Abrams, David. "How a Man Turned Into a Raven." To the Best of Our Knowledge (November 20, 2021) ["Years ago, the animist philosopher David Abram was a sleight-of-hand magician who wanted to learn from the "traditional magicians" of Asia. So he apprenticed with a powerful shaman in Nepal, who seemed to have the ability to transform into a raven. What Abram experienced was its own life-changing kind of magic."]
Conti, Paul and Andrew Huberman. "How to Build and Maintain Healthy Relationships." Huberman Lab (September 20, 2023) ["This is episode 3 of a 4-part special series on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti, M.D., a psychiatrist who did his medical training at Stanford School of Medicine and residency at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of the book, “Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic.” Dr. Conti explains how to find, develop and strengthen healthy relationships — including romantic relationships, work and colleague relationships, and friendships. He explains a roadmap of the conscious and unconscious mind that can allow anyone to navigate conflicts better and set healthy boundaries in relationships. We also discuss common features of unhealthy relationships and clinically supported tools for dealing with relationship insecurity, excessive anxiety, past traumas, manipulation and abuse. Dr. Conti explains how, in healthy relationships, there emerges a dynamic of the mutually generative “us” and how to continually improve that dynamic. The next episode in this special series explores true self-care, which can be cultivated through a process of building self-awareness along with other important practices."]
Dillard, Coshandra. "Teaching the Past to Improve the Future." Learning for Justice #2 (Spring 2022) ["Despite a range of opposition, educators are committed to teaching honest history in their classrooms—and students are eager to learn."]
Elkin, Lauren. Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. Macmillan, 2023. ["What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty. In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies? Encompassing with a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference— among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson. An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives."]
Flanagan, Ben. "Cheech and Chong's Theory of Stoner Aesthetics." Photogenie (July 26, 2023) ["Cheech and Chong are largely credited with creating the modern Stoner Comedy. Their cycle of seven key collaborations between 1978–1985, written by the pair and largely directed by Chong, would set the template for stoner aesthetic ethos which would be used by filmmaker/comedians as disparate as Richard Linklater (Dazed & Confused (1993)), Tamra Davis (Half Baked (1998)), James Toback (Harvard Man (2001)), and Gregg Araki (Smiley Face (2007)). The formula is a simple variation of the Joseph Conrad hero’s journey. The protagonist(s), beginning in a state of altered consciousness through the imbibition of marijuana, must acquire more in an effort to attain a nirvana status. Their journey may take them across town, campus, or simply their bedroom. They will question their relationship with the drug, before eventually conquering their paranoia and settling back on the couch with a freshly loaded bong. They will be enlightened, and they may have even grabbed the girl, but they will very much have regained their weed smoking mojo."]
Fontainelle, Earl. "Methodologies for the study of Magic." The Secret History of Western Esotericism (September 20, 2017) [MB - OK, quick, what comes to your mind when you hear the word magic? I'm really grooving on this podcast. I like the way Earl Fontainelle looks at these subjects from multiple angles. Here in order to start off an exploration of of understandings/histories of magic, he breaks down the etymology, histories, and disinformation surrounding the word/concept. Highly recommended for those that practice magic, those that think magic is silly/dangerous, those that have deep religious beliefs (especially of a Manichean nature), those that are rigidly atheist (I would say fundamentalist), and definitely those that are wrapped up in fanatical ideologies (the type where whole groups of beings/cultures are the enemy and need to be wiped out). What is good or bad - how do we decide? what are the consequences of those decisions? The overall series is a treasure for artists/creatives/seekers (and Humanities professors like me :) What comes to your mind when you think of magic - what happens when we actual explore a concept and think about the multiple ways it is framed?]
Gietschier, Steven P. "Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years (University of Nebraska Press, 2023)." New Books in Sports (September 23, 2023) ["Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures--among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and several others--whose stories figure prominently in baseball's past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness. Combining narrative and analysis, Gietschier tells the game's history across more than three decades while simultaneously exploring its politics and economics, including, for example, how the game confronted and barely survived the United States' entry into World War II; how owners controlled their labor supply--the players; and how the business of baseball interacted with the federal government. He reveals how baseball handled the return to peacetime and the defining postwar decade, including the integration of the game, the demise of the Negro Leagues, the emergence of television, and the first efforts to move franchises and expand into new markets. Gietschier considers much of the work done by biographers, scholars, and baseball researchers to inform a new and current history of baseball in one of its more important and transformational periods."]
Giroliman, Mars. "What is Speculative Fiction?" Southern New Hampshire University (September 21, 2021) ["With subgenres like fantasy, science fiction, horror, alternate history and more, speculative fiction is an encompassing genre that freely explores possibility and impossibility alike."]
Holland, Tom and Dominic Sandbrook. "Christmas: Pagan or Christian?" The Rest is History (December 24, 2023) ["Is Christmas as we know it merely an invention, created by plagiarising from rival cults, such as the worship of Mithra, the Iranian sun god, during the days of the Roman Empire? Is Christmas in fact based on a pagan festival, that Christians have made their own? Or has Christmas always been an authentically Christian celebration, born of its tradition and rituals? Join Tom and Dominic as they delve into the roots of Christmas, the importance of the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the cult of Sol Invictus, and much more."]
Liu, Jasmine. "Selective Hearing." Film Quarterly (December 4, 2023) ["The film takes no great interest in the psychology of the protagonists, their moral culpability, their exemplification of the banality of evil, or the other myriad bafflements that have stumped legal jurists, historians, and philosophers for the greater part of the past century. Instead it asks how a middle-class German couple’s perception of the violence unfolding before their eyes, ears, noses, and hands came to be configured in a specific, monstrous way—a question that turns its attention from the individual in a vacuum to the individual as embedded within a larger social (and physical) architecture. Rather than wondering about isolated people who choose to be cruel and those who choose to be humane, The Zone of Interest conducts an inquiry into our selective experience of sensory data and the ethical implications of that selection. ... On their faces, these investigations—though fictionalized, The Zone of Interest counts as one—put people on trial for blatant denialism. More profoundly, they put systems on trial for producing the conditions under which denialism appears plausible to those who internalize it. In 2021, anthropologist Callie Maidhof attempted to parse how people living in the shadow of Israel’s Separation Barrier, a present-day manifestation of extreme architecture, justified it to themselves. She conducted her fieldwork in Alfei Menashe, an Israeli settlement on the western edge of the West Bank. She was surprised to learn in speaking with settlers that they “barely gave [the Separation Barrier] a passing thought.” Alfei Menashe, which has the look of any Midwestern American suburb—with prim fruit trees, fences, SUVs, swing sets, and dogs—lies a wall away from settlements densely packed with Palestinians living under subhuman conditions, where the air is regularly polluted with the stench of tear gas and tires burnt in protest of the occupation. Maidhof argued that, to get by, Israeli settlers practiced a strategy of “unseeing,” which was “not a lack of vision,” but rather “a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space,” so that certain things lying in plain sight could be ignored."]
Segal, Raz. "Israeli Historian Raz Segal On Genocide And Gaza." Breaking Points (December 28, 2023) ["Ryan and Emily sit down with Israeli historian and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal to ask him about Genocide and Gaza."]
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