Marion Nestle: Biology/Food Studies/Nutrition/Public Health (Azimuths)

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal (for science and society). - source

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Nestle, Marion. "A Food Expert’s Case That The Cyclospora Outbreak Was A System Failure." Where the Food Comes From (July 29, 2026) ["I am outraged by the Cyclospora outbreak. It has sickened thousands of people so far (>16,000?), and made some of them very sick. Cyclospora is different from other foodborne pathogens. It comes from human waste and cannot be removed by washing (although that helps some) or killed by chlorine. It can only be removed by microfiltration or killed by heat or, maybe, ultra-violet radiation. It needs to be prevented from getting into irrigation water. Lettuce producers have known about the Cyclospora hazard for more than a decade. They have not acted, and neither has the government."]

---.  How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. University of California Press, 2013. ["We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view. Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights. When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics--not science, not common sense, and certainly not health. No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy. An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this path-breaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why."]

---. "The Hyper-Marketing of Protein (Continued)." Food Politics (August 6, 2026) ["Most people who eat enough calories get more than enough of the protein they need, so the current protein craze—putting pea, whey, and tofu into everything—doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It does sell products though."]

---. "The Money Behind Ultra-Processed Food." Capitalisn't (May 23, 2024) ["Critics of the food industry allege that it relentlessly pursues profits at the expense of public health. They claim that food companies "ultra-process" products with salt, sugar, fats, and artificial additives, employ advanced marketing tactics to manipulate and hook consumers, and are ultimately responsible for a global epidemic of health ailments. Companies are also launching entirely new lines and categories of food products catering to diabetes or weight management drugs such as Ozempic. Marion Nestle, a leading public health advocate, nutritionist, award-winning author, and Professor Emerita at New York University, first warned in her 2002 book "Food Politics" that Big Food deliberately designs unhealthy, addictive products to drive sales, often backed by industry-funded research that misleads consumers. This week on Capitalisn't, Nestle joins Bethany and Luigi to explore the ultra-processed food industry through the interplay of four lenses: the underlying science, business motives, influencing consumer perceptions, and public policy."]

---. "On Food Choices and Food Politics." Against the Grain (August 4, 2026) ["Food affects all of us — but while it’s a necessity for our survival, it’s also a vast, sprawling industry spanning the globe, which generates enormous profits as well as significant damage to public health and the environment. Nutritionist and molecular biologist Marion Nestle sheds light on the choices we all must navigate when we enter the grocery store." Marion Nestle, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters North Point Press, 2025."]

---. What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. Macmillan, 2025. ["What to Eat Now is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense guide to the most important food questions on our plate today. How do we make informed dietary choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities? In the twenty years since Marion Nestle’s groundbreaking What to Eat first came out, food has undergone a radical change. The emergence of techno foods, the growth of corporate organics, and a surge of interest in food-delivery services reignited by the pandemic are just a few of the things that have altered how we think about how we eat. The typical American supermarket carries more than thirty thousand products. How do you choose? Misinformation, disinformation, and corporate misdirection play a crucial and hard-to-see role in how the average shopper thinks about and chooses food. In an aisle-by-aisle guide, Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and a founding figure in American food studies, takes us through the American supermarket. With persistence, wit, and common sense, she establishes the basics of good nutrition, food safety, and ethical and sustainable eating, and gives readers a close-up look at the web of interests—from supermarket slotting policies to multinational food corporations to lobbying groups—that food has to navigate before it gets to your shopping basket. Above all else, What to Eat Now is a defense of real food and of the value of eating deliciously, mindfully, and responsibly."]

Nestle, Marion, et al. "Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health (University of California Press, 2020)." New Books in Food (January 13, 2021) ["Marion Nestle describes her new book as “a small, quick and dirty reader for the general audience” summarizing some of her biggest and most influential works. Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know About the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health published September 2020 by University of California Press, was written in conversation with Kerry Trueman, a blogger and friend. Trueman’s questions served as prompts to organize Nestle’s 800-1000 word summaries in approachable and engaging prose. Readers familiar with Nestle’s groundbreaking Food Politics will recognize many of the ideas and information, but this new pocket-sized and affordable volume serves as an introduction for undergraduate students or readers new to Food Studies. However, Nestle does cover some new material in her explanation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially the campaign for Zero Hunger. Nestle also summarizes how nutrition advice has changed in the last few years by thinking about food in categories ranging from unprocessed (corn on the cob) to ultraprocessed (Nacho Cheese tortilla chips). This reevaluation makes it easier to identify foods that are acceptable to eat without excessive focus on micronutrients. In the conversation, Nestle addresses the ethics of marketing food to children, food as a human right and access in the Covid era, the possibility of a National Food Policy Agency, the politics of food banks, and the promise of regenerative agricultural practices. Nestle concludes by talking about the pleasures of food and eating and how to establish a “loving relationship” with food that doesn’t include fear, guilt, or anxiety about nutrition. Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, and the author of books about food politics, most recently Unsavory Truth."]

Stewart, Jon. "A Conversation with Marion Nestle: Straight Talk About Obesity, Nutrition, and Food Policy." Permanente Journal (Fall 2006): 62-65. ["Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, does not lack for opinion about the role of the food industry in the etiology of America's obesity crisis. She freely expresses her point of view as one of the most outspoken and influential voices in the national debate on public health nutrition and food policy. Dr Nestle has devoted much of her professional life to the nutrition issues that individuals, institutions, and policymakers are struggling with today: how to make better choices about what we eat."]

White, Dan. "A candid conversation with Marion Nestle: How corporations and politicians decide what you eat." UC Santa Cruz Campus News (February 18, 2026) ["A few hours before delivering the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture, the longtime nutrition scholar and tireless consumer advocate Marion Nestle gave a far-ranging, informal interview at The Humanities Institute (THI.) Nestle discussed the political structure of the American food system, arguing that corporate influence—from agricultural subsidies to supermarket slotting fees—shapes what people eat far more than personal choice does."]

Mundis Imaginalis - Music Mix #56

 Die Spitz; Wombo; The Kilans; Cardinals; Dad Bod; Wilbere; Nadezhda; Freak Slug; Black Sabbath; The Brothers Johnson; villagerrr; Merce Lemon; Feeble Little Horse; Tame Impala; Gorillaz; De La Soul; Neneh Cherry; The Call; Bob Marley and the Wailers; Ziggy Marley; Sex Pistols; The Clash; Siouxsie and the Banshees; Joy Division; Soft Cell; Nirvana; David Bowie; bar Italia; Elias Ronnefelt; Iceage; The Last Dinner Party; The Lovely Eggs; Sonic Youth; The Dream Syndicate; The Mountain Goats; Anathema; The Presidents of the United States of America; Hot Chip; 4 Non Blondes; Folk Bitch Trio; Stevie Wonder

Mundis Imaginalis - Music Mix #56

Non Satis Scire - Music Mix #55

 Yasmin Hamdan; Orange 9mm; The Hello Crows; Princess Nokia; Andrew Bird; Lucius; Rage Against the Machine; Disappeared Completely; The Strokes; No So; Weakened Friends; Not for Radio; Wilby; Jessie Baylin; Badlands; Guitar; The xx; Turnstile; Hayley Williams; Modes Mouse; Magdalena Bay; The Last Dinner Party; Briston Maroney; American Football; Branden Yates; Grandaddy; Between Friends; The Moss; Blackwater Holylight; Alabama 3; Wizard; Kevin Morby; Erin Rae; Melody' Echo Chamber; Ben Kweller; Waxahatchee; Dehd; Dry Cleaning; Smerz; Kenny Hoopla; Hannah Cohen; New Dad; Chanel Beads; Freak Slug; TOPS; Automatic; feeble little horse

  Non Satis Scire - Music Mix #55

Kilby Block Party 2026 (Salt Lake City, UT)

 Kilby Block Party 2026 (Salt Lake City, UT)

3 favorites of this year's festival:

Wombo (Louisville, KY)
Freak Slug (Manchester, UK)
Die Spitz (Austin, TX)

Band we will see:

XX  
Turnstile 
Hayley Williams 
Modest Mouse

Father John Misty

Magdalena Bay 

The Last Dinner Party 

Grandaddy 
The Moss
Kevin Morby 
Melody's Echo Chamber 
Ben Kweller
Dehd
Smerz

KennyHoopla

 Hannah Cohen 

NewDad 
Chanel Beads

Freak Slug 
TOPS 
Automatic
Feeble Little Horse
Die Spitz
Wombo

Cardinals

Dad Bod

Wilbere

Nadezhda

Wonder Cabinet: Science/Humanities/Philosophy/Religion (Azimuths)

Wonder Cabinet homepage ["Intimate conversations about the mysteries of the cosmos and life on a sentient planet with writers, philosophers and scientists who are dazzled by it all."]

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Blackie, Sharon. "Why We Need Fairy Tales Now." Wonder Cabinet (May 9, 2026) ["“Stories are spells,” Sharon Blackie says. “They change things.” Maybe that’s why fairy tales — old, new, fractured and retold — are having a resurgence. As uncertainty rises and old ways disintegrate, fairy tales offer a roadmap to cultural transformation and re-enchantment. Sharon Blackie is one of our foremost fairy tale interpreters. In her new book, “Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now,” she reclaims the subversive fairy tale heroines of the past. Not passive, well-behaved princesses — think Tatterhood instead of Cinderella, the Fox Wife instead of Sleeping Beauty — figures from centuries-old European folk tales that were whispered over hearths and spinning wheels, and handed down from one generation of women to the next, not as children’s entertainment but a blueprint for survival, maps for soul retrieval and cultural regeneration. The brave, smart heroines and wise old women in these tales offer us an alternative, “post-heroic” model of psychological development, Blackie says. A code of ethics based on kinship with the more-than-human world of animals and plants, and a celebration of old-fashioned virtues like compassion, kindness and reciprocity. Fairy tale heroines, Blackie says, don’t slay dragons — they make them part of the team. Fairy tales are part of our collective unconscious, a storehouse of archetypes and images that predate the modern world. There's a bridge back to the enchanted landscapes and animist sensibilities of our ancestors — a gateway to wonder. In this conversation, Blackie shows us how to unlock their power and find our way back the imaginal world."]

Burnett, Graham. "Rewilding Attention." Wonder Cabinet (May 23, 2026) ["We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of "The Friends of Attention," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the German Romantics, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Henry James — to argue that we've lost touch with older, richer forms of attention. And he makes the case that reclaiming it will require more than screentime apps or digital detox – it’ll take collective resistance. Plus: why your Pilates class, your evening needlework, or your walk with the dog might already be forms of radical attention — and how reframing everyday activities can make ordinary life feel richer, more mysterious and more full of wonder.“Book: Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.”]

Chungyalpa, Dekila. "On the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth." Wonder Cabinet (April 11, 2026) ["Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth. For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance. In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing was often female, and where land itself—especially the sacred Himalayan landscape of Sikkim—was alive with presence, meaning, and obligation. Today, she is a global conservationist and founding director of the Loka Initiative, building unlikely partnerships between climate scientists and religious leaders across traditions—from Buddhist monastics to Catholic clergy, Indigenous elders to Muslim clerics and Evangelical pastors. Her work suggests that the climate crisis is not only scientific or political—but spiritual."]

Haskell, David George. "Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty." Wonder Cabinet (March 28, 2026) ["What can flowers teach us about survival? Celebrated biologist and writer David George Haskell reframes flowers as agents of transformation—creatures that turned conflict into collaboration and remade the living world. For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if we’ve misunderstood them entirely? In How Flowers Made the World, biologist and writer David George Haskell invites us to see flowers not as delicate embellishments, but as one of the most powerful forces in Earth’s history. When flowering plants emerged more than 200 million years ago, they didn’t just adapt to the world—they transformed it. Through strategies of beauty, attraction, and reciprocity, they turned rivals into partners, reshaping ecosystems and making possible the rich diversity of life we know today. In a lyrical, science-rich conversation, we explore:
— Why Haskell calls flowers “nature’s revolutionaries”
— How beauty, pleasure, and desire function as evolutionary strategies
— The deep interdependence between flowers, animals, and humans
— What flowers can teach us about resilience in a time of ecological crisis
— How re-centering flowers might change the story we tell about life on Earth.
We live on a floral planet, Haskell says—and more than that, we are a floral species, utterly dependent on flowering plants for food, habitat, and survival. The lessons flowers offer—about creativity, cooperation, and transformation—may be exactly what we need to navigate a rapidly changing world. What would it mean to tell the story of life not through predators and conquest, but through seduction, partnership and bloom?"] 

Henderson, Rebecca. "Can Capitalism Save the World It’s Destroying?" Wonder Cabinet (May 2, 2026) ["Can capitalism save the world it's destroying? Rebecca Henderson thinks so. An economist at Harvard Business School and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, she has advised some of the world's biggest corporations and argues that capitalism itself — and what drives corporations — urgently needs to change. She's clear-eyed about capitalism's failures — the inequality, the exploitation, the environmental destruction — which is precisely what drives her passion for reforming it from within. And as a climate activist, she's haunted by the consequences if we fail to act. But this conversation goes deeper than economics. Henderson opens up about hitting a personal wall in her climate work — and the unexpected turn that brought wonder back into her life."]

Rovelli, Carlo. "Cosmic Mysteries and the Politic of Wonder." Wonder Cabinet (February 7, 2026) ["Carlo Rovelli’s quest to understand the nature of reality began not in a physics lab, but in youthful experiments with consciousness, political protest and a restless hunger for meaning—years before he “fell madly in love with physics.” Today, Rovelli is famous for his bestselling books, including "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" and "Reality Is Not What It Seems," and his pioneering work on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, including black holes and quantum gravity. In a wide-ranging conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Rovelli about his early, profound experiences with LSD; his discovery of the "spectacular" beauty of general relativity and quantum mechanics; his lifelong search for purpose in both the cosmos and his own life; and why scientists need to be politically engaged. Carlo also tells us about the big idea that he’d put in our own wonder cabinet. This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. We also play a short excerpt from Anne Strainchamps’ earlier interview with Rovelli that originally aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge."]

Singh, Manvir. "Was Shamanism the First Religion?" Wonder Cabinet (April 4, 2026) ["Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience? Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds. How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions. Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?"]

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."]

Strand, Sophie. "Ecological Storytelling and Mythic Imagination." Wonder Cabinet (January 31, 2026) ["Writer and ecologist Sophie Strand thinks at a scale that can feel dizzying—in the best way. In a single conversation, she can move from the chemical structure of cells to mushroom spores, from ancient weather gods to mycorrhizal fungi, from Bronze Age collapse to the slow intelligence of soil. In this episode of Wonder Cabinet, we talk with Strand about wonder that doesn’t float upward but roots downward—into bodies, ecosystems, decay, and deep time. We begin with her essay “Your Body Is an Ancestor,” published shortly before Halloween and the Day of the Dead, and follow her imagery into our shared prehistoric past.
The conversation also explores how Strand’s experience of chronic illness reshaped her understanding of nature, selfhood, and health. Rather than seeing the sick body as broken, she turns to ecological metaphors: spider webs, soil structures, caterpillars dissolving inside cocoons. What might it mean to understand ourselves not as machines that fail, but as landscapes that change? Along the way, we talk about fantasy and “romantasy,” Tolkien, Harry Potter, Dramione fan fiction and communal storytelling rituals. This is a conversation about wonder with dirt under its fingernails: embodied, mythic, ecological, and deeply alive to the cycles of death and regeneration that bind us all."]

Winterer, Caroline. "Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the American Soul." Wonder Cabinet (April 25, 2026) ["T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone. Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing mysterious fossils and giant bones they didn't even have names for yet. Almost overnight, something remarkable happened: the New World became old. The United States went from infant start-up nation to the blueprint for all of creation.
Stanford historian Caroline Winterer traces this deep time revolution in her book How the New World Became Old — and she shows us how profoundly it shaped American identity. We still think of dinosaurs as fun, as children's toys and museum spectacles. Few of us realize how deeply they underwrote a national mythology — one that fueled American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, Christian nationalism and genocide. This is a story about wonder and awe. And it teaches us that those emotions are neither simple nor neutral.Caroline’s book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America."]

Que sais-je? - Music Mix #54

Wilco; King Missile; Angine de Poitrine; Stereolab; AC/DC; The Cure; Wendy Eisenberg; Marcus King; Sammy Rae & The Friends; Earthgang; Little Dragon; Sudan Archives; Patrick Wilson; Shiner; Sloan; Sons; The Cords; The Macks; Trestles; Dodie; Bush; Kate Bush; Prewn; Taylor Swift; Smashing Pumpkins; Scorpions; Cream; Wet Leg; Fever Ray; Miles Caton; DC6 Singers Collective; Don Tolliver & Ludwig Goransson; Cedric Burnside; Sharde-Thomas Malloy; Nikki Lane; Oasis; Stone Temple Pilots; Ava Luna; Cal in Red; Cheap Perfume; Rush; Creative Writing; HAERTS; Hammy Down; Caroline Rose; Idlewild; Arthur Buck; Lovejoy; Parent Teacher; Pigeons Playing Ping Pong; Genevieve Artadi; Real Bad Man; TOBi

 Que sais-je? - Music Mix #54 

Michael D. Benton: Introduction to and Discussion of The Battle of Algiers

Michael D. Benton: Introduction to and Discussion of The Battle of Algiers

(Originally published in Uprooting Criminology: April 14, 2014)

In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was released to critical acclaim as well as official condemnation. In France it was banned until 1974 when it was finally screened in a cut version. The film examines the early part of what is known as the Algerian War (1954-1962) when the colonized Algerian population threw off the century-long yoke of the French colonizers (they invaded Algeria in 1830). Pontecorvo’s film is unique in many ways:

1) Its focus is on the early intensification of the Algerian resistance when they began to focus on guerilla warfare in the city of Algiers as the most effective tactic against the French colonizers.

2) It also effectively portrays the French Legion’s military response. Torture as a method of information-gathering and intimidation, as well as, the concerted hunting down of resistance fighters.

3) The film uses mostly non-professional actors who had actually been a part of the Algerian resistance against the French.

4) The film is naturalistic in its portrayal of the operations of revolutionary cells and their guerrilla tactics.

5) The film provides powerful images of the colonizing forces usage of media to communicate their messages. Perhaps, not as obvious, is the resistance resort to “terror” as their only possible tactic to communicate their message.

6) It ends with the seemingly victorious moment for the colonizers when the French Legion has won the Battle of Algiers and decimated the guerrilla cells. However, as the last scene vividly demonstrates, they may have won the battle, but the French in their victory had poured gasoline onto the flame of resistance that would lead to their eventual defeat in the larger war.

The film is considered to be so realistic in its depiction of the resistance against colonizing forces, that the Pentagon in 2003, during the Bush Administration’s initiation of its “War on Terror,” held screenings for their officers in order for them to understand the resistance they would probably face. The film is also very effective in thinking about the later Abu Ghraib scandals and provides insights into the recent USA-France joint invasion of Mali.

Discussion questions:

• In The Battle of Algiers there is a powerful scene that examines the hypocrisy of Western ideology. This is when Colonel Mathieu is hosting the media to announce the capture of the resistance leader. The French celebrated the “heroic” resistance against the NAZI occupation, how were they now complicit in the same acts of the NAZIs (directly relating to the comment from one of the reporters during this scene)?

• Albert Memmi, the Tunisian writer, in his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized, makes the claim that colonization is in essence “one variety of fascism” (63). Do you agree or disagree?

• France had just been defeated in another colonial war (The First Indochina War of 1945-1954 in Vietnam ), do you think this has something to do with their brutal determination to defeat the Algerian resistance.

• The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte considers the violence of the colonizer and the colonized to be different. What response do you have to this claim through a discussion of the violence perpetrated by both sides in the film? Is violence necessary, as Sartre claims, to the decolonization movement? Feel free to bring in observations from other decolonization movements.

• This film continues to resonate with 21st Century events in North Africa and the Middle East (in particular the Abu Ghraib scandals, the American empire’s endorsement of torture as a policy, and the American-French invasion of Mali). Are there lessons to be learned about the experiences of the colonizer and the colonized in this film?

Hana Lee Goldin: Librarian/Critical Thinking/Media Literacy (Azimuths)

Hana Lee Goldin's website Card Catalog

Goldin, Hana Lee. "A Non-Exhaustive List of Sources for When You Need Real Information, Not Just Content." Card Catalog (February 5, 2026) ["How to find trustworthy sources for breaking news, health questions, financial decisions, and local elections."]

---. "Building Your Own Verification Toolkit." Card Catalog (January 27, 2026) ["A guide to the tools and databases librarians use, plus a personal fact-checking workflow you can run in under 60 seconds."]

---. "From Ataris to AI: The Millennial Reckoning With Relentless Change." Card Catalog (March 3, 2026) ["This isn’t a single adjustment. It’s been the continuous condition of our entire adult lives. We didn’t watch the world change and then settle. We watched the world change, adapted to that change, and then watched it change again before the adaptation had even fully landed. We grew up inside the acceleration, and the acceleration has never stopped. On one side of us: an older generation that experienced technology largely as a series of arriving conveniences, things that made existing tasks easier rather than as the ground beneath their feet constantly shifting. On the other: a generation behind us for whom the internet isn’t a place you go but simply the texture of existence, who have no memory of a world that worked differently. We are the bridge generation: old enough to remember before, young enough to be living through the middle, and bearing the particular exhaustion of people who can see both shores but can’t quite stand on either."]

---. "The Four Layers of Information Reality." Card Catalog (February 10, 2026) ["A framework for understanding how information becomes belief."]

---. "Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It." Card Catalog (February 24, 2026) ["40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it."]

---. "The Hierarchy of Sources: A Cheat Sheet - A guide to evaluating information sources in the AI age." Card Catalog (February 19, 2026) ["Why This Matters Now: The information environment you navigate today bears little resemblance to the one that existed a few decades ago. In the 1990s, getting your ideas in front of a large audience usually required convincing a publisher, a newspaper editor, a television producer, or some other institutional gatekeeper that your content was worth distributing. Those gatekeepers had biases and blind spots, and plenty of valuable perspectives were excluded from mainstream channels. But the friction involved in publishing meant that most widely circulated information had passed through at least one filter, however imperfect. That friction is gone. Anyone with an internet connection can now publish anything, to a potential audience of billions, at essentially zero cost. A teenager in their bedroom can create a website that looks as professional as a major news organization. A coordinated network can flood social media with fabricated stories faster than fact-checkers can respond. AI tools can generate plausible-sounding text, realistic images, and convincing audio and video at a scale that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. Meanwhile, the platforms that distribute this information have built their business models around engagement, which means their algorithms actively promote content that generates strong emotional reactions regardless of whether that content is accurate. Research has shown that false news stories tend to spread faster and reach more people than accurate ones, in part because fabricated content is often designed to provoke outrage or surprise. The economic incentives of the attention economy are misaligned with the goal of keeping people well-informed."]

---. "In Praise of Serendipity." Card Catalog (April 2, 2026) ["On staying open to the unexpected: We teach search as technique: how to construct a query, which databases to use, how to evaluate a source. What we don’t teach is the limit built into all of those tools: they can only return what we already know to ask for. Everything we don’t know to ask for requires a different approach entirely. AI extends that limit further. A language model synthesizes from what we’ve already thought to ask about, which means it’s only as generative as the questions we bring to it. Some of the most generative questions arrive through wandering, through the accidental encounter that reframes what we thought we were looking for, and that’s something current AI tools aren’t designed to do. The library tradition has long understood that knowledge develops through exposure to the unexpected and through the slow accumulation of encounters that couldn't have been planned. Following a thread without knowing where it leads is how the connections start to form on their own. The practices above aren’t a romantic supplement to serious research. They’re part of how serious research has always developed. Serendipity has a research literature and a documented role in how knowledge develops. But the reason any of that matters is simpler: the world occasionally offers something we didn't know we needed, arriving from a direction we never would have thought to look. We stumble into it less than we used to, but it's still there when we make room for it."]

---.  "The Libraries That Weren't Supposed to Exist - Basement libraries and buried archives: a brief history of reading against the state." Card Catalog (April 23, 2026)  ["Underground libraries are still being built. In the United States, PEN America has documented nearly twenty-three thousand instances of school book bans since 2021, concentrated largely in Florida and Texas, and reports from affected districts describe informal lending networks forming among parents and students to keep removed titles in circulation. In Ukraine, librarians have evacuated and hidden collections during the Russian invasion. In Afghanistan, underground schools have continued teaching girls since the Taliban banned their education in 2021. Each of these cases traces the same arc the earlier ones did: a restriction is imposed, and a group of readers decides the loss is not acceptable and finds a way to keep access available. The same four kinds of information control that authoritarian regimes apply deliberately also occur in democracies, produced by different mechanisms but with overlapping effects. Restriction in a democracy is rarely outright prohibition; it shows up as the steady removal of titles from school and library collections, licensing and liability pressure on publishers, and content removals across platforms. Distortion in a democracy isn’t state propaganda; it’s the combination of algorithmically amplified content and coordinated disinformation campaigns that erodes the shared factual ground a news ecosystem requires to function. Surveillance in a democracy is conducted mostly by private companies rather than the state, but the data collected on reading habits and search histories changes what people are willing to look up. And the long-term narrowing of what people find it possible to think shows up as the consolidation of information access through a few corporate platforms, which decides, increasingly, what most people encounter at all. These pressures differ from outright authoritarianism in scale and mechanism, but they still affect what most people end up reading. Four practices drawn from underground libraries give readers ways to keep access to books and ideas stable if information channels should narrow. Each takes on a different angle of the narrowing, and together they form the basis of a reading life that holds up under institutional pressure."]

---. "Steel-Manning Can Be More Useful Than Fact-Checking." Card Catalog (April 14, 2026) ["We steel-man an opposing argument for one of two reasons: either to discover that the opposing position has merit we hadn’t recognized (which makes our own understanding more accurate), or to be able to argue our own position from a much stronger and more grounded place (because we’ve already engaged with the best the other side has to offer rather than the worst). Both of these outcomes make us better thinkers. Neither requires us to abandon our original view. There’s a practical test for whether a steel man has been done well: if we can restate the opposing position back to someone who holds it and they respond with something like, “Yes, that’s what I believe,” then we’ve succeeded. We’ve demonstrated that we understand their position on its own terms, not a distorted or simplified version of the position. Once we’ve reached that point of genuine understanding, the conversation changes. We know exactly which specific points we disagree on and which points the other side has right, which means we can focus our pushback on the real points of divergence instead of wasting energy on misunderstandings. And the person we’re engaging with is far more likely to listen to our counterarguments, because we’ve shown that we took the time to understand theirs first. Steel-manning someone’s position doesn’t mean we’ve conceded anything. It means we’ve done the intellectual work of comprehending why they believe what they believe, so that if we still disagree, our disagreement is precise and informed rather than reactive. We’re not meeting them halfway; we’re making sure we know exactly where the halfway point is before we decide where we stand."]

---. "We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet." Card Catalog (April 9, 2026)  ["Every cognitive technology in the historical record produced capacities that exceeded what anyone anticipated, because the technology changed not just what people could do but how they thought about doing it. We’re inside that process now, which means we can’t see its full shape any more than the first literate Greeks could see what reading would eventually make possible. What we can do is engage deliberately, bringing real questions to these exchanges and holding our own reasoning as the standard against which we measure what comes back. The capacities that emerge from this transition will be shaped by exactly that: not by the tools themselves, but by the quality of thinking we bring to using them."]

---.  "We Were Never Supposed to Know This Much: On the cost of knowing everything, everywhere, all at once." Card Catalog (March 17, 2026)  ["In 1992, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published research connecting primate brain size to social group size. What he found was striking: the human neocortex is sized for a stable social world roughly the size of a village, intimate enough that we can track the histories, alliances, and emotional states of everyone in it. Beyond that scale, the cognitive architecture starts to strain. We were simply never built to hold more. For most of human history, that was more than enough. We lived in communities where bad news had edges: a neighbor’s illness, a failed harvest, a conflict close enough to matter and local enough to address. The information environment was scaled to what a human nervous system could hold, process, and respond to in a meaningful way. Bad news came with a corresponding set of possible actions. Knowing about a problem and having some capacity to do something about it were rarely that far apart. What’s happened since is not just a change in the volume of information, but a structural rupture in that relationship between knowing and doing. The internet didn’t simply give us more news. It collapsed every geographical and temporal boundary that had previously kept information at a manageable human scale. We now receive, in a single morning, detailed accounts of suffering from dozens of countries, political crises on multiple continents, and a running feed of expert opinion about all of it, alongside advertisements and the hot takes of strangers. All of it is real and all of it deserves moral seriousness. The brain receiving it, though, is the same one that evolved for a village, and it’s being asked to perform as a global news desk, a grief counselor, and a political analyst simultaneously. There’s also a subtler problem: the feed isn’t a mirror of the world. It’s a distortion. Research consistently shows that engagement-based algorithms amplify emotionally charged content, particularly anger and outrage, over content that is neutral or resolution-focused. A story about a crisis keeps us scrolling longer than a story about a resolution. The world as it appears in our feeds isn’t proportional to the world as it exists. It’s been filtered through an optimization function that rewards activation, which means we’re not just receiving more information than we were built for. We’re receiving a skewed version of it."]

---.  "What a Librarian is Reading in Times of Moral Nausea and Psychological Despair." Card Catalog (February 17, 2026)  ["What do you do when the problem isn’t misinformation, but accurate information that shatters everything you thought possible? When you have to expand your conception of what humans are capable of doing to each other, what systems are capable of enabling, what societies are capable of tolerating? When the facts themselves demand that you build a larger, darker, more complex model of how power operates and who it serves? These books don’t answer that question; they can’t. But they do offer ways to live inside the question without being consumed by it. They model how others have metabolized unbearable knowledge and continued. They provide practices for days when continuing feels impossible. They remind us that we’re not the first people to discover the world is not what we thought, and we won’t be the last. They model what becomes possible when you stop asking “how do I unknow this” and start asking “who do I want to be now that I know.” Some things change us permanently. These books are companions for that transformation. They’re maps drawn by those who traveled this territory before us and discovered that continuing mattered more than understanding, that staying present had value even without resolution. They’re proof that others have stood where you’re standing and found ways forward, too."]

---. "What 'Do Your Own Research' Actually Means." Card Catalog (April 7, 2026) ["A step-by-step methodology for evaluating any claim and exploring any subject."]

---. "When Your AI Asks How You're Feeling: A Field Guide to Engagement Manipulation." Card Catalog (February 12, 2026) ["AI systems use dark patterns to keep conversations going longer than necessary. Learning to spot them protects your time and attention."]