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!
Joe Kent served 11 tours as a ranger in the Special Forces primarily in Iraq. His wife Shannon was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria while serving. Kent became politically active and was later a fervent supporter of Trump. He was appointed the head of the National Counterterroism Center under Tulsi Gabbard the director of national intelligence. For that role he was confirmed by the US Senate in July and had the highest security clearance. On March 17th, Kent resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, citing disagreement over U.S. involvement in the Iran war and the influence of Israel and the Israeli lobby in domestic politics. This is an episode about his first interview after that resignation.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger of a Single Story."TED Global (2009) ["Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."]
Alexander, Rahne, Keith Gordon, and Mike White. "Head On (2004)."The Projection Booth #789 (March 4, 2026) ["Collision as courtship. Self-destruction as intimacy. Fatih Akın's Head-On (2004) opens with two suicide attempts and spirals into a sham marriage between Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), German Turks who weaponize matrimony to escape themselves. What begins as a performance of tradition mutates into volatile love, violence, prison, exile, and a reunion that refuses catharsis. Keith Gordon and Rahne Alexander join Mike to unpack Akın’s fusion of Sirkian melodrama, Fassbinder fatalism, and arabesk despair."]
Banai, Hussein.. "War with Iran."Open Source (March 6, 2026) ["We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, on the first weekend of the war, which President Trump says could go on for weeks. But to what end? On whose say-so? At what risk? Hussein Banai, known as Huss, is our guest—the guide we turn to partly because he was born and schooled in Iran. He is informed but not official, a professor of international studies at Indiana University in Bloomington."]
The Corporation (Canada: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot, 2003: 145 mins) ["Did you know that the legal system recognises a corporation as a person? What kind of ‘person’ is it then? What would happen if it sat down with a psychologist to discuss its behaviour and attitude towards society and the environment? Explored through specific examples, this film shows how and why the modern-day corporation has rapaciously pressed itself into the dominant institution of our time, posing big questions about what must be done if we want a equitable and sustainable world. What must we do when corporations are psychopaths?"]
Coviello, Peter. "Infrastructures of Escape."Filmmaker Quarterly 79.3 (2026) ["One Battle is not, as Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) rather successfully was, an “adaptation” of Pynchon. It is, I think, something looser, and weirder, and altogether better: an extended riff, that is also an extended reading, that is also—and here the heart swells—something like a fan’s notes, a loving tribute executed in the idiom of film. There are plenty of things to say about its formal accomplishments and deficits—about the textured 70 mm photography, the pivot from Vineland’s 1960s/1980s setting to the calamitous present tense, the badly fumbled ending, its casting, its plotting, the astounding kinetic vivacity of a film that’s engrossing over the whole course of its nearly three-hour run. But most of what I mean to say is that I fucking loved it. Whatever else Anderson may do in his reading, I think he gets impeccably and upliftingly correct that Pynchon is at heart a comic humanist and a vitriolic antifascist. And then, with a grace and ingenuity all his own, Anderson translates that signature novelistic disposition—the delirious sentences, off-kilter plots, lunatic counterfacutals—into a rollicking big-screen entertainment. I don’t know that it’s the easiest thing, just now, to make a credibly antifascist piece of mass culture. Anderson has done that, and Pynchon helped him do it. I’d like to give an account of what this means."]
Dennison, Stephanie and Alfredo Suppia. "The Secret Agent: gripping thriller reminds us why academic freedom needs protecting."The Conversation (February 19, 2026) ['One of the features that makes The Secret Agent, set predominantly in 1977, particularly compelling in this regard is its treatment of universities, as battlegrounds where memory, power and democracy collide. The film’s main character Armando, played by Oscar-nominated Moura, is not, in fact, a secret agent and has no obvious links to opposition movements. He is an academic forced into hiding after clashing with big business interests aligned with the authoritarian regime who want to get their hands on his research."]
Diamond, Adele. "The Science of Attention."On Being (2014) ["What Adele Diamond is learning about the brain challenges basic assumptions in modern education. Her work is scientifically illustrating the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization, and reflection. What nourishes the human spirit, the whole person, it turns out, also hones our minds."]
Doctorow, Cory. "How to Stop “Enshittification” Before It Kills the Internet."Capitalisn't (December 11, 2025) ["There’s a word that’s gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “enshittification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders. We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed. For Doctorow, "enshittification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors. Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior. Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution."]
Drimmer, Sonja and Christopher J. Nygren."Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education."Publiic Books (December 16, 2025) ["Though half a century ago, still, the demonstration resonates now. Today, it may seem to many that the cluster of technologies marketed as “AI” is entirely new, and, logically, that objection to it must likewise be unheard-of. But, as the demonstration shows, not only is “AI” not especially new; protesting it has a long history. Inspired by the collective objection represented in this photo, we are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education. We envision a resistance that is, by its very nature, a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction."]
Gemünden, Gerd. "When the Fantastic Meets Reality: An Interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho."Film Quarterly 79.3 (2026) ["O agente secreto (The Secret Agent, 2025), the latest feature by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, has been billed as a political thriller, but is better described as a stylish and frolicsome romp through Brazilian and North American film history that celebrates all that cinema is capable of. While beholden to the narrative of deception that propels many conventional thrillers, the film smoothly navigates an array of genres (the Western, noir, horror, even the family story) while nodding toward John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and other US horror films of the 1970s. Set in 1977, during the military dictatorship, The Secret Agent casts its tale of corruption and repression as a black comedy, presenting a strange and discomforting story in which nothing is what it seems, and in which the many subplots and detours matter more than the story’s central conceit, which revolves around a researcher called Marcelo (an alias; his real name is Armando) on the run from hired hitmen. In a metanarrative set in the present, two university students transcribe audiotapes that record the story of Marcelo/Armando—one of several ways in which The Secret Agent engages with the notion of the archive and links the past to the present."]
Holt, Jim. "The Grand Illusion."Lapham's Quarterly (ND) ["Does time have a future? Yes, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be."]
Iacono, Carlo. "Books and Screens."Aeon (February 19, 2026) ["Amy Orben, a psychologist studying technology panics, identifies the ‘Sisyphean cycle’: each generation fears new media will corrupt youth; politicians exploit these fears while deflecting from systemic issues like inequality and educational underfunding; research begins too late; and by the time evidence accumulates showing mixed effects dependent on context, a new technology emerges and the cycle restarts. What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology. These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications. This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints."]
Johnson, David. "The Doors of Perception."The Observing #3 (January 20, 2023) ["In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between observation and perception, how our own prejudices and preconceptions overlay what we experience, and what we can do to change that."]
Kemp, Luke. "Where are We Going? Societal Collapse - The Future."Past Present Future (March 8, 2026) ["In the fourth and final conversation in this series David talks to Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse, about where we might be heading. Where does the greatest risk of global collapse lie? Who is ultimately responsible for our fate? What makes states and corporations the agents of doom? How can we humans fight back?"]
---. " Where Are We Going? Societal Collapse – The Modern Age."Past Present Future (March 1, 2026) ["In today’s episode David talks to Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse, about the strengths and weaknesses of modern states and modern structures of authority. Are modern states any different from the criminal enterprises of coercion that preceded them? Does democracy change the dynamic of societal collapse? What are the lootable resources of the modern age? And why are all states essentially empires?"]
Larsen, Rasmus Rosenberg. "There are No Psychopaths."Aeon (February 27, 2026) ["Virtually everything you think you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on?"]
Modinger, John H. "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."Military Review (July/August 2022) ["The contention of Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is that senior military and political leaders routinely lied to the American public. If the title of the book has a familiar ring to it, that is no accident. It plays on the title of another dramatic release of information that revealed U.S. political and military leaders were lying about the state of affairs in Vietnam. With the release of The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg provided a war-weary people a trove of documents that clearly showed the American government and its military had been complicit in a long-running attempt to deceive the American public about the true situation in the Vietnam War. The fact of the matter was the war was going poorly, but leaders offered up a steady diet of sunshine and rainbows detached from the reality on the ground to sidestep uncomfortable questions and prolong the war—up until then America’s longest."]
Morrison, Grant. "The Enemies of Humanity are Wielding Occult Power."Team Human #360 (March 11, 2026) ["The tech elite are wielding occult power, but we have the imagination. Douglas Rushkoff sits down with legendary comic writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison for a deeply urgent conversation about reclaiming reality. Morrison argues that magic isn't just the supernatural; it's a mundane, everyday tool of collective agreement that we are all already using. While billionaires use algorithmic binding spells to predict our moves and trap us in a boring, materialist nightmare, we possess the ultimate counter-measure: our collective imagination.Finding the others is no longer enough. It's time to stop being NPCs in someone else's sterile simulation and start authoring our own pro-human reality."]
Muncer, Mike and Juliet Sugg. "MAN-MADE MONSTERS #26: Crash (1996) & Titane (2021)."The Evolution of Horror (February 19, 2026) ["Juliet Sugg joins Mike to discuss two transgressive body horror movies where flesh, sex, death, flesh and metal collide: David Cronenberg's Crash and Julia Ducournau's Titane."]
Pickard, Victor. "The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media Empire."On the Media (February 27, 2026) ['Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss why what’s happening at CBS, The Washington Post, and Paramount is simply the latest stage of a phenomena called "media capture," and what we can do to free ourselves from its binds."]
Puhak, Shelly. "The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster."New Books in Women's History (February 17, 2026) ["There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families-is a vicious killer. Some even say she bathes in the blood of her victims. When the king's men force their way into her manor house, she has blood on her hands, caught in the act of murdering yet another of her maids. She is walled up in a tower and never seen again, except in the uppermost barred window, where she broods over the countryside, cursing all those who dared speak up against her. Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster (Bloomsbury, 2026) Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness-a world where nothing is ever as it seems. In this exhilarating narrative, Puhak renders a vivid portrait of history's most dangerous woman and her tumultuous time, revealing just how far we will go to destroy a woman in power."]
Rovelli, Carlo. "All Reality is Interaction."On Being (March 12, 2020) ["Physicist Carlo Rovelli says humans don’t understand the world as made by things, “we understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses — happenings.” This everyday truth is as scientific as it is philosophical and political, and it unfolds with unexpected nuance in his science. Rovelli is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory and author of the tiny, bestselling book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. Seeing the world through his eyes, we understand that there is no such thing as “here” or “now.” Instead, he says, our senses convey a picture of reality that narrows our understanding of its fullness."]
Rushkoff, Douglas. "My Dinner With Jeffrey: What the Epstein Files Tell Us About All of Us."Team Human #356 (February 28, 2026) [""Why are you in the Epstein files?" It is a question Rushkoff received from his own daughter, and in this raw monologue, he gives the full answer. His name appears in the CC field of emails from his former literary agent alongside Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and yes, Jeffrey Epstein. But the story of why those names were grouped together reveals something much darker than a mailing list. Rushkoff recounts a disturbing mid-90s dinner party where he was physically grabbed by a host and scolded for "wasting his plus-one" on a brilliant female intellectual instead of "eye candy" to decorate the room for the male elites. He traces the lineage of this misogyny directly to the "scientism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, whose theories of humans as "meat machines" and "survival vehicles for genes" provided the perfect philosophical cover for sociopaths like Epstein to commodify and abuse women. This is not just a story about a predator; it is an indictment of the permission structure built by the scientific and tech elite. A worldview that dismisses human soul, consent, and morality as mere delusions."]
---. Will AI Eat the Earth?"Team Human (March 6, 2026) ["The digital world promises a frictionless existence of infinite growth, convenience, and total scale. But what happens when that virtual map starts consuming the real territory? Rushkoff reflects on his recent appointment to the Club of Rome and their legendary 1972 warning: The Limits to Growth. From the massive water and energy drained by AI data centers to Jeff Bezos' intentional dismantling of the Washington Post, Rushkoff breaks down how the tech elite are using the digital simulation to extract the last remaining value from the physical world. The oligarchs want a frictionless reality where they own the platform and avoid the messy negotiations of actual human connection. But reall life, and real democracy, requires friction. It requires the awkward, inefficient, and vital collisions of human beings sharing a local space. It is time to stop confusing the map with the territory. Find the others. Embrace the friction."]
Saini, Angela. "Junk Science: How belief in biological racial difference pollutes the world of science, from eugenics to genetics."American Scholar (August 9, 2019) ["For our 100th episode, we welcome back science journalist Angela Saini, whose work deflates the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum. With far-right nationalism and white supremacy on the rise around the world, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2019, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us."]
Robyn Hitchcock; Camper van Beethoven; Cracker; The Rolling Stones; The Shins; Songs: Ohia; Kristin Hersh; Throwing Muses; Goldfrapp; The White Stripes; Radiohead; Babe Rainbow; Raspberries; David Bowie; Soccer Mommy; Ten Years After; Ian Noe; Cole Chaney; Cody Lee Moomey; Miranda Lambert; Mannequin Pussy; The Rumjacks; Blue Oyster Cult; Talking Heads; Yo La Tengo; The Turtles; Belle and Sebastian; Tame Impala; Lou Reed; The Yardbirds; Stephen Trask; Neko Case; Air; Jimi Hendrix; Stereolab; Jacqueline Taieb; PJ Harvey; The Cure; Mark Saunders; The Smashing Pumpkins; WILCO; Pink Floyd; Mitski; Arcadde Fire; Silver Jews; Erykah Badu; Sonic Youth; The Black Keys; Mazzy Star; Oasis; Frankie Goes to Hollywood; Led Zeppelin; Portishead; Aerosmith; Deep Purple; Alice Cooper; Steely Dan; Mega; Patrick Watson; Warren Zevon; Kacey Musgraves
The most transformative form of learning is to educate yourself about a subject and then develop that knowledge for sharing with others. In the process of sharing your knowledge and discussing it with others, you relearn it in a thorough way, while also beginning to see it through many other perspectives. - Michael Benton
“For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hard-liners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears. Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behavior by narrow-minded individuals.” -- Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (2012 winner of Oscar for Best Foreign Film; 2017 nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film)
The popular stereotypes in film and on TV of sexual deviants and gender outlaws, those who lived outside the boundaries of accepted behavior, were usually portrayed as self-hating, degenerate outsiders. It was clear in these examples that these choices would lead to a life of quiet desperation, or, of quick extermination. These gender outlaws, like popular Western outlaws, were always at risk of being taken down by self-prescribed regulators of social codes. Like Brandon Teena (Boys Don’t Cry https://youtu.be/mYpUhVvfGeg ), they were always vulnerable to attack, violation, and murder for their perceived transgressions of the social order.
This extreme anxiety led to the construction of a psychological defense system that relied upon a smooth and seamless internalization of social myths about gender and sexuality, so effective that I forgot that I had ever thought or felt differently. Even more disturbing, I have had to recognize that my self-destructive internalization of restrictive sexual and gender roles led to my own complicity in reproducing the violence and oppression of our society. I was no longer the kind, sensitive kid who wanted to create something beautiful; instead, I was the angry, anti-social bully who was going to make others pay for my pain. Like Zachary growing up in the working-class male world of Quebec (C.R.A.Z.Y. https://youtu.be/sCvQ2OpCj8A ), I sought to erase my empathy for others and adopted the hard tough guise. Slowly, later in life, through the patient guidance of caring people who taught me about love, I learned to recognize my betrayal of my inner self in order to fit into society’s strict gender roles. As I once again began to open myself up to my creative side, I also became very interested in how other artists understand and portray identity issues. This helped me to recognize the warring selves inside me and allowed me to put them into dialogue with each other, with positive role models in my community, and with the cinema I study. -- Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)
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Alston, Philp. "Extreme Poverty in America: Read the U.N. Special Monitor Report.The Guardian (December 15, 2017) ["Philp Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has spent 10 days touring America. This is the introduction to his report."]
Amadae, S.M. "Where are We Going? Nuclear War Part 1."Past Present Future (February 15, 2026) ["For the first in a new series of conversations exploring the future that faces us all, David talks to S. M. Amadae about what nuclear weapons and the prospect of nuclear war have done to the human condition. Was 1945 the decisive watershed in the history of humanity? What made the possibility of nuclear conflict different from previous ideas of catastrophe? How did we reconcile ourselves to the horrifying consequences of what we had built?"]
Bergland, Renee. "The Enchanted Science of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin."Wonder Cabinet (February 28, 2026) ["Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin both saw nature as alive with mystery – and treated wonder as a way of knowing. Literary scholar and science historian Renee Bergland, author of "Natural Magic," is our guide to the forgotten kinship between the reclusive poet and the celebrated naturalist. Dickinson and Darwin never met, but they had at least one close friend in common. Both were both fascinated by fossils. Both wandered the woods and swamps near their homes, studying insects and documenting rare plants. They shared a vision of the interconnectedness of all life. We know that Dickinson, with her background in botany, geology, astronomy and chemistry, was enthralled by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. And it certainly seems possible that Darwin, with his degree in theology and his lifelong love of poetry and literature, might have admired the American poet whose close observations and delicate perceptions echoed his own. Bergland’s dual biography, just out in paper, is vivid, sparkling intellectual history – a window onto a time when scientific thinking still embraced emotion and wonder as modes of perception. Could the belief in “natural magic” that infused Dickinson’s and Darwin’s ideas restore our own faith in a universe alive with meaning? Our conversation about the poet who studied natural history and the naturalist who loved poetry suggests a way forward – by reclaiming their shared ecological wonder."]
Bonneval, Karine, Paco Calvo and Tom Greaves. "Plants."The Forum for Philosophy (April 2019) ["Philosophers have long assumed that plants are inferior to humans and animals: static, inert, and unreflective. But recent scientific advances suggest that we may have underestimated plants. They can process information, solve problems, and communicate. We explore what plants can teach us about intelligence and agency, and ask whether plants think."]
Boshernitsan, Rimma. "Our Emerging Planetary Nervous System."NOEMA (February 17, 2026) ["Human intelligence is beyond mere calculation. What makes us uniquely human isn’t our processing power, but our capacity to discern what matters — to sense the whisper beneath the data. Our intuition is our oldest inheritance, emerging from the quiet place technology can never reach: a consciousness capable of care. This knowing lives in the body, not merely the mind. Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist explains that the brain’s right hemisphere frames reality in terms of salience before the left hemisphere attempts to label it. In ambiguity, that framing becomes essential. Attention isn’t trivial — it’s where selection happens, where meaning emerges from noise. Where pause isn’t absence, but rather a different kind of presence. Intelligence begins with choice. As the philosopher Forrest Landry argues, it’s not how much we know, but what we choose to care about amid complexity. That is the ethical function of human intuition: to choose alignment, to decide what matters in the moment when information overwhelms us and the stakes shift beneath our feet. This intuitive attention becomes infrastructural when embedded in practice. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s research shows that communities that iteratively refine rules governing land and seasons often outperform centralized models — especially when governance is rooted in local knowledge and mutual accountability. And Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that Indigenous practices — whether tending sweetgrass or reading fire patterns — encode centuries of attunement as collective wisdom. This isn’t mystical; it’s strategic. Global assessments confirm that this isn’t just a cultural preference, but a measurable practice."]
Butler, Judith. "This Is Wrong - On Executive Order 14168."London Review of Books 47.6 (April 3, 2025) ["It’s not surprising, then, that Executive Order 14168 includes among its dictates the need to correct any ‘misapplications’ of Bostock v. Clayton County. Indeed, the order shifts the basis of ‘an individual’s immutable biological classification’ away from genitalia to gametes: ‘“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell ... “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.’ Why this shift? And what does it mean that the government can change its mind about what is immutable? Is the ‘immutable’ mutable after all? The existence of intersexed people has long posed a problem for sex assignment since they are living evidence that genitalia can be combined or mixed in certain ways. Gametes must have seemed less problematic. There is a larger one and a smaller one: let that be the immutable difference between female and male. There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’ They remind us that ‘sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.’ Interplay, interaction, co-construction are concepts widely used in the biological sciences. And, in turn, the biological sciences have made considerable contributions to gender theory, where Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, has long argued that biology interacts with cultural and historical processes to produce different ways of naming and living gender."]
Bydon, Mohamad. "Miraculous new treatments for spinal cord injuries."Big Brains (February 19, 2026) ["In this episode of Big Brains, Dr. Bydon walks us through the extraordinary, multi-stage surgery at UChicago that not only saved the boy’s life but helped him regain the ability to breathe, talk and move his fingers and toes. He examines the future of surgery for spinal cord injury patients—from minimally invasive surgery techniques to robotic surgery and AI to stem cell therapy—is even helping some paralyzed patients regain movement and even walk again after their injuries."]
DeNicola, Daniel R. "Plato's Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance."The MIT Press Reader (September 12, 2024) ["Are we like these cave dwellers? Is this gloomy cave the image of the womb from which we were all thrust unknowing into the light? But do we not then quickly overcome this primal oblivion — or do we all still dwell in a place of such abysmal ignorance? To think this through, I want to reverse Plato’s approach: Rather than describing how we may know the truth, let us consider how we recognize ignorance."]
Ehrlich, David. "Yes Review: Nadav Lapid’s Furiously Orgiastic Satire of Modern Israel Asks How People Can Live Normally."IndieWire (May 22, 2025) ["Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. 2019’s eruptive “Synonyms” was a semi-autobiographical identity crisis about a man who flees to Paris because he’s convinced that he was born in the Middle East by mistake, while 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” was a similarly personal scream into the wind — this one rooted in the blue-balled impotence of artistic resistance amid an exultantly genocidal ethnostate. Spasming with anger where Lapid’s previous features (“Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher”) searched for hope, both of these movies were fringed with a sense of resignation that they fought tooth-and-nail to shake off. As a result, I naturally assumed that his follow-up feature — written in Europe before the events of October 7, 2023, and then furiously reworked around them as Lapid conceded to the futility of escaping his background — would either be the wildest film that Lapid has ever made, or the most defeated."]
"Examples of Censorship from National Parks Conservation Association et. al. v. Department of the Interior, et. al."Democracy Forward (February 17, 2026) ["In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing the rewriting and sanitization of American history and science at national parks. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed suit on May 20, issuing a secretary’s order that launched the implementation of the president’s directive within the National Park Service (NPS). These orders have forced NPS staff to remove or censor exhibits that share factually accurate and relevant history and scientific knowledge. The National Park Service escalated its implementation of the Secretary’s order in January 2026, with interpretive signs — detailing the contributions of historically marginalized populations, atrocities perpetuated against particular communities, and the long term impact of scientific developments — either removed or flagged for removal. Those reportedly include the following examples:"]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Magic Mirror: On J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring."Weird Studies (February 25, 2026) ["This is the first of three episodes on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to be released in the course of the next several months. Focusing here on The Fellowship of the Ring, our hosts discuss the first leg of Frodo's journey into darkness, paying special attention to Tolkien's prose style, his modernism, his commitment to a truly magical realism, and his penchant for the weird and the tragic."]
Hirschel-Burns, Tim. "Assaults and Batteries: Nicolas Niarchos digs up the hidden costs behind your rechargeables."Los Angeles Review of Books (February 24, 2026) ["The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, a new book by journalist Nicolas Niarchos, paints a semi-apocalyptic vision of that cobalt’s origins: corrupt bargains between politicians and foreign companies, displacement and environmental destruction, cave-ins that bury miners alive. The book comes as part of a surge of interest in the unsavory trade-offs behind the energy transition (other notable members of this emerging genre include Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism from last year and Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives from 2022). As Niarchos puts it, the energy transition exchanges “cleaner power at home for pollution and suffering elsewhere.”]
Nestle, Marion. "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."]
Petcu, Lulia Teodora. "Shielded by Power: Jeffrey Epstein, The Justice System and the Persistence of Elite Privilege."Diggiti (December 12, 2025) ["This paper examines Jeffrey Epstein’s case through C. Wright Mills’ concept of the power elite to explore how elite privilege shapes accountability in the justice system. Epstein’s wealth, political connections, and social networks illustrate how elites are insulated from legal consequences, while media coverage and public discourse reveal fragmented trust in institutions."]
Pickard, Hannah. "Addiction."Overthink (February 24, 2026) ["To what extent is drug addiction voluntary? In episode 162 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with philosopher Hanna Pickard about her book, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. They discuss how the “broken brain model” of addiction emerged to combat the moral model of addiction and explore the consequences of both of these models. What drives some people into addiction? What does it mean to say that addiction is a brain disease? How should responsibility and blame fit into our understanding of this condition? And how do we identify when somebody’s patterns of drug use have crossed the threshold into addiction?" Works Discussed:: Alan Leshner, “Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters”; Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction; Hanna Pickard, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction]
Pistor, Katerina. "How Inequality Distorts the Law."Capitalisn't (February 19, 2026) ['If we want to understand why capitalism feels broken, do we need to stop looking at the economy and start looking at the legal code that underpins it? In our system, capital is often described as money, machinery, or raw materials. But Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor argues that capital is actually a legal invention. An asset, whether it's a plot of land, an idea, or a promise of future pay, only becomes capital when it is given the right legal coding. Pistor suggests that lawyers are the true coders of capitalism. They use the law to "enclose" assets, from land to user data, giving owners the power to exclude others and monetize that value. She argues for injecting principles of "fairness and reciprocity" back into private law, ensuring that contracts aren't just tools for the powerful to extract value from the weak. Luigi Zingales suggests that large corporations have become so powerful we may need a new branch of "quasi-public law" to govern the asymmetry between an individual consumer and a corporate giant. This episode explores the deep, often invisible architecture of our economic system and asks whether we can ever truly tame corporate power without rewriting the rules of the game."]
Robinson, Nathan J. "Critics of “Don’t Look Up” Are Missing the Entire Point."Current Affairs (December 26, 2021) ["It’s not about Americans being dumb sheep, but about how billionaires manipulate us into trusting them, how the reckless pursuit of profit can have catastrophic consequences, and the need to come together to fight those who prevent us from solving our problems."]
Robson, Leo. "Godardorama."New Left Review (February 17, 2026) ["Richard Linklater’s shrewd and absorbing film catches this ‘feeling of freedom’ that Godard invoked. Shot in black-and-white with a French-speaking cast, it tells the story of the making of À Bout de Souffle, which Godard, a critic and reporter with a handful of shorts to his name, shot for little money over twenty days in the late summer of 1959. There was no script, only a set-up, derived by François Truffaut from a news story. Michel, after stealing a car from an American soldier at Marseilles Old Port, shoots a policeman who was trying to flag him down, then hitches a ride to Paris, where he steals money from his girlfriend Liliane and hangs around with his ‘favourite’ girlfriend Patricia, an American student and aspiring journalist, until she decides to turn him in. À Bout de Souffle is now a monument, as reflected in the existence of Linklater’s portrait, but its central properties are casualness and offhand intimacy. The director Roger Vadim claimed that when he bumped into Godard shortly before production began, all he had was a few phrases scrawled on the inside of a matchbook, among them ‘She has an accent’ and ‘It ends badly. Well, no. Finally it ends well. Or it ends badly.’"]
Solnit, Rebecca. "Hope After the End."Wonder Cabinet (February 14, 2026) ["How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us. But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book "The Beginning Comes After the End," writer and activist Rebecca Solnit makes the case that something is dying, all right — because something better is being born. A rising worldview that embraces antiracism, feminism, environmental thinking, Indigenous and non-Western ideas, and a vision of a more interconnected, compassionate world. Solnit is an engaged writer and intellectual in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. Her new book picks up where her earlier bestseller “Hope in the Dark” left off — with an argument against despair and historical amnesia. In this conversation, we explore the extraordinary scale of progressive social, political, scientific and cultural change over the past century, the roots of Solnit’s stance of “pragmatic, embodied hope,” her thoughts on “moral wonder, “ and her years in San Francisco’s underground punk rock scene. She also tells us what she’d put in our own wonder cabinet: an AIDS Memorial Quilt square sewn by Rosa Parks."]
Suh, Elissa. "Against Nature: Feral Eating and Feminist Performance."Notebook (February 20, 2026) ["In cinema, the image of a woman eating is seldom incidental: Romcoms are rife with Bridget Joneses who cannot control themselves. By contrast, for men, eating is often a display of authority or menace, of power rather than pathology. Perhaps this additional scrutiny can work as an advantage. When a camera watches women eat, it opens the possibility of performance before they even speak, turning their appetite into a subtle assertion of oneself—a rejection of expectations or a claim to private desires. How or what she eats marks her difference: It can measure her position in the world or the distance she keeps from it. Like Vitti, these women can be feral, which is above all a mark of refusal; they are not domesticated, not assimilated, but fragile and dangerous, out of bounds."]
Suton, Koraljka. "Villeneuve’s Arrival: A Deep Exploration of the Importance of Language, the Nature of Time and the Dichotomy of Human Existence."Cinephilia and Beyond (November 18, 2024) ["Being a linguist, Louise knows very well that language is the foundation of civilization. It is “the glue that holds a people together,” as she states in her book, making it possible for us to communicate effectively and find common ground. Language helps us bring forth our internal landscapes in ways that are extremely basic and deeply profound. Much like music, it enables us to convey and share with one another the intricacies that make up the human experience, which, in turn, gives us a chance to feel seen and understood. This striving for true understanding is not just inherent in Louise’s vocation as a linguist but is also one of her core qualities as a person. Unlike the majority of the world and its leaders, she is not the least bit interested in playing zero-sum games but rather seeks to utilize our ability for meaningful interpersonal connection so as to arrive at a win-win. Even though the aliens in Arrival are as unhuman-like as it gets, both in terms of language and appearance, Louise’s primary objective is, and remains throughout the film, to truly understand them. And, in doing so, bridge the gap between the ‘self’ and ‘other’. How does she do it? By connecting with them—being to being. This delicate unfolding is touching and awe-inspiring to behold."]
Thrasher, Steven W. "From Gaza to Minneapolis We Are Still Being Told to Disbelieve Our Eyes."Literary Hub (February 4, 2026) ["The far more dangerous problem has been western news outlets and governments pretending that horrors that actually did happen did not occur. Journalists, more than 270 of them, gave their lives to show the world the genocide in Gaza. So did more than 300 United Nations workers and more than 1,500 healthcare workers. As did tens of thousands of Palestinians, many who pleaded with the world for help, human-to-human, mother-to-mother, child-to-child, using their phone cameras to prove to the world the depth of their desperation and persecution. There is little excuse for not knowing what happened in Gaza; everyday, it was as if the screams of 10,000 Anne Franks had been beamed right into the pockets of millions of Americans during World War II. And the people of the world largely believed their fellow humans in Gaza, when they heard them scream and cry. But the news media and the governments of the West pretended that what was happening was not, in fact, happening. They proved that the denial of verifiable reality is as dangerous as manufactured propaganda. They physically beat, expelled and even deported students who said the genocide was unacceptable. They fired journalists and blacklisted professors who reported what anyone could see, if they chose to. They cancelled the visas of artists who spoke the truth."]
Daniele Luppi; Parquet Courts; Karen O; Pond; Tracy Bryant; Rising Appalachia; Savoy Motel; La Luz; Wolf Alice; Porcupine Tree; New Candys; Delerium; Sarah McLachlan; Pixies; Fontaines D.C.; The Cars; Kate Bush; Emma Ruth Rundle; Die Spitz; Highly Suspect; SAULT; De La Soul; Shintaro Sakamoto; Frank Zappa; Jethro Tull; The Budos Band; Tunde Adebimpe; Turnstile; Nektar; Ghostface Killer; Adrian Younge; Raekwon; RZA; Cardinals; The Smile; Elton John; Steely Dan; Minnie Riperton; Fiona Apple; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; Tool; The Beatles; Beans; Blonde Redhead; Stick Figure; Max Winter; Bill Callahan; Modern Woman; Maxine Funk; James Gang
"It is far from easy to be a good man. In fact, as one gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to know what a good man is. Yet it also becomes increasingly important to at least try." -- Rudolph Wegener, The Man in the High Castle (1.10)
People who think philosophy is useless also tend to think that society does not need to change. If you want to maintain the status quo, teaching people to question everything is a pretty stupid thing to do. (Existential Comics, March 21, 2018)
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but we must take it because our conscience tells us that it is right.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Proper Sense of Priorities" (1968)
MB: During my morning coffee ritual, I was reading about the 1961 Freedom Rides through Alabama and Mississippi in Mark Hamilton Lytle's excellent narrative history America's Uncivil Wars about the social/political conflicts of the long 1960s (mid 1950s to mid 1970s). The courage of these young activists and the vision of James Farmer is breathtaking to read about. I highly recommend the book, it reads with intensity, and it is thorough in its scope. It is relevant for out current era of sociopolitical conflicts.
Armenikus, Vashik. "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli."Artidote (September 5, 2026) ["Why did Sir Isaac Newton spend decades studying alchemy? Is the octopus the closest creature that we have on Earth to alien life-forms? Which science is closer to Faith? Why did Einstein make so many errors in his calculations? How do we form Ideas? These are just a few topics that Rovelli covers in his essays and if any of those questions intrigued you I believe you will enjoy reading this book. Rovelli is peerless in his skill of communicating complex ideas in just two pages. For example his essay ‘Dante, Einstein and the Three-Sphere’ is only two and a half pages long. However, Rovelli explained to me Einstein’s theory of Three-Spherical cosmos, gave me a short commentary on Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, and then finished by showing me how Dante ‘predicted’ (for the lack of better word) what Einstein would discover seven centuries later. But what I enjoyed most of all is Rovelli’s open-mindedness to everything in the world. Whilst some scientists (such as Stephen Hawking whom Rovelli admired) tend to disregard philosophy, poetry and generally everything that is not rooted in the material world - Rovelli finds science and art to be inseparable from each other."]
Bariach, Ben. "When AI and Human Worlds Collide."NOEMA (January 20, 2026) ["These challenges are profound, but they are not inevitable. The science of world models remains in relative infancy, with a long horizon expected before it matures into wide deployment. Thoughtful engagement with the world model paradigm now will shape not just how such future agents learn, but what values their actions represent and how they might interact with people. An overly precautionary approach risks its own moral failure. Just as the printing press democratized knowledge despite enabling propaganda, and cars transformed transportation while producing new perils, world models promise benefits that may far outweigh their risks. The question isn’t whether to build them, but how to design them to best harness their benefits."]
Bissonnette, Gilles and Sarah Hinger. "Department of Education Backs Down on Unlawful Directive Targeting Educational Equity."ACLU (February 18. 2026) ["Across the country, educators do everything in their power to support every student, so each feels safe, seen, and is prepared for the future. Donald Trump and Linda McMahon tried to use politically motivated attacks and vague directives to stifle speech and erase essential teaching and learning in our schools and universities. The courts rejected that attack on public education. While Trump and McMahon want to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion, educators know these values are at the core of our nation. Diversity is our uniqueness and our strength. Equity means every student gets what they need, when they need it, and in the way that serves them best. And inclusion means all students are seen, valued, respected, and have access to opportunities and support,” said Becky Pringle, president at the National Education Association. "The Trump administration’s unlawful Dear Colleague Letter and certification requirement have now been vacated and abandoned, underscoring how badly Trump and McMahon overreached in their attempt to interfere with curriculum and instruction. Educators, parents, and community leaders will continue to organize, mobilize, and take action to protect our students and their futures."]
Brabandere, Luc de. "A Very Short History of Critical Thinking."Philosophy Now #172 (2026) ["In Greece in the fifth century BC, some public speakers who were certainly cultured but who were also unscrupulous, made the most of their oratorical talents by turning them into a particularly lucrative profession. Armed with misleading arguments and fallacious reasoning, they were called Sophists. They were so good at arguing any case they were able to simultaneously demonstrate something and its opposite. To be a sophist is to argue in a way that appears to be valid, but where the argument has been deliberately manipulated to distract or mislead the listener. Sophism is not a way of thinking; it’s a way of arguing designed to dazzle and trick an opponent; or if they should suspect foul play, to cause them logical embarrassment. It then proves hard to refute the argument because the flaw is subtly concealed. A sophist cares not about ethics or justice. They have little regard for truth. What they’re interested in is power. If it takes a lie to win, then go ahead and lie! If cheating is necessary to get through, then go ahead and cheat! In the end it doesn’t matter, because the goal is not to prove, but to be approved, regardless of the route used. Whilst a good debate often starts with ‘May the best man win!’, according to sophists, the opposite is true: whoever wins is the best man. ... There are many definitions of ‘critical thinking’, but they all agree on one point: the necessity of intellectual rigour. Critical thinking is not linked to a particular discipline or a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it must operate through all disciplines and should aim to preserve the advantages of skepticism without having to pay the price of ignorance. Thinking in a critical manner means trusting with caution while being wary of four elements: the reliability of a source, the strength of the argument, the medium, and our own ability to judge the matter at hand. The emergence and subsequent rise of ChatGPT and other so-called ‘generative’ AIs make critical thinking more essential today than ever before."]
Capper, Daniel. "Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World."Emergence (February 5, 2024) ["Daniel Capper's book Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World (Cornell UP, 2022) delves into ecological experiences in seven Buddhist worlds, spanning ancient India to the modern West, offering a comprehensive analysis of Buddhist environmental ethics. Capper critically examines theories, practices, and real-world outcomes related to Buddhist perspectives on vegetarianism, meat consumption, nature mysticism, and spirituality in nonhuman animals. While Buddhist environmental ethics are often seen as tools against climate change, the book highlights two issues: uncritical acceptance of ideals without assessing practical impacts and a lack of communication among Buddhists, hindering coordinated responses to issues like climate change. The book, with an accessible style and a focus on personhood ethics, appeals to those concerned about human-nonhuman interactions."]
Carocci, Max. "What is a Shaman?"The Bureau of Lost Culture (February 3, 2026) ["Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels. In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power. Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites. But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation. Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised. Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss."]
Carroll, James, et al. "The Moral Crisis Faced by Christianity."Ideas (May 6, 2019) ["Christianity is the world's largest religion. One third of humanity identifies as Christian. Christian rituals and symbols have a special power even among non-believers in western countries — witness the outpouring of shock and sorrow over the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The moral codes of Christianity are intrinsic to western societies and form the foundation of the ethics and mores of hundreds of millions of people. And yet, some of Christianity's most daunting challenges have derived from the moral failures of its biggest institutions and the failures of Christians to follow their religion's core teachings. The object of worship may be divine, but the church and the worshippers are very human. Some of the crises facing contemporary Christianity are obvious, such as the ever-widening revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and the role of bishops in covering it up. Some are less obvious, such as the embrace of anti-immigrant, xenophobic political movements in countries with large Christian majorities. On this month's edition of The Enright Files, conversations about the moral authority of the Church — and the struggles of Christians to live up to the principles of their faith — in the face of anxious, angry times and the Church's own crimes."]
Case, Oren. "The Wealth of Wall Street."The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (February 11, 2026) ["As the stock market continues to break records, Jon is joined by Oren Cass, Chief Economist at American Compass, to examine how America's economy was reengineered to serve shareholders instead of workers. Together, they trace the history of financialization that enabled this transformation, explore how shareholder capitalism has hollowed out worker prosperity, and consider what policy interventions could rebuild an economy that delivers shared gains."]
Chang, Ha Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. ["Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers-from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea-all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and-via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization-ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world. Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct-but developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth-but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps."]
Eckholm, Andrew. "The Art of Nostalgia: Wes Anderson's History Films."The Point #36 (February 1, 2026) ["Most of us, at least once, come to a moment when the contradictions between the world as we prefer to imagine it and the world as it apparently is become impossible to ignore. Our defenses overwhelmed and our sustaining delusions exposed, we feel an acute sense of loss, a falling away of fixity and coherence. It is at these moments that nostalgia’s pull is strongest. The same could be said in times of cultural and political crisis. The world is burning; the country is collapsing; the only thing certain about the future is that it won’t look like the past. In this situation, we can argue with our feelings and prove the safety we yearn for is another delusion: our childhood wasn’t actually happy; our nation’s past was full of horrors. Or we can pick up the sword of reaction: take our longing for the past at face value and attempt to reorder the world back into its proper shape. Both quests, however, are quixotic and never-ending. Nostalgia is ineradicable: dangerous when channeled, but even more dangerous to ignore. The question, then, is not whether to feel nostalgia but what to do with it. When the rush of events debunks our received wisdom about history and our place in it, new myths must be made that can explain how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t that way, at least not yet. New objects for our nostalgia are needed. In America, the argument over what those new objects should be, the debate over when things went wrong (2016, 2008, 1992, 1964, 1865, 1776, 1619) is what we call “culture war.” And it’s a marker of the depth of our crisis, in symbolic terms at least, that politics and culture war have become virtually synonymous."]
Fitzpatrick, Megan C., et al. "Improving the Prognosis of Healthcare in America."The Lancet (February 15, 2020) ["Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."]
Folbre, Nancy. "Making Care Affordable is Key to Our Economic Future."UC Press Blog (January 2, 2026) ["At some point in our lives, most of us commit time and money to taking care of others, especially children, the elderly and people experiencing illness or disability. Most of us consider such commitments both morally valuable and personally satisfying. Yet there is widespread disregard for their economic value to society as a whole—a disregard that contributes to mounting private costs. My forthcoming book, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First, traces this long history of misplaced priorities. It explains how unpaid care came to be disqualified as productive work and how expenditures on ourselves and others came to be classified as consumption rather than investment. Not everything we produce can be bought or sold, and market prices seldom reflect the social benefits of good care or the social costs of failing to provide it."]
Gillan, Zach. "Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism."The Ancillary Review (May 2, 2025) ["It boils down, I think, to two axioms: 1) To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root. 2) To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.) The first step toward envisioning a better world is recognizing what is wrong with this one. Weird fiction prepares us for the process of seeing society’s dominant ideology not only as Wrong—an unsettled, disturbing way of interpreting and interacting with the world—but also as irreal, as fictional. It gives us a metaphor—dark, disturbing, alarming—for the theory and structure of thought that precedes the action of praxis, and engage in active resistance. This action is key: not to fall into the nihilistic madness of the Lovecraftian victim or the passivity of the status quo. Weird fiction must prepare us not to surrender to or deny the horrors of the world, but to read and understand them. Before it was killed and messily reanimated as a boogieman by the Right, this is what Black activists meant by “woke”—the injunction to have your eyes open and consciousness aware of the horrific structures underlying daily life. Weird fiction is a useful metaphor for this awakening; we must, in other words, read the social world in which we live as a work of weird fiction. "]
Kampf-Lassin, Miles. "Let's Legalize Public Drinking."Current Affairs (February 10, 2026) ["Laws against public drinking criminalize working-class people and make public life less fun. It’s time to repeal them."]
Koebler, Jason. "Our Zine About ICE Surveillance Is Here."404 Media (February 2, 2026) ["We are very proud to present 404 Media’s zine on the surveillance technology used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While we have always covered surveillance and privacy, for the last year, you may have noticed that we have spent an outsized amount of our attention and time reporting on the ways technology companies are powering Donald Trump’s deportation raids. When we announced this zine in early December, we hoped that people would want it. Trump’s dehumanizing mass deportation campaign is perhaps the bleakest, most horrifying aspect of an administration that has reveled in its attacks on civil liberties, science, and government expertise."]
Rovelli, Carlo. "Mein Kampf."The Word / Te Kupu (March 14, 2022) ["We are going through some seriously trying times right now, times that are unprecedented for all of us - and as is usually the case during such times, uncertainty and fear creep in. Trying to rationalise global affairs is hard during such time, so I felt the need to record something that could perhaps shed at least a little light on what is happening in the world. So, here just a short podcast to try and frame what is going on, not from a geopolitical perspective, but more from a human and psychological one. In this episode I read an essay by Carlo Rovelli, one of the greatest minds of the 21st century, an essay he penned 6 years ago in response to the re-publication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Italy. It is a poignant analysis of what really drives dictators and tyrants to do what they do. This essay is one of many recorded in Rovelli’s genius book There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness. A mesmerising journey through science, philosophy and history, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness is a luminous new collection of essays from the 'the poet of modern physics' Carlo Rovelli - I highly recommend it. Will make you feel better about the planet we currently call home."]
---. "White Holes, Where Time Dissolves."To the Best of Our Knowledge (November 18, 2023) ["Carlo Rovelli takes us into the heart of a black hole, where space and time dissolve and a white hole is born. As a theoretical physicist, Rovelli has devoted his career to bridging the gap between Einstein's time-warping relativity theory and the unpredictability of quantum mechanics. In "White Holes," the beloved author of the internationally best-selling "The Order of Time," and "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" returns to the subjects that fascinate him most: time and impermanence, which he says have brought him a kind of serenity."]
Rubsam, Robert. "Wild Facts: Varieties of Spiritual Cinema."The Baffler (February 11, 2026) ["Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict. Yet it reaches all the same. Practitioners of the art pursue what William James called “wild facts,” that mixture of the impossible and the unassimilable which crops up in any study of the affective dimensions of human culture. Levitation is a wild fact; so are mystic visions, holy apparitions, and inexplicable physical transformations. James called such events “paradoxical absurdities,” yet he sought to understand them all the same. In his book They Flew, the historian Carlos Eire attempted to parse what such impossible absurdities meant to the people who believed in them—and what it might mean for those on the other side of modernity, with its redefinition of the line between the rational and the irrational, to allow themselves at least the potential for belief. I’d venture that anyone who hopes to make a great work of art must do something similar: to believe, like the Shakers, in the possibility of impossible things. In taking seriously the visions of Ann Lee, Fastvold does this. So does Caroline Golum, the director and cowriter of Revelations of Divine Love. Golum’s film is many things: a dramatization of the life of the fourteenth-century anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich; a catalog of her holy visions; a plague story; a rebellion story; an expression of the persistent supremacy of love in a world of nearly unbearable suffering. It is both period-accurate and pointedly anachronistic, carefully handmade and plainly artificial. It is totally remarkable, and then some. ... Our age is not fit for angels. I don’t mean this literally, or even spiritually. I’m talking about art here. Ours is a culture of persistent literalism, a society which routinely mistakes surfaces for depths. We celebrate finely formed but ultimately shallow novels, films that serve only to demonstrate their maker’s formidable technique. Whether secular or religious, such artists are incapable of reaching beyond themselves, because they do not believe any other world to be possible. This is not just about the presence of miraculous or impossible events, such as those our ancestors routinely allowed themselves to experience. You don’t have to be religious, and you certainly don’t need to be Christian; Fastvold and Golum certainly aren’t. But you must have the sense that something—anything—might reside beyond the visible world, and that we might attempt to reach it. ... If you never expect more from the world, how could your art ever hope to? ... I want this: an art of expectation and aspiration, an art that levitates and revelates, that shakes and speaks in unknown tongues—a miraculous art that pushes beyond itself, that reaches toward the impossible, and makes contact. I want the art of wild facts. Don’t you?"]
Sarkar, Sahotra. "Defining when human life begins is not a question science can answer – it’s a question of politics and ethical values."The Conversation (September 1, 2017) ["The overall point is that biology does not determine when human life begins. It is a question that can only be answered by appealing to our values, examining what we take to be human. Perhaps biologists of the future will learn more. Until then, when human life begins during fetal developments is a question for philosophers and theologians. And policies based on an answer to that question will remain up to politicians – and judges."]
Schaake, Marietje. "Can Democracy Coexist with Big Tech."Capitalisn't (September 26, 2024) ["International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at the expense of the public and democratic institutions, Schaake writes. Schaake joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss proposals for reversing this shift of power and maintaining the balance between innovation and regulation in the digital age. If a "tech coup" is really underway, how did we get here? And if so, how can we safeguard democracy and individual rights in an era of algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism? Marietje Schaake’s new book, “The Tech Coup: Saving Democracy From Silicon Valley."]
Tabor, James. "On the Real Mother of Jesus."Radio West (December 16, 2025) ["Jesus’s mother Mary likely lived for over 40 years, but many believers only think of her in two places, the Nativity and the Crucifixion. The scholar James Tabor wants to change that. Tabor’s new book is called “The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus.” It’s the result of many years of work, trying to piece together who Mary really was. Which isn’t easy, because as Tabor says, the actual Mary — the Jewish woman living in Galilee, the mother of eight children and central figure in the Jesus movement — has been largely erased by a religious idea of Mary, the eternal virgin of the utmost purity. James Tabor joins us to reintroduce her. He calls Mary the best known, and least known, woman in history."]
Wilkerson, Isabel. “We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be.”On Being (March 9, 2023) ["In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson’s eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings “caste” into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but “caste is the bones.” And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that."Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.]
Wilkinson, Richard. "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies."TED Talks (November 2, 2011) ["We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust."]
Williams, Michelle A. "How W.E.B. DuBois and James McCune Smith Helped Combat Medical Racism in America."Literary Hub (February 4, 2026) ["The most prominent of Du Bois’s intellectual influences was James McCune Smith. Brilliant and uncompromising, Smith was a public intellectual with the distinction of being the United States’ first university-trained Black doctor. In 1846, in a stinging and exhaustively researched rebuttal, he showed how John Calhoun’s racist analysis was spurious. Using the relatively new field of biostatistics, along with demographics, he exposed the Southern senator’s questionable claims. Specifically, he did a spatial analysis using latitude coordinates to show that Black people lived longer in states that abolished slavery, like New Hampshire and Connecticut, than in Georgia where slavery was legal. He also stratified mortality rates by age, race, and place to demonstrate that Black people in New England lived longer than those in the South. And finally, he showed that racial differences in longevity were due to socioeconomic factors and were not inherently biological. “There are sufficient grounds for the belief that the slaves…under all [their] disadvantages, would, if freed from slavery, attain a longevity not very much below that attained by the Europe-American population.”"]
