Decision to Leave (South Korea: Park Chan-Wook, 2022)

 Decision to Leave (South Korea: Park Chan-Wook, 2022: 138 mins)

Barquin, Juan. "Unworthy of Your Love." Reverse Shot (October 28, 2022)

Chan-wook, Park. "Park Chan-wook Finds Decision to Leave in 'The Mist.'" MUBI (December 7, 2022) ["In 1972, a lush pop ballad called "The Mist" swirled out of radios all over South Korea. Fifty years later, master auteur Park Chan-wook has taken it as the main inspiration for his celebrated new thriller-romance DECISION TO LEAVE. ... Park tells host Rico Gagliano about the song's influence on the film, unveils the musical inspiration for a possible future project...and explains why his action sequences always seem to leave his characters breathless."]

Ehrlich, David. "Decision to Leave: Park Chan-wook’s Detective Procedural Is the Most Romantic Movie of the Year." IndieWire (May 23, 2022)

Hammond, Caleb. "Park Chan-wook on Decision to Leave, Methodical Directing, and Not Being a Film Buff." The Film Stage (October 18, 2022) 

Hudson, David. "Starring Tang Wei." Current (November 9, 2022) ["As Seo-rae, a woman curiously unmoved by the sudden death of her husband in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, Tang Wei gives what Robert Koehler, writing for Cinema Scope, calls “the best single performance in any of Park’s movies.” That’s a notable claim, given that Park has worked with Song Kang Ho (Thirst), Nicole Kidman (Stoker), and Kim Minhee (The Handmaiden). With Starring Tang Wei, a five-film series opening on Friday and running through November 19, New York’s Metrograph spotlights the actress who first broke through internationally in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007)."]

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #12

“If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.” - Celine in Before Sunrise 

-------------------------------------------------------

Callard, Agnes. "Socrates and Living A Philosophical Life: A Dialogue with Agnes Callard." Converging Dialogues #404 (March 2, 2024) ['In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Agnes Callard about Socrates and living a philosophical life. They discuss untimely questions, intellectual intimacy, savage commands, socratic ethics, truth inquiries, living a philosophical life, and many more topics. Agnes Callard is a philosopher and Associate Professor of philosophy and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Chicago. She has her Bachelors from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Berkeley. Her primary research areas are ancient philosophy and ethics. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s and others. She is the author of many books, including her latest book, Open Socrates: The Case For A Philosophical Life."]

Einstein, Mara. "Hoodwinked." Team Human (March 3. 2025) ["Dr. Mara Einstein, Author of Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics As Cults, helps us recognize the cult tactics being used to hoodwink us into submission and get us to act against our own self-interest. Dr. Mara Einstein is a powerhouse marketing critic who pulls no punches. After working for a decade in corporate marketing for some of the biggest names in the business, she left for academia. That transition was motivated by a desire to pull back the curtain on consumerism’s dark side with the goal to 1) persuade companies to do better and 2) give people tools to increase their power in the marketplace. She has written books on branding religion (Brands of Faith), cause marketing (Compassion, Inc.), and deceptive marketing practices. This last book was Black Ops Advertising, which The New York Times called “well-researched and accomplished” and The Guardian agreed, saying “Einstein’s explanations of all this – from internet news organisations to TV product placement and even dating sites – are thoroughly researched, elegantly explained and often alarming, even for readers familiar with most of the above facts in the abstract.”"]

Nader, Ralph. "Ralph Nader's Capitalism." Capitalisn't (April 11, 2024) ["The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals," says Ralph Nader, the former third-party presidential candidate who just turned 90 after more than 60 years of consumer advocacy and fighting for small business in America. From influencing the transformative passage of car safety legislation to advancing numerous environmental protection and public accountability causes, Nader has fought against the proliferation and insinuation of corporate power in our government. In between all of that, Nader has also found the time to develop a prolific writing career. In this week’s episode, Nader joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his new book, "Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Got It Right." The three talk about the possibilities of ethically profitable business, Nader’s lifelong pursuit of justice, his views on the state of capitalism today, the political disillusionment of the public, and how we can reclaim democratic control of capitalism."]

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."]

Rather, Adam. "Why Measles Is Resurging—And The Rise Of Vaccine Hesitancy." Big Brains (February 20, 2025) ["In 2000, the United States declared that measles had been eliminated. But just 15 years later, the disease made a comeback—and it hasn’t gone away since. In this episode, Dr. Adam Ratner, director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at NYU and author of Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health, explains why measles outbreaks are occurring again—as vaccine hesitancy and the antivax movement is on the rise—and what this means for the future of children’s health. Ratner describes why measles is the most contagious disease we know of, and why it can be particularly harmful to children. As vaccination rates for children and adults continue to decrease in the U.S., are we at risk of undoing decades of medical progress? And what can we do to stop it?"]

Robertson, Derek. "Democracy Dies in the Techno-Dump." Liberties (January 2025) ["Thirty-five years ago, a Canadian named Ursula Franklin offered a dark prophecy. She predicted that unfettered technological development could strip us of the capacity to honor our fellow citizens’ very humanity. In such a world, she taught, democracy will become increasingly untenable — because liberal humanism is impossible to cultivate in a society dominated by atomizing, market-serving technologies. In January, 2025 America bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dark world she foresaw. (She called that world an “unlivable techno-dump”). And yet, given the extent to which digital technology shapes our lives — our politics, our pocketbooks, our schools, our sex — Americans care astonishingly little about it."]

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."]

Taylor, Herman. "Cardiology (The Heart)." Ologies (February 26, 2025) ["It beats. It throws blood. It breaks – but not if Dr. Herman Taylor can help it. He is a physician, professor and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and an absolute legend. Cardiology is a vast field but Dr. Taylor joined for a 101 on how the heart works, and how to take care of it. Get pumped for valves, tubes, electrical shocks, Grey’s Anatomy glossaries, heavy metal hearts, the effects of long term stress and systemic oppression on the heart, what those blood pressure numbers mean, what to do in an emergency, cardiac disease symptoms, what your heart wants you to eat, how to decipher your cholesterol numbers and why you would want to. Also: the worst heart tattoos out there."]

West, Stephen. "How Mysticism is missing in our modern lives. (Critchley, Heidegger)." Philosophize This! #215 (October 30, 2024) ["Today we talk about whether it's possible to achieve not just freedom of the will, but freedom from the will. The technological enframing of reality from the perspective of Heidegger. Misconceptions about Mysticism. The ways that modern life prevents us from having more of a connection with Being. Some ways to start practicing mystical types of experiences using the resources that we have available to us. We do all of this via some points made by Simon Critchley in his new book On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy."]

Wilson, Lucas. "Rebranded as ‘Biblical Counseling,’ Conversion Therapy is ‘a Colonizing Effort’ — A Q&A With The Author of ‘Shame-Sex Attraction.'" Religion Dispatches (February 7, 2025) ["Last December, the evangelical organization Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, claiming that it violates freedom of speech. Conversion therapy, or the fraudulent practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression through physically and psychologically abusive methods, still remains legal in 18 states, not including states with partial bans or states whose bans are tied up in the courts. "]

Gender and Sexuality: A Cinematic Exploration

“Gender and Sexuality: A Cinematic Exploration”
By Michael Dean Benton

“Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality.” — John Berger, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960)

“There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” — Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)

Gender and sexuality are important contemporary political concepts for understanding the constitution of our selves. They are important because they are a key to the production of our sense of self and identity as social beings, because they are experienced by every human being, because all societies seek to regulate what is acceptable in regards to gender and sexuality, and, because myths about gender and sexuality are tools for the control, demonization and oppression of groups of people. My claim for the importance of gender and sexuality as political concepts does not discount class or race, rather it recognizes that even within the hierarchical divisions of classes and races, there are further inequalities built upon perceived gender and sexuality differences (and vice versa). The discriminatory, power-based inequalities of gender and sexuality are even built into our everyday language.

While the construction of gender and sexuality is a serious subject for us to address, it is also a joyous, surprising, creative, and challenging project. Of all the personal illusions I continuously work to dispel, the myths of gender and sexuality are the most difficult; but, for that reason, also the most rewarding and enriching. The difficulty lies in my training from the earliest age to think of myself as a certain gender construct—a tough, heterosexual, working-class male—that must perform a certain rigid sexual role, and adapt the attitudes/poses necessary to be accepted in my early social environments.

From the family to cultural institutions, in the pack of peers and through the ever ubiquitous media, I learned the dreaded consequences of transgressing the social conceptions of proper gender performances and sexual behavior. I could go insane, become a degenerate deviant, be socially ostracized, mercilessly mocked by peers, randomly brutalized or murdered by strangers, and locked up by the authorities. Even my friendly childhood pastor got worked up on the pulpit about fornicators and homosexuals, declaring that they would burn in hell.

These lessons, as also outlined in the documentary films The Celluloid Closet (1995) and Tough Guise (1999), often involved verbal conditioning from peers in which the perceived weak male is called faggot, queer, homo, bitch or girl. The message was clear, your perceived weakness, makes you not-a-man, harden your exterior or you will be attacked.  I was a rather small, bookish, quiet kid, who quickly learned that sensitivity and intellectualism made me an easy target for local bullies. I desperately imitated Clint Eastwood’s steely stare, Jack Nicholson’s manic craziness, and countless other cinematic bad asses. I had this desperate need to be threatening and tough. When I was 13 I decided I needed to harden my attitude and my body. No more books, no more thinking, no more empathy, as seen in this picture, a future of self-destruction and self-hatred was written all over my 16 year old, 125 pound body [note to Stas, I’ll get you the picture].

Further reinforcement was provided by the ubiquitous media. 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-proscribed regulators of social codes. Like Brandon Teena (Boys Don’t Cry), 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 weak, 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.), I sought to erase my empathy for others and adopted the hard tough-guise of this world. Slowly, later in life, through the patient guidance of caring people who taught me about love, I slowly learned to recognize my betrayal of my inner self in order to fit into society’s prescribed 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.

As a result, as a film and media scholar, I have been working with the concepts of gender and sexuality for a long time. Cinema provides a unique opportunity for us to explore gender and sexuality. Issues of gender and sexuality have been treated in the cinema from every angle of vision and from all ideological perspectives while retaining the ability to continue to challenge us to reconsider our unconscious assumptions.

The film theorist Sophie Mayer (The Cinema of Sally Potter, 2009: 5-10), reminds us that films take place in the world, not just in the theater, and that films have just as much power as our “real” experiences to construct an understanding of our world. This is because of cinema’s “haptic” effect, which alludes to film’s ability to “touch us,” to make us feel as if we have actually experienced the events on the screen, and its profound ability to cause us to “rethink ways of seeing that link the viewer into the body of the protagonist.”

The multi-media artist, performer and filmmaker Sally Potter explains to Mayer the power of film to initiate critical reflection.

“In the act of surrender to it, what the film experience can offer is the possibility of saying ‘There you are! This is your life: your life is this and more. This is a journey inside your brain, or your experience, or your relationship with people, things, places, spaces.’ It’s not just through identification or projection onto characters, it’s the totality of experience itself being thrown back at you. With the best [films], you come out with the feeling that you took a walk through your own brain and remembered that you were alive in the big, spacious universe that you’re occupying.”

Cinema incorporates the other arts, and makes unique use of our senses to engage our experienced memories causing us to reflect on our embodied feelings.

Cinema constructs a set of memories that work in conjunction with our experienced memories to create a sense of the world. With that in mind we must recognize the extremely influential power that cinema, and popular media in general, have to proscribe rigid, naturalized, unquestioned gender roles and sexual expressions. These controlling narratives support privileged modes of being in the world that dominate our choices on how we should be and relate in the world. This is why it is important to explore challenging films that contest these dominant and repressive constructions of proper gender roles and sexual expression.

Probably the most challenging film I have taught is John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) because it is such an honest and direct portrayal of sexuality, unlike any contemporary American film. The first time I watched it by myself I actually blushed during the first ten minutes of the film. I had a close friend get angry at me for telling him to watch it.  I have had students walk out of class during the national anthem scene, yet no film I have ever taught has generated such amazing discussions of what it means to be a human in our current society or so many thoughtful, researched papers. As I worked with this film I began thinking what is it in our society that makes the honest direct portrayal and discussions of gender/sexuality so controversial for some and so invigorating for others?  Put in dialogue with films like Fatih Akin’s German/Turkish film Head-On (2004), we also began, as a class, to wonder who was performing the true drag, Justin Bond expressing himself honestly in a dress in Shortbus, or the wild Cahit and Sibel masquerading as a traditional monogamous couple in order to allow her to escape her repressive family structure.

This is how I began working on developing a course to explore how contemporary international cinema has portrayed gender and sexuality. The “Gender and Sexuality: A Cinematic Exploration” course is structured around an introductory section; followed by three groupings of contemporary international films: 1) The Politics of Love; 2) Unruly Bodies; 3) Queerying Gender and Sexuality.  My choice to avoid typical Hollywood films is a conscious decision to explore unique examples that may not be familiar to most people. Also, by developing an international sampling of films, it allows us to understand the broader movement to challenge and change naturalized conceptions of gender roles, loving relations and sexual expressions. More popular Hollywood examples that reinforce rigid gender roles will, of course, be referred to as touchstones for exploring our examples from contemporary films.

Introduction (clips):

Un Chien Andalou

(France: Luis Bunuel, 1929)

Pretty Woman

(USA: Garry Marshall, 1990)

Boys Don’t Cry

(USA: Kimberly Peirce, 1999)

Secretary

(USA: Steven Shainberg, 2002)

Kinsey

(USA/Germany: Bill Condon, 2004)

Brokeback Mountain

(Canada/USA: Ang Lee, 2005)

I A.M. a Sex Addict

(USA: Caveh Zavehdi, 2005)

300

(USA: Zack Snyder, 2006)

Don’t Look Down

(Argentina: Eliseo Subiela, 2008)

The introduction will be a discussion of the main concepts, questions, and theories framing the course through the images and themes of the feature films listed above. We will also watch various short experimental films exploring gender roles and expressions of sexuality.

The Politics of Love

In the Company of Men

(USA/Canada: Neil LaBute, 1997)

Yes

(UK/USA: Sally Potter, 2004)

Head-On

(Germany/Turkey: Fatih Akin, 2004)

The Piano

(New Zealand/Australia/France: Jane Campion, 1993)

The themes of this section will be that “relationships are always political”: The consequences of the competitive nature of sexual conquest as framed by a hyper-masculine discourse (In the Company of Men); how perceived racial and class differences come into play to disrupt and complicate traditional gender/sexual roles (Yes); the challenge for second-generation Turks in Germany, who are redefining and resisting their culturally prescribed roles, and the consequences of their transgressions (Head-On); the economic aspects and controlling narratives of traditional marriages and relationships (Piano).

Unruly Bodies

Human Nature

(France/USA: Michel Gondry, 2001)

XXY

(Argentina: Lucia Puenzo, 2007)

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

(Romania: Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

Moolaade

(Senegal: Ousmane Sembene, 2004)

The themes of this section will be the “disruptive body”: The way in which a self-defined, advanced, “civilized” Western industrial culture rests its assumptions of cultural superiority on the extreme control of bodily functions (Human Nature); how science seeks to definitively control and define gender/sexuality through biological determinism and the problems that erupt from individuals that exist outside these deterministic boundaries (XXY); how patriarchal-authoritarian societies seek to control the bodies of their citizens, especially women’s reproductive systems, and the dangers that this poses for those that seek to evade this control (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days); a powerful narrative of a woman inspiring her community to stand up to destructive rituals designed to harness female sexuality (Moolaade).

Queerying Gender and Sexuality

But I’m a Cheerleader

(USA: Jamie Babbit, 1999)

C.R.A.Z.Y.

(Canada: Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005)

The Skin I Live In

(Spain: Pedro Almodovar, 2011)

Shortbus

(USA: John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)

The themes of this section will focus around “journeys”: The use of satire to queer perceptions of what is normal gender/sexual behavior and the lengths that society will go to reinforce conforming gender identity and sexual expressions (But I’m a Cheerleader); how the repression of one’s innermost feelings can lead to destructive violence and self-hatred; how a conforming society teaches those that are viewed as sexually different to deny their identity (C.R.A.Z.Y.).  How scientific and technological discourses and practices define, regulate and reconstruct our bodies and body images without our consent (The Skin I Live In). And, finally, in a Post 9-11 world how do we move beyond the limited and repressive sexuality of a fearful, fundamentalist American culture? Is polyamory a healthy alternative to a sterile sexual culture (Shortbus)? 

Adam Gaffney: Healthcare/Medicine/Single-Payer Advocacy (Azimuths)

 Gaffney, Adam. "Bill of Health: How Market Logic Hobbles Our Nation's Hospitals." The Baffler #52 (July 2020) ["The consequences of this profit-oriented financing system is a combination of deprivation and excess. That kind of inequality of health care supply has a name. In 1971, the British general practitioner Julian Tudor Hart coined a phrase, the “inverse care law,” that describes it well. “The availability of good medical care,” he wrote in The Lancet, “tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served.” Those who need care the most, that is to say, have the least access to it. ... As Hart noted, the “inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.” As such, the inverse care law is today in operation in the United States like no other high-income nation. But we can change that. We could fund new hospitals and new health infrastructure not from profits, but from the public purse, something that the Medicare for All bills now in Congress, particularly the House version, would achieve. Hospital expansion would then be premised on the basis of health needs, not market logic."]

---. "Crisis and Opportunity." Dissent (Spring 2018) ["A society’s health—and healthcare system—serves as a window into its soul: it sheds light on the balance of class power, on political struggles long settled and still underway, and on who the society privileges and who it lets die."]

---. "A History of Putting a Price on Everything: Why policymakers calculate the cost of life and death, sickness and health." The New Republic (December 1, 2017)

 ---. "Medicare For All Is Still The Solution!" Current Affairs (February 22, 2025)   ["Dr. Adam Gaffney, the former head of Physicians For a National Health Program, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and the author of the book To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History. Adam is one of the most articulate and effective champions of Medicare For All, having once fought five Fox Business Channel commentators at once. Today he joins to discuss why Medicare For All is still the #1 best way we can improve people's healthcare. He responds to common objections, and Nathan challenges him with quotes from the author of the book The False Promise of Single-Payer Healthcare. Adam shows why the objections are silly and we need to build a consensus around the necessity of a single-payer plan."]

---. "'The Status Quo is Not Sustainable': : How Medicare for All Would Fill Gaps in Obamacare Coverage." Democracy Now (April 2, 2019) ["As Trump attacks the Affordable Care Act, we look at the growing case for Medicare for all. More than 100 Democratic lawmakers co-sponsored a House bill last month to dramatically revamp healthcare in the United States by creating a Medicare-for-all system funded by the federal government. The bill would expand Medicare to include dental, vision and long-term care, while making the federally run health program available to all Americans. It would also eliminate health insurance premiums, copayments and deductibles."]

---. "What the Doctors Ordered." The Baffler (February 19, 2020) ["Once opponents of universal health care, medical professionals may now help win it."]

The Banshees of Inisherin (Ireland/UK/USA: Martin McDonagh, 2022)

 

 The Banshees of Inisherin (Ireland/UK/USA: Martin McDonagh, 2022: 114 min)

Balaga, Marta. "The Banshees of Inisherin." Cineuropa (May 9, 2022)

Bender, Abbey. "A Wardrobe of Coats: Costume Designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh on The Banshees of Inisherin." Filmmaker (December 15, 2022)

Burwell, Carter. "Carter's Notes: The Banshees of Inisherin." (personal website - he did the score for the film)

Eggert, Brian. "The Banshees of Inisherin." Deep Focus Review (October 21, 2022)

Flight, Thomas. "What is The Banshees of Inisherin Asking You?" (Posted on Youtube: February 2023)

Kenny, Glenn. "The Banshees of Inisherin." Roger Ebert (October 21, 2022)

Kohn, Eric. "‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ Confronts the One Subject Martin McDonagh Doesn’t Want to Discuss." IndieWire (October 19, 2022)

Lessons From Stories. "The Banshees of Inisherin: Overcoming Existential Loneliness." (Posted on Youtube: January 31, 2023) ["Martin McDonagh's film The Banshees of Inisherin is an insightful portrayal of existential loneliness. Halfway through the movie, Siobhan asks, “Do you never get lonely, Padraic?” Padraic never gives his sister an answer. Nevertheless, this question echoes throughout the entire movie permeating the life of all characters. In this video, I reflect on the lessons we can learn from how each character deals with loneliness in their own lives."]

Sociocinema. "The War Allegory in The Banshees of Inisherin Explained." (Posted on Youtube: February 2023) ["The Banshees of Inisherin explained the Irish Civil War through the allegory of Pádraic and Colm. The sudden and severe end to their friendship parallels the conflict that broke out between the Free State and the anti-treaty IRA following the Irish War of Independence. Whilst little was gained from the fighting, the war had devastating consequences, affecting many that weren't directly involved. We see that Siobhán may represent the Irish diaspora, Peadar the British State and Dominic the youth that had their futures ripped up by conflict."]

Tracy, Tony. "Men Behaving Madly: The Banshees of Inisherin." Estudios Irlandeses (2023) 

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #11

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (1961)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Allen, Arthur, Elena Conis, and Paul Offit. "The Anti-Vaccine Movement." Throughline (February 13, 2025) ["The alleged link between vaccines and autism was first published in 1998, in a since-retracted study in medical journal The Lancet. The claim has been repeatedly disproven: there is no evidence that vaccines and autism are related. But by the mid-2000s, the myth was out there, and its power was growing, fueled by distrust of government, misinformation, and high-profile boosters like Jim Carrey and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In this episode: the roots of the modern anti-vaccine movement, and of the fears that still fuel it – from a botched polio vaccine, to the discredited autism study, to today."]

Boustan, Leigh. "Immigration in America: Data and Myths." Capitalisn't (July 4, 2024) ["If democracy is a social contract, why don’t we allow everybody who is willing to sign it? Why don’t we have open borders for immigration? In their book "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," Princeton University’s Leah Boustan and Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky provide insights from big data to explore how immigration shaped the United States by looking at the economic legacies of immigrants and their children. On this week’s encore episode, hosts Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean talk with Boustan to unpack how immigrants and their progeny have impacted jobs, wages, and housing prices for native-born Americans. Conversely, how do immigrants’ countries of origin overcome obstacles to socioeconomic change when many of their most-motivated citizens leave? Can data move the U.S. immigration debate beyond the current border crisis?"]

Butler, Judith and Jack Halberstam. "Who's Afraid of Gender?" Pioneer Works (Posted on Youtube: June 2024) ["In 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity helped revolutionize how we understand sexuality, gender, and the performative dimensions of identity. In the decades since, Butler has become one of our most trenchant and iconic public intellectuals—a thinker who has made countless timely and urgent interventions on questions of violence and peace, language and war, and precarity and cohabitation. Now, in Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), Butler returns to the topic that made their name, to illuminate how “anti-gender ideology movements” have become central to reactionary politics and rising authoritarianism worldwide."]

Finkel, Eugene. "Intent to Destroy: The Ukraine-Russian War." Converging Dialogues (February 16, 2025) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Eugene Finkel about the Ukraine-Russian War. They discuss Russia’s 200 year crusade to end Ukraine, identity, shared histories, and impact of Mongol and Ottoman empires. They talk about the Donbas and Crimea regions, Putin’s version of history, Galicia and Eastern Front in WWI, Ukraine independence, and Stalin’s Russification of Ukraine. They discuss Ukraine post- Soviet Union, 2014 annexation of Crimea and start of the current war, the 2022 invasion, current state of the war, peace, and many other topics. Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. He received a BA in Political Science and International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change. He is the author of numerous books including the most recent, Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine."]

Grant, Jim. "Is Private Credit in the Public Interest?" Capitalisn't (April 25, 2024) ["The meteoric rise of private credit over the last decade has raised concerns among banks about unfair competition and among regulators about risks to financial stability. Historically, regulated banks have provided most of the credit that finances businesses in the United States. However, since the 2008 financial crisis, banks have restricted their credit lines in response to new regulations. In their place has arisen private credit, which comprises direct (and mostly unregulated) lending, primarily from institutional investors. Estimates peg the current size of outstanding private credit loans in the U.S. at $1.7 trillion. Private credit loans aren't traceable, and there are incentives to lend to riskier borrowers in the absence of regulation. This could lead to catastrophic spillover effects in the event of a financial shock. This week, Bethany and Luigi sit down with Jim Grant, a longtime market and banking industry analyst, writer, and publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of financial markets published since 1983. Together, they try to answer if private credit is in the public interest."]

Kennedy, Gabriel and Grant Morrison. "Chapel Perilous." Team Human (February 19, 2025) ["Grant Morrison and Douglas Rushkoff celebrate the publication of the first biography of Robert Anton Wilson with author Gabriel Kennedy (PropAnon). Kennedy and Morrison walk us through the Chapel Perilous and land us safely back in consensus reality. Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson is the first biography of the late countercultural novelist and underground philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy (co-written with Robert Shea) is one of the most talked about underground American novels of the late 20th century. Wilson’s work and life were full of magic and strange occurrences. His ideas have been sources of inspiration for some of the most exciting writers working today. Names like Grant Morrison, Douglas Rushkoff, Alan Moore, Tom Robbins, and many others all proudly declare that Wilson was a huge influence on their work. George Carlin, arguably the greatest Stand-Up comedian of all time, even claimed Wilson as a major influence on his worldview. Simply put, Robert Anton Wilson may have quietly become the most influential American writer of our time, and hardly anyone knows it! Chapel Perilous will change that. This book will appeal to both the hardcore RAW fan, who can quote chapter and verse of any RAW book, as well as those who never heard of Robert Anton Wilson. It is a focused micro-history of Wilson’s life and times, folded into a compelling hero’s journey story line, that contemplates some of the most important aspects of human life."]

Larson, Rob. "The Grotesque World of the Super-Rich." Current Affairs (March 1, 2025) ["Rob Larson is Current Affairs' In-House Economist. He is also the author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More. Rob covers the grotesque contrast between the lives of the rich and poor in this country, and the outsized power that the super-rich have over our lives. He shows how our country's wealth is squandered and outlines strategies for ending the plutocracy."]

Leonhardt, David. "Capitalism-Was: What Happened to the American Dream?" Capitalisn't (June 6, 2024) ["Is the famed American Dream still attainable for the immigrants and working class of today? What made America the land of opportunity — and if it isn't the same anymore, what happened to it? Joining co-hosts Bethany and Luigi to discuss these questions is David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "Ours Was the Shining Future." In his book, Leonhardt describes what he calls today's "rough-and-tumble" capitalism and distinguishes its laissez-faire characteristics from a more bygone, democratic version. Charting shifts in manufacturing, labor power, and the perennial tension between immigration and wages, Leonhardt and our hosts deliberate over the ramifications of this story for progressive and populist movements in a tumultuous election year and offer potential pathways to rekindle the promise of prosperity and upward mobility."]

Miller, Patricia. "Silence of the Nuns — Oscar Darling ‘Conclave’ Contains Subtle Indictment of Catholic Church’s Views on Women." Religion Dispatches (February 7, 2025) ["There are many pleasures for students of the Catholic Church in Conclave—which recently received eight Oscar nominations—from the glimpses behind the doors of the uber-secretive papal conclave itself to the spot-on portrayal of the lush-austere pageantry of an institution that is some eight centuries older than the British monarchy. But none is more resonant than the portrait it paints of the silent, submissive nuns of the Vatican, a subtle indictment of how the church views women that adds weight to the movie’s surprise ending."]

West, Stephen. "Framing our Being in a completely different way (Heidegger)." Philosophize This! #214 (October 21, 2024) ["... Heidegger's critique of metaphysics and the traditional subject-object framing in philosophy. How multiple framings are necessary for a fuller picture of our being. His challenge to thinkers like Nietzsche and Descartes. Dasein, the limitations of objectivity. Phenomenology as an alternative focusing on the importance of lived experience. And his ideas on temporality and death as a horizon of our being."]

Promiscuous Knowledge - Music Mix #41

 Throwing Muses; D'angelo; Magdalena Bay; Grimes; Lenny Kravitz; Louis Cole; Lightning Bug; OK Go; Franz Ferdinand; Guided by Voices; Suzzalo; WITCH; Samba the Great; Theresa Ng'ambi; Hannah Tembo; dj poolboi; Keith Mlevu; Paul Ngozi Family; Musi-O-Tunya; The Peace; Amanaz; The Hold Steady; Fugazi; Thin Lizzy; The White Stripes; The Jesus Lizard; Hot Chip; Rare Americans; Preoccupations; Primus; Saya Gray; Addults; Liminanas; Bobby Gillespie; Bertrand Belin; Pascal Comelade; Goat; Abronia; Morrison Graves; Lady Kazoo & the Bunnypalooza; Mama Sam and the Jam; Strange and the Familiars; Night Heron; Shotski; Panthervision; Santigold; Spank Rock; Panda Bear; Mdou Moctar; Darkside; Soccer Mommy; Yves Jarvis; Andy Bell; Dot Allison; Michael Rother

Promiscuous Knowledge - Music Mix #41

The Worst Person in the World (Norway: Joachim Trier, 2021)

 

“People talk about the death of cinema, and they talk about the death of the novel. The novel has reinvented itself and changed form and been experimental and, therefore, has survived. I think movies should be inspired by that — the spirit of the possibility of the dramaturgy not being one thing. The dramaturgy or the structure of your telling is up for grabs, and it’s personal.” – Joachim Trier, Seventh Row Louder than Bombs Interview Part 1

“How to show thinking in cinema, it’s something I’m really interested in. I get so pissed when people say, “Oh, thinking, that’s for the novel. Cinema is about the exterior”. I disagree. Film can be incredibly subjective.” – Joachim Trier, Louder Than Bombs Interview Part 2

 The Worst Person in the World (Norway: Joachim Trier, 2021: 128 mins)

"About Joachim Trier." The Seventh Row (Ongoing Archive)

Carrassco, Salvador. "Anatomy of a Breakup or Her Life to Fix: The Worst Person in the World." Senses of Cinema #103 (October 2022)

Gruder, Susannah. "The Worst Person in the World." Reverse Shot (February 3, 2022)

Kemp, Ella. "Cool World: Norway’s Capital Through the Eyes of the Oslo Trilogy." Cinemascope (March 27, 2022)

Lie, Anders Danielson, Renate Reinsve, and Joachim Trier. "The Worst Person in the World." Film at Lincoln Center #384 (February 2022) ["As proven in such exacting stories of lives on the edge as Reprise and Oslo, August 31, Norwegian director Joachim Trier is singularly adept at giving an invigorating modern twist to classically constructed character portraits. Trier catapults the viewer into the world of his most spellbinding protagonist yet: Julie, played by Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve, who’s the magnetic center of nearly every scene. After dropping out of pre-med, Julie must find new professional and romantic avenues as she navigates her late-twenties, juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie and engaging newcomer Herbert Nordrum). Fluidly told in 12 discrete chapters, Trier’s film elegantly depicts the precarity of identity and the mutability of happiness in our runaway contemporary world."]

O'Malley, Sheila. "The Worst Person in the World: Lost and Found." Current (June 28, 2022) ["Idleness” is a grave sin, perhaps the gravest, in a world where the answer to “What do you do?” is more important than the answer to “How are you?” Whatever it is that you “do” must fit into the appropriate container for your age and life phase. Everyone agrees you need ambition, goals, a plan. But what happens if your timeline doesn’t match up with expectations? What if you want to keep your options open? What if you are baffled at the idea of having to make a choice and stick to it for all time? What if you legitimately do not know what you want? Julie (Renate Reinsve), the woman on the cusp of thirty who stumbles and cavorts her way through Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021), experiences all these questions, sometimes simultaneously. Saying “I don’t know”—as she often does—is seen as fickle, indecisive, but maybe Julie’s idleness is creating a clear enough surface for the “submerged truth” that Virginia Woolf describes, however eccentric it may be, to rise. It’s the rare film that allows a character to just be, loosing her from the constraints of plot, giving her a huge playground—here, the city of Oslo—in which to think, question, make mistakes, behave poorly, course-correct, all while having no idea what she’s doing or why."]

Pugh, Lindsay. "Renate Reinsve: ‘I wanted her to be strong in the chaos.'" Seventh Row (January 19, 2022)

Power, Nina, et al. "The Worst Person in the World." The Lack (October 25, 2023) 

Staab, Laura. "The End Of Joachim Trier’s 'Oslo Trilogy'; The End Of Art And Community." Another Gaze (March 28, 2022)

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #10

The waterfall has been imagined as a stream feeding the dark realms of the underworld and circling up to issue again from craggy heights. It has suggested the descent of the immutable into an ever-dividing stream that defies capture, cannot be contained, is eternal movement, eternal change, generating life and death. One can be broken in the tonnage of the waters; "Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts all your waves and billows have gone over me," cries the Psalmist to his god. In Chinese tradition, the waterfall represents the autumnal, yin aspect of the dragon's water power; it plunges into the water, its claws are the spouts of foam.
    Human beings have learned to exploit the waterfall's hydroelectric power in order to drive technology, but in so doing they destroy the waterfall and devastate the land to which it belongs and contributes ecologically. The waterfall itself is an emblem of balance. Chinese landscape paintings portray the waterfall in contrast to the upward movement of the rock face over which it descends, and the dynamic movement of its rushing waters with the stillness of the rock (48). -  The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (Taschen, 2010) 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Lewison, Rebecca. "Hippopotomology (Hippos)." Ologies (February 5, 2025) ["Do they sweat blood? Will one kill you? What are cocaine hippos? Is Moo Deng… okay? Actual real life Hippopotomologist Dr. Rebecca Lewison explains how hippos have some of the best – and worst – PR. We chat about pet hippos, subspecies, daily diets, the current state of hippo conservation, the absolute chaotic affection we have for pygmy hippos, their role as ecosystem engineers, what’s up with their nostrils, and how to keep a hippo in your pocket."]

McKay, Adam. "How Don't Look Up Explains Our Times." Current Affairs #367 (February 8, 2025) ["Adam McKay is a writer and film director who has made some of the most successful comedy films of our century, including Anchorman (No. 6 on Time Out's top 100 comedy films of all time), Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys. In the last decade, his more dramatic and political films like Vice and The Big Short have attracted critical acclaim and been nominated for multiple Academy Awards. He joins us today to discuss the film he released in 2021, Don't Look Up, a satirical look at the climate catastrophe that uses the analogy of an approaching deadly comet to expose how the media, corporations, and the political system are incapable of addressing a major crisis. When Don't Look Up came out, it quickly became one of the most popular movies in Netflix's history, but many critics assailed it as "heavy-handed." In Current Affairs, Nathan wrote an article arguing that these critics were missing much of the penetrating leftist analysis that makes the film a remarkably astute piece of satirical fiction."]

Mulainathan, Sendhil. "Can AI Even Be Regulated?" Capitalisn't (February 13, 2025) ["This week, Elon Musk—amidst his other duties of gutting United States federal government agencies as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)—announced a hostile bid alongside a consortium of buyers to purchase control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vehemently replied that his company is not for sale. The artificial intelligence landscape is shifting rapidly. The week prior, American tech stocks plummeted in response to claims from Chinese company DeepSeek AI that its model had matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost. Days before that, President Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank would partner on an infrastructure project to power AI in the U.S. with an initial $100 billion investment. Altman himself is trying to pull off a much-touted plan to convert the nonprofit OpenAI into a for-profit entity, a development at the heart of his spat with Musk, who co-founded the startup. Bethany and Luigi discuss the implications of this changing landscape by reflecting on a prior Capitalisn’t conversation with Luigi’s former colleague Sendhil Mullainathan (now at MIT), who forecasted over a year ago that there would be no barriers to entry in AI. Does DeepSeek’s success prove him right? How does the U.S. government’s swift move to ban DeepSeek from government devices reflect how we should weigh national interests at the risk of hindering innovation and competition? Musk has the ear of Trump and a history of animosity with Altman over the direction of OpenAI. Does Musk’s proposed hostile takeover signal that personal interests and relationships with American leadership will determine how AI develops in the U.S. from here on out? What does regulating AI in the collective interest look like, and can we escape a future where technology is consolidated in the hands of the wealthy few when billions of dollars in capital are required for its progress?"]

Nussbaum, Martha C. Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. Simon & Schuster, 2023. ["A “brilliant” (Chicago Review of Books), “elegantly written, and compelling” (National Review) new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day. The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world’s most renowned philosophers and humanists, Martha C. Nussbaum, provides “the most important book on animal ethics written to date” (Thomas I. White, author of In Defense of Dolphins). From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before."]

 Proctor, Robert. "Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Updated Encore." Ologies (February 12, 2025) ["Yes, there is an -ology for that. And yes, we’re airing this episode -– with a ton of 2025 updates -– because it’s never felt more relevant. Dr. Robert Proctor is a Stanford professor of the History of Science and co-edited the book “Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance,” having coined the word 30 years ago. We chat about everything from tobacco marketing, to the sugar lobby, to racial injustice, horse vision, the psychology of the Flat Earther movement, which countries have the highest rates of climate denial, empathy, how to navigate difficult conversations and why it's critical to dismantle the systems of willful ignorance, starting locally. Dr. Robert Proctor’s book: "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance" His 2021 book: Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted."]

Rubsam, Robert. "The Empire of Ugliness." Liberties (December 2024) [This is a review of the film Red Rooms: "So what are we doing here, really? One cannot imbibe such diverse, daily horrors and not be made coarser. It has been argued that this presentation dulls us to violent images by making them seem less real, but I think we are experiencing something more akin to a levelling, in which images of violence are made to seem just as banal as all the other images or thoughts we see online, both disarming the violence and infecting the mundane with a violent energy, a tincturing which degrades both at the same time. ... We can see these forces everywhere, in the fossil fuel CEOs who consciously destroy our planet, the tech VC billionaires who commit their fortunes to end democracy, the president-elect who promises to make public life hell for all manner of minorities. These are vicious, vindictive people, obsessed with their IQs, who preen over their supposed genetic superiority, yet must purchase a prominence they cannot earn. Leys found them not only in the realm of aesthetics, but even more in ethics: “The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature.” They can destroy whatever is good and beautiful in society, can attack it in others, can push their technologies to the edge, yet they are totally incapable of producing anything but ugliness themselves. It should disturb us that so many identify with and celebrate them. Their empire is everywhere, and we are all stakeholders."]

Sanchez, Lily. "US Transit is Abysmal and Unacceptable." Current Affairs (February 7, 2025) ["America’s air safety crisis, our automobile-congested cities, and our lack of high-speed rail and other options make getting places a real (and dangerous) pain in the ass. We desperately need safe, efficient, and enjoyable public transit."]

Skopic, Alex. "Who Are the Real Vampires in ‘Nosferatu’?" Current Affairs (January 18, 2025) ["Eggers isn’t the first filmmaker to revisit the silent Nosferatu. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 with Klaus Kinski in the lead role, and the prolific character actor Doug Jones starred in a low-budget independent version in 2023. There’s also Shadow of the Vampire, the metafictional horror movie from 2000 that imagines an actual monster stalking Murnau’s set. But more than any previous retelling, Eggers’s Nosferatu holds fascinating—and disturbing—historic echoes of the German original. Murnau and his crew made their silent film in the wake of the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918-19, as fascism was beginning to emerge as a hideous threat across Europe. More than a century later, Eggers made his version as the COVID pandemic continues to ravage the planet, and as neo-fascism is emerging in the United States and elsewhere. As a result of their historical context, both films are preoccupied with themes of plague and contagion, and with their respective societies’ fears about race and immigration. They can be seen as violently xenophobic films, portraying Count Orlok as an immigrant figure who is also a demonic spreader of plague and decay and has to be exterminated by the protagonists. But that would be a superficial reading, and ultimately a flawed one. Dig a little deeper into the vampire’s tomb, and you begin to realize that it’s not the ethnic or cultural other that’s really the looming threat at Nosferatu’s heart. It’s the economic elite."]

Stiglitz, Joseph. "Visions of a New Progressive Capitalism." Capitalisn't  (June 24, 2024) ["In the last 60 years, few economists have contributed more to exposing the failures of capitalism than Joseph Stiglitz. Formerly the chief economist of the World Bank and chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for his work showing that the possibility of having different information can lead to inefficient market outcomes. On this episode of Capitalisn't, Stiglitz joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his latest book, "The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society" (W.W. Norton, 2024). The book, as Bethany describes it, is a "full frontal attack on neoliberalism" that provides a prospective roadmap towards a more progressive form of capitalism. Together, the three discuss the role of mis- and disinformation in producing market inefficiencies, the importance of regulation, institutional accountability, and collective action in correcting market failures, and the role of neoliberalism in today's global populist uprising. In the process, they underscore the close link between economic and political freedom."]

Szaniawski, Jeremi. "Trick or Treat? Genre Trouble." Senses of Cinema #112 (January 2025) ["Concurrently, we have seen enough horror films to know that they are one of the best places to investigate mild societal shifts before they occur in full swing in mainstream culture. And this holds true even as they have vastly abandoned the ghetto of independent production and become reified objects of the film industry in their own right, at least as far as their modes of production and distribution are concerned. So it is that, in the fall of 2024, besides the grotesque spectacle of the US presidential election, which may constitute its darkest comedy, and the wars and invasions unfolding in various corners of the globe, marked by mind-boggling numbers of civilian casualties (unarguably, the most intolerable horror of all) something is afoot. The return of the thriller/horror genre, is at one and the same time some sort of conclusion that yet also constitutes a new beginning. Not that any of these films, taken individually, is exceptional: rather, they coalesce into an interesting whole, and they are, each in their own way, compelling. "]

Judas and the Black Messiah (USA: Shaka King, 2021)

 

 Judas and the Black Messiah (USA: Shaka King, 2021: 126 mins)

Bourland, Ian. "Judas and the Black Messiah: Captures the Complexities of Revolutionary Death." Frieze (February 16, 2021)

Eggert, Brian. "Judas and the Black Messiah." Deep Focus Review (February 18, 2021)

Fishback, Dominique, et al. "A Conversation About Judas and the Black Messiah." TIFF Originals (March 7, 2021)

Francis, Leslie. "Judas and the Black Messiah." Philoso?hy Talk (March 8, 2021)

Henderson, Odie. "Judas and the Black Messiah." Roger Ebert (February 12, 2021)

Jones, Okla. "Judas and the Black Messiah Puts a Nostalgic Lens On a Modern-Day Struggle." Consequence Film (February 12, 2021)

"Judas and the Black Panther: Education Guide." Participant Media, 2021.

"Judas and the Black Messiah, Explained - Self-Preservation Won't Save You." The Take (Posted on Youtube 2021)

King, Shaka. "Judas and the Black Messiah: Director Shaka King on Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers & COINTELPRO." Democracy Now (February 1, 2021) ["A highly anticipated new feature film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” tells the story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O’Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated the Illinois Black Panther Party to collect information that ultimately led to Hampton’s killing in 1969 by law enforcement officers. The film is premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and stars Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton, LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal and Martin Sheen as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Shaka King, the film’s director and co-writer, says focusing on Hampton and O’Neal was a way “to make 'The Departed' inside the world of COINTELPRO,” referring to the decades-long illegal FBI program to undermine Black and radical political organizations. “I just thought that that was a very clever vessel and intelligent way to Trojan-horse a Fred Hampton biopic.”"]

---. "On the Making of Judas and the Black Messiah." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (February 18, 2021) ["This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Shaka King, co-writer, producer, and director of Judas and the Black Messiah, moderated by Eugene Hernandez, Film at Lincoln Center’s Deputy Executive Director of Programs. Fred Hampton, a young, charismatic activist, becomes Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party — putting him directly in the crosshairs of the government, the FBI, and the Chicago Police. But to destroy the revolution, the authorities are going to need a man on the inside, enter William O’Neal. Judas and the Black Messiah stars Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback, Ashton Sanders, and Martin Sheen."]

McGovern, Joe. "Judas and the Black Panther Cinematographer on Why He Shot Black Panther and FBI Scenes in Different Colors." The Wrap (February 10, 2021)

Murch, Donna, et al.  "The Real Black Panthers." Throughline (April 15, 2021) ["The Black Panther Party's battles for social justice and economic equality are the centerpiece of the Oscar-nominated film 'Judas and The Black Messiah.' In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panther Party "without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country." And with that declaration he used United States federal law enforcement to wage war on the group. But why did Hoover's FBI target the Black Panther Party more severely than any other Black power organization? Historian Donna Murch says the answer lies in the Panthers' political agenda and a strategy that challenged the very foundations of American society."]

Scott, A.O. "Judas and the Black Messiah: I Was a Panther for the F.B.I." The New York Times (April 25, 2021)

Smith, Kaitlin. "The Complexity of Black Agency in Judas and the Black Messiah." Facing Today (February 19, 2021)

Wilkinson, Alissa, et al. "How Best Picture nominee Judas and the Black Messiah questions the meaning of freedom." Vox (April 22, 2021)

Robert N. Proctor: History of Science/Ignorance & Knowledge/Medicine/Rhetoric (Shooting Azimuths)

Kournay, Janet A. and Martin Carrier. Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted. MIT Press, 2020. ["An introduction to the new area of ignorance studies that examines how science produces ignorance—both actively and passively, intentionally and unintentionally. We may think of science as our foremost producer of knowledge, but for the past decade, science has also been studied as an important source of ignorance. The historian of science Robert Proctor has coined the term agnotology to refer to the study of ignorance, and much of the ignorance studied in this new area is produced by science. Whether an active or passive construct, intended or unintended, this ignorance is, in Proctor's words, “made, maintained, and manipulated” by science. This volume examines forms of scientific ignorance and their consequences. A dialogue between Proctor and Peter Galison offers historical context, presenting the concerns and motivations of pioneers in the field. Essays by leading historians and philosophers of science examine the active construction of ignorance by biased design and interpretation of experiments and empirical studies, as seen in the “false advertising” by climate change deniers; the “virtuous” construction of ignorance—for example, by curtailing research on race- and gender-related cognitive differences; and ignorance as the unintended by-product of choices made in the research process, when rules, incentives, and methods encourage an emphasis on the beneficial and commercial effects of industrial chemicals, and when certain concepts and even certain groups' interests are inaccessible in a given conceptual framework."]

Cross, Gary S. and Robert N. Proctor. Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire. University of Chicago Press, 2014. ["From the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned, condensed, and distilled, unleashing new and intensified surges of pleasure, delight, thrill—and addiction. In Packaged Pleasures, Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor delve into an uncharted chapter of American history, shedding new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience. In the space of only a few decades, junk foods, cigarettes, movies, recorded sound, and thrill rides brought about a revolution in what it means to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. New techniques of boxing, labeling, and tubing gave consumers virtually unlimited access to pleasures they could simply unwrap and enjoy. Manufacturers generated a seemingly endless stream of sugar-filled, high-fat foods that were delicious but detrimental to health. Mechanically rolled cigarettes entered the market and quickly addicted millions. And many other packaged pleasures dulled or displaced natural and social delights. Yet many of these same new technologies also offered convenient and effective medicines, unprecedented opportunities to enjoy music and the visual arts, and more hygienic, varied, and nutritious food and drink. For better or for worse, sensation became mechanized, commercialized, and, to a large extent, democratized by being made cheap and accessible. Cross and Proctor have delivered an ingeniously constructed history of consumerism and consumer technology that will make us all rethink some of our favorite things."]

Proctor, Robert N. "Agnotology (WILLFUL IGNORANCE) Updated Encore." Ologies (February 12, 2025) ["Yes, there is an -ology for that. And yes, we’re airing this episode -– with a ton of 2025 updates -– because it’s never felt more relevant. Dr. Robert Proctor is a Stanford professor of the History of Science and co-edited the book “Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance,” having coined the word 30 years ago. We chat about everything from tobacco marketing, to the sugar lobby, to racial injustice, horse vision, the psychology of the Flat Earther movement, which countries have the highest rates of climate denial, empathy, how to navigate difficult conversations and why it's critical to dismantle the systems of willful ignorance, starting locally. Dr. Robert Proctor’s book: "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance" His 2021 book: Science and the Production of Ignorance: When the Quest for Knowledge Is Thwarted."]

---. "Fisher in the 21st Century." Gonville and Caius College (Posted on Youtube: 2024) ["“Why did Big Tobacco love (and fund) eugenicists like R.A. Fisher?” Robert Proctor (via Zoom), Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Medicine, Department of History, Stanford University. In 1957, Sir Ronald ridiculed the idea of cigarettes causing cancer as “a catastrophic and conspicuous howler.” Cigarette makers loved his “itch in the lung hypothesis,” the idea that cancer gives its victims an “itch” that only smoking can scratch, confounding cause and effect. Fisher became a recruiter for the industry, and Big Nicotine ended up funding thousands of scholars, including at least 25 who went on to win the Nobel Prize. Here we explore the scope of this deadly collaboration, focusing on why eugenicists were so willing to shill for the industry."]

---. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press, 2012. ["The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes."]

---. "NAZI Science and Ideology."  Lex Fridman Podcast (March 6, 2022) [Michael Benton: This should actually be titled "Science and Ideology" as it is a wide-ranging discussion, and the NAZI application of science is only an initial jumping off point. Very important as we see mindless rejection "and" acceptance of science become the polarized standards of society going into and coming out of the COVID pandemic. I know a lot of people that will go nuts if I say we shouldn't just say "accept the science" (even knowing full well that I am pro-science), I believe we need to ask questions about practices & consequences and think like scientists realizing that science changes over time. "Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford University"]

---. The NAZI War on Cancer. Princeton University Press, 2000. ["Collaboration in the Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The “euthanasia” of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of “the unfit.” Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler’s warped quest to create a German master race. Robert Proctor recently made the explosive discovery, however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling, Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores the controversial and troubling questions that such findings raise: Were the Nazis more complex morally than we thought? Can good science come from an evil regime? What might this reveal about health activism in our own society? Proctor argues that we must view Hitler’s Germany more subtly than we have in the past. But he also concludes that the Nazis’ forward-looking health activism ultimately came from the same twisted root as their medical crimes: the ideal of a sanitary racial utopia reserved exclusively for pure and healthy Germans. Author of an earlier groundbreaking work on Nazi medical horrors, Proctor began this book after discovering documents showing that the Nazis conducted the most aggressive antismoking campaign in modern history. Further research revealed that Hitler’s government passed a wide range of public health measures, including restrictions on asbestos, radiation, pesticides, and food dyes. Nazi health officials introduced strict occupational health and safety standards, and promoted such foods as whole-grain bread and soybeans. These policies went hand in hand with health propaganda that, for example, idealized the Führer’s body and his nonsmoking, vegetarian lifestyle. Proctor shows that cancer also became an important social metaphor, as the Nazis portrayed Jews and other “enemies of the Volk” as tumors that must be eliminated from the German body politic. This is a disturbing and profoundly important book. It is only by appreciating the connections between the “normal” and the “monstrous” aspects of Nazi science and policy, Proctor reveals, that we can fully understand not just the horror of fascism, but also its deep and seductive appeal even to otherwise right-thinking Germans."]

Procter, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger, eds.  Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press, 2008. ["What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible."]

ENG 102 2025: Resources Archive #9

Beaver, David and Jason Stanley. "Attunements in Political Communication." (Excerpted from The Politics of Language. Princeton University Press, 2023: 66-68) ["In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualizing the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language—from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality. At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest."]

Dorian, M.J. "Salvador Dali (Saint of Delusion)." Creative Codex #7 (July 3, 2019) ["Salvador Dali is one of the most successful artists of all time. Join us as we find the origin of his unmistakable style, discover the secret to his creative process, and unravel the lies of the enigmatic: Dali."]

Eisinger, Jesse, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel. "The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax." Pro Publica (June 8, 2021) ["ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing."]

Frank, Thomas. "Why Democrats Fear Populism (and Keep Losing)." Current Affairs (January 31, 2025) ["Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures. “The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.” — Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal.]

Haiven, Max, et al. "Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Imagination." Darts and Letters (October 11, 2023) ["This episode of Darts and Letters examines the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing. There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics, exemplified by the enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and others. However, this misses autonomous and anarchist-inflected (and sometimes, explicitly anarchist) social movements that have brought enormous energy, and enormous change–from the movement for black lives, to organizing for Indigenous sovereignty, and so much more. In this episode, we look at the Kurdish movement, and mutual aid experiments across North America. First, we look at the work of the late libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin broke with Marxism, and later anarchism, and eventually developed an idiosyncratic ecological and revolutionary theory that said radical democracy could be achieved at the municipal level. This Vermont-based theorist has been enormously influential, including in an area formerly known as Rojava. There, the Kurdish people are making these ideas their own, and developing a radical feminist democracy–while fighting to survive. We speak with Elif Genc about these ideas, and about how the Kurdish diaspora implements them within Canada. Next, what is mutual aid? Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factory of Evolution (1902) examines how cooperation and reciprocity are core to nature. To anarchists, this should be generalized to a radical political program, and a radically new way of living. Darts and Letters producer Marc Apollonio speaks to Payton McDonald about how the theory and practice of mutual aid drives many social movements across North America. Payton is co-directing a four-part documentary series called the Elements of Mutual Aid: Experiments Towards Liberation. Finally, how do social movement scholars understand (or misunderstand) autonomous social movements? There’s a tendency to dismiss movements that do not make clear tangible demands, and deliver pragmatic policy victories (see: Occupy). However, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish say that this misses something key to radical social movements: their radical imagination. These movements do not want to just improve this system, they want to imagine, and create (or prefigure), a different system. We discuss their book the Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, the blind spots of social movement theory, and whether there might be a new style of organizing emerging that is somewhere between the the statist and the anti-statist."]

Hall, Anna. "In the Shadow of 'Citizens United.'" Sojourners (January 27, 2014) ["Last week marked the fourth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a 5-4 ruling, the court ruled that corporations are entitled to the same free speech rights as individual humans as guaranteed under the First Amendment. The political repercussions of Citizens United include the rise of “Super PACs” — political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, independent of direct campaign contributions, to influence politics. The power yielded to such corporations, as well as indiscriminate spending allowance, has deleterious effects upon our democracy."]

Higgins, Eoin. "The Tech Oligarchy's Campaign Against the Media." Tech Won't Save Us (February 13, 2024) ["Paris Marx is joined by Eoin Higgins to discuss how tech billionaires set out to change the media ecosystem and made it profitable for influential voices to shift to the political right. Eoin Higgins is a journalist and the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left."]

Hirshman, Dan and Dirk Philipsen. "Simon Kuznets and the Invention of the Economy: On the GDP and its Alternatives." Darts and Letters (October 27, 2024) ["Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values, interests, ideologies, and petty bureaucratic politics. In Cited Podcast’s new mini-series, the Use and Abuse of Economic Expertise, we tell the hidden stories of the economic ideas that shape our world. For future episodes of our series, and a full list of credits, visit our series page. On episode one, we begin at the beginning: the invention of the modern economy, or at least the idea of the economy. It starts with one measure: the GDP, or gross domestic product. It’s a measure that comes to define what we mean by ‘the economy.’ Before GDP, we did not really speak in those terms. Cited producer Alec Opperman talks to sociologist Dan Hirshman, who brings the story of the man who pioneered the GDP, Simon Kuznets. Yet, the GDP was not the measure the Kuznets hoped it would be. It’s a story that reveals the surprisingly contentious politics of counting things up. Plus, what about alternatives to GDP? The Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Green GDP, and so on. These measures are said to be more progressive, as they often capture things we value (like, care work for instance), and subtracting out things we could use less off (like, environmental degradation). Scholars and policy wonks have been raging about these types of measures for decades, but they have not taken off. Why? Economic historian Dirk Philipsen, author of The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton UP, 2017), talks to Alec about why a good number alone is never enough to change the world."]

Jacobson, Lisa Sheryl. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition." New Books in History (December 25, 2024) ["In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024), alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Dr. Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens."]

Kerr, Deborah, et al. "Donald Trump is Rewriting the Past. Plus, the Christian Groups Vying for Political Power." On the Media (February 14, 2025) ["The new administration is purging data from government websites and databases, such as the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency. On this week's On the Media, a historian shares the political playbook for rewriting the past in order to control the future. Plus, meet the different Christian groups vying for power at the White House."]