sparked discussion on beauty standards and ageism. It reinvigorated feminist debates around women’s discipline over their image, the beauty industry, and, not least, the commodification of feminism – being marketed as ‘feminist’ despite its controversial treatment of the female body."]
Johnson, David. "Attention is the Last Frontier: Bernard Stiegler and the Age of Distraction." The Observing 1 (August 24, 2025) ["Bernard Stiegler’s life reads like something out of a parable. A young man with no future robs banks in 1970s France, spends years behind bars, and in that captivity rebuilds himself with philosophy. He walks out of prison not as a criminal, but as a thinker possessed, convinced that the real theft in our time is not money, but attention. In this episode of The Observing I, we explore Stiegler’s haunting philosophy of technology. For him, every tool humanity creates is a pharmakon, a drug that is both poison and cure. Writing, television, the internet, the smartphone. Each expands memory and possibility, while at the same time eroding our ability to care, to think slowly, to live with depth. Stiegler saw consumer capitalism as an attention factory, engineering desire, fragmenting focus, and hollowing out culture. He warned that the collapse of care, the long, patient work of knowledge, intimacy, and love, was not a side effect but the central mechanism of the system we live inside. Burnout, anxiety, distraction: these are not private pathologies, but collective symptoms of a civilization addicted to speed. We trace Stiegler’s journey from outlaw to philosopher, his obsession with memory and time, his warnings about the industrialisation of attention, and the tragic end of his life that makes his work feel even more urgent. At the heart of it all lies the question he left for us: if attention is the last scarce resource, can care itself survive? This is not just an episode about a philosopher. It’s about the world we live in now. A world where our memories are outsourced, our futures feel stolen, and our very capacity to care is on the line."]
Kim, Hannah H. "When Story Loses the Plot." The Los Angeles Review of Books (December 20, 2025) ["Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration (2024) adds two forces to the critiques of storytelling: fragmentation of attention and the loss of narrative communities. In the past, the hectic pace of life might have driven us toward stories for closure and coherence; instead, today, the same pace—amplified by ongoing political and climate crises—collides with a media environment that undermines narrative form. We traffic in information that is additive and cumulative, stimulating but contingent, never shaped into an arc. Narrative depends on pacing the release of relevant information, but today we are either bombarded with an endless stream of updates or confronted with institutional opacity that withholds crucial information. Both forces prevent events from organizing into a meaningful arc, and Han thus argues that we now live in a post-narrative world. In this environment, “storytelling” becomes “storyselling,” a communication technology that can be more or less effective. And the kinds of stories that do thrive tend to be narrow in form: either “those people are the problem (and the truth will save us)” (e.g., news, conspiracy theories) or “you’re wounded, and understanding that will help you live differently” (e.g., therapy). The potent mix of capitalism, social media, and information overload has rendered most “stories” brief, disconnected, and designed for consumption rather than connection. Think TikTok reels, Instagram Stories, or the news cycle."]
Koopman, Colin. "The Power Thinker." Aeon (March 15, 2017) ["Foucault never denied the reality of state power in the Hobbesian sense. But his political philosophy emanates from his skepticism about the assumption (and it was a mere assumption until Foucault called it into question) that the only real power is sovereign power. Foucault accepted that there were real forces of violence in the world, and not only state violence. There is also corporate violence due to enormous condensations of capital, gender violence in the form of patriarchy, and the violences both overt and subtle of white supremacy in such forms as chattel slavery, real-estate redlining, and now mass incarceration. Foucault’s work affirmed that such exercises of force were exhibits of sovereign power, likenesses of Leviathan. What he doubted was the assumption that we could extrapolate from this easy observation the more complex thought that power only ever appears in Leviathan-like form. ... One need not be locked away in a prison cell to be subject to its designs of disciplinary dressage. The most chilling line in Discipline and Punish is the final sentence of the section entitled ‘Panopticism’, where Foucault wryly asks: ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’ If Foucault is right, we are subject to the power of correct training whenever we are tied to our school desks, our positions on the assembly line or, perhaps most of all in our time, our meticulously curated cubicles and open-plan offices so popular as working spaces today. To be sure, disciplinary training is not sovereign violence. But it is power. Classically, power took the form of force or coercion and was considered to be at its purest in acts of physical violence. Discipline acts otherwise. It gets a hold of us differently. It does not seize our bodies to destroy them, as Leviathan always threatened to do. Discipline rather trains them, drills them and (to use Foucault’s favoured word) ‘normalises’ them. All of this amounts to, Foucault saw, a distinctly subtle and relentless form of power. To refuse to recognise such disciplining as a form of power is a denial of how human life has come to be shaped and lived. If the only form of power we are willing to recognise is sovereign violence, we are in a poor position to understand the stakes of power today. If we are unable to see power in its other forms, we become impotent to resist all the other ways in which power brings itself to bear in forming us."]
Leonido, Tim. "Natural Systems: Gurney Norman and the dream of the counterculture." The Point (December 16, 2025) ["Running along the lower right-hand corner of The Last Whole Earth Catalog was something unexpected: a serialized novel that unfolded segment by segment across its 450 pages. The novel was Divine Right’s Trip. Though inspired by the ethos of the counterculture movement, it also posed the essential question of what should follow in the wake of the communes. In retrospect, the novel reads as a hinge between two emerging visions of human connection: one drifting toward abstract, digital networks, and the other toward engagement with tangible, place-based community. Reissued this August from Gnomon Press, months before the passing of its author, Gurney Norman, in October, the novel’s animating question still feels like an urgent one: In an increasingly networked world, what would it mean to return home, and to forge a literature that was rooted in place?"]
Magdoff, Fred. "Food as a Commodity." Monthly Review (January 1, 2012) ["Food is one of the most basic of human needs. Routine access to a balanced diet is essential for both growth and development of the young, as well as for general health throughout one’s life. Although food is mostly plentiful, malnutrition is still common. The contradiction between plentiful global food supplies and widespread malnutrition and hunger arises primarily from food being considered a commodity, just like any other."]
Mann, Sally. "Art Work: On the Creative Life." LARB Radio Hour (January 2, 2026) ["This week, we are revisiting our episode with [Appalachian] photographer and writer Sally Mann about her book, "Art Work: On the Creative Life." Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with Mann, whose book describes her path to becoming an artist and provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come between you and your work. The book includes selections from Mann’s rich archive of photographic work prints, explaining some of the ideas that have gone into her pictures, as well early diary entries that portray a fierce determination alongside equally fierce self-doubt. She also includes excerpts from her long correspondence with a fellow photographer named Ted Orland. Mann’s advice is to write letters, keep your receipts, make lots of lists, and remember that being an artist isn't necessarily such a big deal, it’s a job like any other: you have to work at it."]
Nyirenda, Hardy. "You Are Not Invited to the Orgy." Hardy's Substack (December 5, 2025) ["Bataille rejected this denunciation of excess. Bataille flipped the core views of economics. For Bataille, life on Earth is not a frugal economy of scarcity but a profligacy of cosmic excess. He proclaimed that the sun showers energy upon us without asking for return; this is the source of what he called la part maudite, “the accursed share”. The surplus energy-biological, economic, down to the psychological-that any system must expend, one way or another. All life on Earth uses solar energy or stored parcels of solar energy, so there is a massive excess of it. The sun’s energy sustains all life on Earth; everything that we consume can have its route of existence traced through a chain that starts with the sun. Even in resources of oil and coal, fossilised plants and animals are just conduits that have held the energy of the sun underground for millennia until we can bring it back up to use again. Societies throughout history, with their abundance of energy, cannot sustain the critical mass of all of this excess. And Bataille states that here is where societies must spend the excess, ‘either gloriously, or catastrophically’. But not just spend the excess, but waste it for the sake of ridding of it. The modes of expenditure, gloriously, would involve non-productive, sumptuous but nonetheless socially constructive reasons; this would include art, festivals, rituals, monuments and the gift-giving ceremony of ‘potlatch’. Imagine the ancient societies that would have exquisite parties or animal sacrifice after a bountiful harvest. This relinquish in abundance to Bataille was what was truly sacred in societies, the extravagant art, banquets, cathedrals and offerings to the Gods, celebration for its own sake. What is truly human and opposed to the profane is relinquishing and making or doing things for the action itself, not utility. What makes life, life, more than the moments squandered against utility? Lounging for pleasure, intoxication and big beautiful parties. To look back on one’s life through the points of utility, repetition of chores and work are not the points we use to distinguish what made our lives worth living."]
O'Connor, Anahand.
"How the Food Industry is Influencing Your TikTok Feed." On the Media (September 20, 2023) ["In July, the World Health Organization issues a report indicating that aspartame, an artificial sweetener used in many low calorie sodas and snacks, was "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The new statement on a widely utilized artificial sweetener led to controversy in the medical community, with the Federal Drug Administration saying they saw no concern over aspartame consumption. Some dietitians even took to social media to voice their contradicting opinions.
Anahad O’Connor, a health columnist at The Washington Post, the response to the announcement on social media smelled a bit fishy. In a report
released earlier this month with colleagues Caitlin Gilbert and Sasha Chavkin, O’Connor found that dozens of registered dietitians, some with more than 2 million followers each, were paid to counter the WHO’s announcement. He and his colleagues followed the money back to industry groups like American Beverage, which represents companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. This week, OTM correspondent
Micah Loewinger sits down O'Connor to learn more about the growing trend of influencer dietitians and the long history of food and beverage lobbies attempting to influence our eating habits."]
Rexer, William. "Clubhouse Conversations -The Testament of Ann Lee." American Cinematographer (November 24, 2025) ["In this episode, cinematographer William Rexer, ASC is joined by interviewer Tari Segal, ASC to discuss his work on The Testament of Ann Lee — an historical musical drama from director Mona Fastvold that examines the life of the founding leader of the Shakers religious sect in the 18th century. The Testament of Ann Lee charts the radical religious journey of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), an England-born woman who envisioned and established the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing — a religious sect that became widely known in America as the Shakers, due to their ecstatic manner of worship and Quaker roots. The film marks the third for director Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote the screenplay with creative partner Brady Corbet; Fastvold and Corbet's previous feature, The Brutalist, won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Cinematography (Lol Crawley, ASC, BSC) earlier this year."]
Roberto, Michael Joseph. "In The Coming Of The American Behemoth Fascism Hits Close To Home." The State of Things (January 29, 2019) ["Many Americans know fascism as an authoritarian ideology which blossomed in early 20th century Europe — first with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and later with Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazi Germany. But historian Michael Joseph Roberto argues that while Mussolini and Hitler were capturing the world’s attention, a type of fascist ideology was also taking hold in the United States, although the system looked different. Roberto says monopoly-finance capitalism and the dominance of big business over personal liberties is America’s own mutation of fascism. He articulates this argument in the book “The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940” (NYU Press/2018)."]
Rosen, Jay. "On the Digital Revolution That Wasn't." The Kicker (December 29, 2025) ["In 2006, Jay Rosen, the media scholar, published his influential article “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” His medium was as important as his message. Although the essay would later appear in media-studies textbooks, it was first published on his blog, a form invented in the late 1990s that seemed, in Rosen’s words, to give everyone their own printing press. Armed with such technologies, he said, the public would no longer simply consume journalism as passive spectators. They now owned the means of media production. A beautiful democracy and a newly accountable press were sure to flourish. As Rosen knows as well as anyone, the world did not quite pan out that way. What was initially understood to be a technology of liberation became, increasingly, a mechanism of control: a means of surveilling the public, selling ads, and generating enormous profits for a small number of companies. Journalism and democracy both entered periods of sustained crisis from which they have yet to recover. The internet has even begun to abandon participation as part of its core ethos. As a recent analysis by the Financial Times shows, “social media has become less social”: partly because of these platforms’ algorithms, people are interacting with one another less and returning to the passive media consumption that the internet was supposed to disrupt. In this context, it seems that the people formerly known as the audience are… once again the audience. In this episode of Journalism 2050, Rosen joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss where it all went wrong and what journalists can do to fight back. Were the assumptions that the internet would help democracy and journalism simply naive? What did commentators fail to see at the time? What should we make of the return to blogging culture via platforms like Substack and Medium?"]
Silverman, David. "Silicon Valley's Dark Quest For Techno Fascism." Breaking Points (December 22, 2025) ["Krystal is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss Silicon Valley's quest for techno fascism. David Silverman's newest book is Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley: "What happens if the world's richest and most powerful men decide to dismantle democracy? In Gilded Rage, New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman takes us inside the surreal, high-stakes world of Silicon Valley. This is the story of the political awakening and radicalization of a cabal of tech billionaires and their descent into ideological extremism. Flush with cash from the zero-interest era, addicted to their own mythology, these men have began reshaping the world in their image -- and it should terrify us all. At the center is Elon Musk, the mogul whose obsession with the “woke mind virus” has turned him from a tech innovator to an ideological crusader. But Musk is just the beginning. Silverman maps a sprawling network of radicalized elites - from Peter Thiel and JD Vance to the financiers bankrolling Donald Trump's return - who are using their platforms and their money to ensure a political revolution that's already underway. This is not just a book about tech. It's about power. We meet the billionaires funding life-extension labs and embracing apocalyptic visions of AI. We examine the populist rhetoric that is leading to the ruthless dismantling of democratic norms. And we enter the strange, darkly comic world of the tech-oligarchy where libertarian dreams meet authoritarian impulses, and where the people with the most influence over our lives are the least accountable. Silverman travels from San Francisco to Miami, New York to DC, following a movement that's rewriting the rules and oftentimes fighting a war against reality itself. With sharp reporting and a cast of extraordinary characters, Gilded Rage is a gripping, essential dispatch from the front lines of the billionaire revolution. If you want to understand who is trying to control the future, and why, then this is the book you need to read."]
Thalos, Mariam. "Resist and Be Free." Aeon (April 4, 2019) ["If we shift our focus away from thinking about ‘options’ or ‘alternatives’, and consider instead the opportunities for moulding our self-image in the course of resisting oppressive forces, we might be able to promote real freedom. That way, we can help people use instances of restraint or repression as moments of self-creation, by preparing people in advance of threats to their liberty. This new approach to freedom demands a metamorphosis in how we think about creating an identity, particularly in situations where we have been disciplined to rule out eligible options. Friends and critics alike do us no service when they point out that we can ‘do anything we want’. If we can’t see the alternatives as genuinely open, because of stereotypes or other forms of expectation, it doesn’t matter if they technically exist. True freedom is fundamentally about self-fashioning: you are free when you act out of your self-conception, even (or especially) when doing so defies what others think you are capable of."]
Tulleken, Chris van. Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food. W.W. Norton, 2023. ["A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body. It’s not you, it’s the food. We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There’s a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF. These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food. In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You’ll find no diet plan in this book—but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world’s leading experts from academia, agriculture, and—most important—the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris’s own addiction to UPF. In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won’t only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global scale."]
West, Stephen. "The Frankfurt School - Introduction." Philosophize This #108 (August 17, 2017) ["This episode explores the philosophical undercurrents of the 20th century by framing key figures like Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Marx, and Camus not just as isolated thinkers but as participants in larger historical and intellectual movements. The discussion begins with Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “God is dead,” reframing it as a mournful observation about the collapse of shared sources of meaning in the wake of scientific progress. From there, it examines how this loss of moral certainty gave rise to new ideological structures—nationalism, Marxism, and existentialism—as modern people searched for meaning in an increasingly fragmented world. French existentialists emphasized individual freedom and responsibility in response to the horrors of groupthink during World War II, while the Frankfurt School sought to revise Marxism in light of its historical failures and Enlightenment’s limits. The episode ends with a reflection on Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, proposing that meaning can be reclaimed not through abstract reflection but through deep engagement with our everyday tasks—even when they seem absurd.
Further Reading:
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre by Walter Kaufmann (2004)
The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance by Rolf Wiggershaus (1995)
Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope by Patrick Hayden (2016)]
---. "The Frankfurt School (Part 7): The Great Refusal." Philosophize This! #114 (December 23, 2017) ["This episode explores Herbert Marcuse’s concept of the Great Refusal—not as a set of actionable political tactics, but as a deeply personal, transformative process of resisting the dominant culture of aggression, domination, and control. Marcuse challenges the assumption that political revolution can succeed without first reexamining and reshaping one’s own subjectivity, which is often shaped by consumerism, media narratives, and social conditioning. He warns that even well-meaning movements risk reproducing the very systems they aim to dismantle if they fail to confront how monopoly capitalism has conditioned their instincts, perceptions, and values. Drawing from Marx and psychoanalysis, Marcuse emphasizes the need to “emancipate the senses” and cultivate a “new sensibility”—a more humane way of seeing and being that rejects the commodified, aggressive impulses normalized by society. The episode closes by framing this ethical and psychological transformation as essential for genuine liberation, setting the stage for a broader discussion on subjectivity and postmodern critiques." Further Reading:
The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements – Edited by Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke (2017)
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society – Herbert Marcuse (1964)
Counterrevolution and Revolt – Herbert Marcuse (1972)]
---. "Simone De Beauvoir Pt. 1 - The Ethics of Ambiguity." Philosophize This! #106 (July 19, 2017) ["In this episode, the discussion builds on Sartre’s view of human existence as a constant tension between facticity—the unchangeable facts of our lives—and transcendence—the possibilities we have to shape ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir deepens this idea in The Ethics of Ambiguity by arguing that human beings do not live in just one tension but inhabit a web of overlapping dualities: subject and object, individual and collective, mind and body. Rather than simplify these contradictions, she insists we must face them honestly, embracing the inherent ambiguity of existence. De Beauvoir critiques historical philosophy and religion [MB: Performative professional politicians are also guilty of this] for offering comforting but false narratives that obscure this truth. She emphasizes that freedom—our unavoidable capacity to choose—is the foundation of any ethical life. However, she warns that many fall into “bad faith,” adopting fixed identities or nihilism to escape the discomfort of freedom. Instead, true ethical living requires not only accepting our own freedom but working to maximize the freedom of others. Through this lens, meaning is not discovered but created through action, and ethics begins with the acknowledgment that we are condemned to be free."
Further Reading:
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (2016)
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre edited by Walter Kaufmann (1956)
Existentialism for Everyday Life: Finding Meaning in a Chaotic World by Aurora Koskinen (2023)]
Wright, Joe. "The Making of an Autocrat: Co-opt the Military." The Conversation Weekly (December 4, 2026) {'In November, six Democratic lawmakers recorded a video directed at members of the US military and intelligence agencies. In it, they issued a blunt reminder: "The laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders. […] You must refuse illegal orders." The lawmakers were issuing the warning against the backdrop of US airstrikes on boats off the coast of Latin America the Trump administration claims are suspected drug runners. Many Democrats and legal experts, however, argue these strikes are illegal. Since returning to office, Trump has successfully expanded his power over his own party, the courts and the American people. Now, like many autocrats around the world, he’s trying to exert control over the military. In the final episode of The Making of an Autocrat, Joe Wright, a political science professor at Penn State University, says: "I am very concerned that getting the military to do illegal things will not only put US soldiers at more risk when they do engage in international missions in the future […] it’s a first step to using the military to target domestic political opponents. That’s what really worries me.""]
