Anderson, Ellie and David M. Peña-Guzmán. "Exercise." Overthink #83 (August 1, 2023) ["Western philosophy started… at the gym. ... Ellie and David tackle the philosophy of workouts, from Plato’s days as a wrestler to the modern loneliness of a solitary bench press. As they discuss the role of exercise — which the Greeks called gymnastics — in building bodies and training souls, they consider the ancient Olympics, the cravings for health and beauty that guide us through what David calls the "Protestant work-out ethic," and Jean Baudrillard's thoughts about Americans' passion for jogging."]
Arcas, Blaise Agüera y. "The Illusion of AI's Existential Risk." NOEMA (July 18, 2023) ["Focusing on the prospect of human extinction by AI in the distant future may prevent us from addressing AI’s disruptive dangers to society today."]
Benazzo, Mauricio and Zaya Benazzo. "After the Wisdom of Trauma." Sounds of Sand #51 (September 7, 2023) ["Today on the podcast, we welcome two special guests, Science and Nonduality co-founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. Zaya and Maurizio are both filmmakers and activists. They merged their lifelong passions for science and mysticism when they met in 2007, and their first project together was filming the documentary Rays of the Absolute on the life and teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. This project sparked their next level of creation and collaboration: SAND, a global community inspired by timeless wisdom traditions, informed by modern science, and grounded in direct experience. In 2021 they released the acclaimed documentary The Wisdom of Trauma featuring Dr. Gabor Maté. And for the past year they have been traveling the globe working on their next documentary about indigenous cultures, resilience, and an expansion of what is meant by Nonduality and Science, all today on the Sounds of SAND Podcast."]
Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Open Road Media, 2011. ["Acclaimed scholar and sociologist Peter L. Berger carefully lays out an understanding of religion as a historical, societal mechanism in this classic work of social theory. Berger examines the roots of religious belief and its gradual dissolution in modern times, applying a general theoretical perspective to specific examples from religions throughout the ages. Building upon the author’s previous work, The Social Construction of Reality, with Thomas Luckmann, this book makes Berger’s case that human societies build a “sacred canopy” to protect, stabilize, and give meaning to their worldview."]
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)." Monster Theory: Reading Culture. ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 3 - 25. ["Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self knowledge, human knowledge—and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them."]
Corriveau, Arielle. "A Spectacle of Modified Bodies: The Contemporary Grand-Guignolesque as a Feminist Challenge to Somatophobia in American Mary." Monstrum #2 (June 2019) ["What if you could make “five grand” in one night? Would you accept, even if it was illegal—even if you might be enticed to turn a single offer into an ongoing practice? In American Mary (2012), a horror film directed by the Canadian sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska, the protagonist, a medical student, takes such an offer but soon finds herself unable to come back to her normal life. American Mary centers on Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle), a broke, aspiring surgeon who falls into the strange world of body modification (also known as “bodmod”) in order to obtain enough money to continue her studies. However, her life takes a dark turn when her oppressive medical school professor breaks her trust and rapes her at a party. After that traumatic experience, Mary is enticed by the earnings associated with bodmod surgery— and possibly the renewed agency she gains from this practice—and she leaves medical school to open her own underground clinic in the bodmod community. Focused on visceral surgical procedures that provoke affective meaning, American Mary offers a critical engagement with bodmod culture and normative patriarchal fears of the body as a site of transformation and (especially in the female body) adaptability. In its championing of bodies on display, American Mary is a Grand-Guignolesque horror movie that advances a feminist vision of erotic voyeurism where a woman can inhabit and be in control of her sexuality without being reduced by it. 1 American Mary explores the limits and limitations of body modification as a form of self-expression in order to show how our society’s fear of the female body pushes unreasonable expectations onto women, and it concludes that we should instead celebrate and accept the diversity of bodies in our culture."]
Dorian, M.J. "Creativity Tip 21: Think Less, Play More." Creative Codex (August 6, 2023) ["What is the hidden link between play and creativity? Why do we discourage adults from play? How do you heal your relationship with play and improve your creativity? As we journey from childhood into adulthood, the world demands that we abandon play and daydream–relegating them to the domain of childhood. But of the many sacrifices we all must make in our transition into adulthood, this sacrifice is the most damaging to our creativity. It's time we heal our relationship with play and reimagine its place in our daily lives."]
Final Girl Studios. "Why American Psycho is More Relevant Than Ever (And Why Women Love It)." (Posted on Youtube: February 15, 2023) [MB - This is a very insightful video essay - the montage of Instagram influencers set to Bateman's morning routine monologue is chilling. Movie description: "A wealthy New York investment banking executive hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he escalates deeper into his illogical, gratuitous fantasies."]
Ford, Phil, J.F. Martel, and Meredith Michael. "That Ain't Plot: On Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away." Weird Studies (February 15, 2023) ["Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is one of those rare films that is both super popular and super weird. Rife with cinematic non sequiturs, unforgettable imagery, and moments of horror, it is an outstanding example of a story form that goes all the way back to the myth of Psyche and Eros from Apuleius's Golden Ass, if not earlier. In this type of story, a girl on the cusp of maturity steps into a magical realm where people and things from waking life reappear, draped in the gossamer of dream and nightmare. Musicologist and WS assistant Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss a strange jewel of Japanese animated cinema."]
Foster, Nicola, et al. "Corals." In Our Time (August 3, 2023) ["Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the simple animals which informed Charles Darwin's first book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, published in 1842. From corals, Darwin concluded that the Earth changed very slowly and was not fashioned by God. Now coral reefs, which some liken to undersea rainforests, are threatened by human activity, including fishing, pollution and climate change."]
Gianninni, Erin. "“If I stop doing that job, they don’t stop eating”: iZombie and the Sociopolitical Dimensions of Food." Monstrum #2 (June 2019) ["Zombies serve as a handy metaphor for any number of interpretations: fear of revenge from enslaved or colonized individuals (White Zombie [1932], I Walked with a Zombie [1943]); rampant consumerism (Dawn of the Dead [1978]) (Posey 2014); pandemics (28 Days Later [2002]) (Abbott, 2018: 13-23); and contemporary fears of both immigration and one another (The Walking Dead [2010-present]). It is a trope that filmmakers and creators continue to turn to, with a significant spike in zombie narratives over the past 20 years (172 released between 2000 and 2010, and 176 released or produced between 2011 and 2016) (Crockett and Zarracina, 2016). Because of their liminal notdead/not alive status, zombies, like other hybrid monsters, are feared as “the products of the culture that shapes them and bear within their myths the imprint of existing social conditions” (Lauro and Embry 100). They can only infect; “no zombie body is relieved of its condition by passing it on” (Lauro and Embry 100), and thus zombie-ism as a symbol cannot be transformative or liberating, unlike the image of the cyborg (Lauro and Embry 87). The zombie body can, however, symbolize (or reflect) the society in which zombie narratives are employed."]
Lee, Nathan. "Plastic Fantastic." Film Comment (July 31, 2023) ["By the time you read these words, the detonation of Barbie discourse will likely have faded to its most tedious aftereffect: commentary on the mountain of gold it accumulated on opening weekend and What This Means for the Movies (and for Women). You have surely endured, and perhaps contributed to, one of the half-dozen meme cycles the film has engendered since it broke the internet. You will have followed the factions of the Barbie vs. Oppenheimer contretemps as they reached the cringe détente known as Barbenheimer. Now that every corner of the cultural commentariat has weighed in, you may have read that Barbie is an exuberant girlboss fantasia, that it is yasss and slay, that it has its cake and eats it too. Alternatively, you may have been informed that just as there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there is no feminist anti-capitalist critique immanent to a cinematic production beholden to Mattel, Inc. Alas, you might even have heard the bobbleheads on Fox News denounce the film as “anti-man” and accuse it of promoting “trans grooming,” a phrase that can only be taken seriously when applied to transgender employees at a dog spa."]
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