“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)
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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."]
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