A fragment for my friend -
If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in the night
August in Emily St. John Mandel's novel Station Eleven (Vintage Books, 2015: 141)
Byrne, Honor Swinton, Joanna Hogg and Tilda Swinton. "The Souvenir." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #227 (May 15, 2019) ["The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2013’s Exhibition and a breakthrough from the year’s Sundance Film Festival, is an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young woman in early 1980s London. Starring Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Burke, The Souvenir is a moving bildungsroman about the ties that inexplicably bind; it is also an absorbing evocation of a time, place, and national mood."]
Coppins, McKay. "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President." The Atlantic (March 2020) ["How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election"]
Glenza, Jessica. "The One-Woman Lobby Machine Behind the 'Heartbeat' Bills." On the Media (May 17, 2019) ["For decades, the anti-abortion movement has tried to chip away at Roe v. Wade by putting up obstacles to abortion access through restrictions on clinics. Now the tactics seem to be shifting, as evidenced by this week's new abortion ban in Alabama and a series of so-called "heartbeat" bills passed in several states in recent months. For nearly a decade, Janet Porter has been a one-woman lobbying machine with her group Faith2Action. She's railed against gay marriage, advocated for "conversion therapy," and championed the racist birther conspiracy theory. She has also been pushing for a so-called "heartbeat" bill which would ban abortions after six weeks, a move that used to divide abortion groups. Jessica Glenza is a health reporter from The Guardian who recently profiled Porter. This week, she spoke to Bob about why the term "heartbeat" bill is misleading and what Porter's tactics and politics tell us about how anti-abortion groups are operating."]
Klein, Ezra. "Book excerpt: A better theory of identity politics." The Ezra Klein Show (January 23, 2020) ["A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts. We’ve been taught to only see identity politics in others. We need to see it in ourselves."]
Kogonada. "Nothing at Stake." The Current (February 11, 2020) [New video essay on Alfonso Cuaron's film Roma]
Thompson, Heather Ann. "Blood in the Water." This is Not a Pipe (May 23, 2019) ["Heather Ann Thompson discusses her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy with Chris Richardson. Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan. Blood in the Water has won the Bancroft Prize, Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council for Crime and Delinquency, and more. It also received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association and was long listed for the Cundill Prize in History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award. "]
West, Stephen. "Antonio Gramsci on Cultural Hegemony." Philosophize This! #131 (May 23, 2019) ["Gramsci begins his explanation by evoking and repurposing a word that had been thrown around all throughout human history but it was a word that he thought in recent years was starting to take on an entirely new meaning. The thing that was responsible for allowing a particular social class to ascend to power and then maintain a privileged status…was what he called Cultural Hegemony. This concept of hegemony is going to become massively important to the political conversation of the 20th and 21st centuries and by the end of this arc of the show we’re going to have looked at it from a lot of different perspectives. Maybe we should start from the origins of the word…the word hegemony originates in ancient Greece…the root of the word comes from the greek word meaning “to lead”, some translators say it’s closer to “to rule over”…but either way during antiquity there were things called hegemons…now in the context of ancient Greece a hegemon was typically a state that had a significant military advantage over another state…the arrangement being that if the weaker state didn’t comply with certain demands from the hegemon they would be annexed or dominated militarily or burned to the ground, take your pick. The term hegemony implied the threat of physical dominance over a population of people…this was the case all throughout human history. But Gramsci is going to say that in our modern world the definition of the word hegemony needs to evolve with the political reality we are living in. We are no longer living in a world where most political control is exercised by military dominance over a population of people. Since the advent of mass media people in positions of power have realized that a much more effective way of controlling populations is by manipulating the cultural parameters that citizens have to navigate. The general idea is this: to be a human being living a life in our modern world…you always HAVE to be living that life immersed within a particular culture. But what IS a culture other than an elaborate collection of norms, rules, structures, mores, taboos, rituals, values, symbolic gestures…these things are not exactly abstract concepts…they are acute. They are visible. This is the cultural custom of a handshake to pay deference to someone else. This is not talking with your mouth full. This is the sum total of every ritual we engage in on a daily basis that all come together to create a cohesive society. But what Gramsci is going to ask is: who exactly created all of these norms and taboos that we abide by?"]
Wuerthner, George. "The War on Wolves is Part of the Culture War." Counterpunch (February 11, 2020)
Coppins, McKay. "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President." The Atlantic (March 2020) ["How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election"]
Glenza, Jessica. "The One-Woman Lobby Machine Behind the 'Heartbeat' Bills." On the Media (May 17, 2019) ["For decades, the anti-abortion movement has tried to chip away at Roe v. Wade by putting up obstacles to abortion access through restrictions on clinics. Now the tactics seem to be shifting, as evidenced by this week's new abortion ban in Alabama and a series of so-called "heartbeat" bills passed in several states in recent months. For nearly a decade, Janet Porter has been a one-woman lobbying machine with her group Faith2Action. She's railed against gay marriage, advocated for "conversion therapy," and championed the racist birther conspiracy theory. She has also been pushing for a so-called "heartbeat" bill which would ban abortions after six weeks, a move that used to divide abortion groups. Jessica Glenza is a health reporter from The Guardian who recently profiled Porter. This week, she spoke to Bob about why the term "heartbeat" bill is misleading and what Porter's tactics and politics tell us about how anti-abortion groups are operating."]
Klein, Ezra. "Book excerpt: A better theory of identity politics." The Ezra Klein Show (January 23, 2020) ["A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts. We’ve been taught to only see identity politics in others. We need to see it in ourselves."]
Kogonada. "Nothing at Stake." The Current (February 11, 2020) [New video essay on Alfonso Cuaron's film Roma]
Thompson, Heather Ann. "Blood in the Water." This is Not a Pipe (May 23, 2019) ["Heather Ann Thompson discusses her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy with Chris Richardson. Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan. Blood in the Water has won the Bancroft Prize, Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council for Crime and Delinquency, and more. It also received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association and was long listed for the Cundill Prize in History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award. "]
West, Stephen. "Antonio Gramsci on Cultural Hegemony." Philosophize This! #131 (May 23, 2019) ["Gramsci begins his explanation by evoking and repurposing a word that had been thrown around all throughout human history but it was a word that he thought in recent years was starting to take on an entirely new meaning. The thing that was responsible for allowing a particular social class to ascend to power and then maintain a privileged status…was what he called Cultural Hegemony. This concept of hegemony is going to become massively important to the political conversation of the 20th and 21st centuries and by the end of this arc of the show we’re going to have looked at it from a lot of different perspectives. Maybe we should start from the origins of the word…the word hegemony originates in ancient Greece…the root of the word comes from the greek word meaning “to lead”, some translators say it’s closer to “to rule over”…but either way during antiquity there were things called hegemons…now in the context of ancient Greece a hegemon was typically a state that had a significant military advantage over another state…the arrangement being that if the weaker state didn’t comply with certain demands from the hegemon they would be annexed or dominated militarily or burned to the ground, take your pick. The term hegemony implied the threat of physical dominance over a population of people…this was the case all throughout human history. But Gramsci is going to say that in our modern world the definition of the word hegemony needs to evolve with the political reality we are living in. We are no longer living in a world where most political control is exercised by military dominance over a population of people. Since the advent of mass media people in positions of power have realized that a much more effective way of controlling populations is by manipulating the cultural parameters that citizens have to navigate. The general idea is this: to be a human being living a life in our modern world…you always HAVE to be living that life immersed within a particular culture. But what IS a culture other than an elaborate collection of norms, rules, structures, mores, taboos, rituals, values, symbolic gestures…these things are not exactly abstract concepts…they are acute. They are visible. This is the cultural custom of a handshake to pay deference to someone else. This is not talking with your mouth full. This is the sum total of every ritual we engage in on a daily basis that all come together to create a cohesive society. But what Gramsci is going to ask is: who exactly created all of these norms and taboos that we abide by?"]
Wuerthner, George. "The War on Wolves is Part of the Culture War." Counterpunch (February 11, 2020)
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