"Johfra Bosschart was a Dutch painter who described his own works as 'Surrealism based on studies of psychology, religion, the Bible, astrology, antiquity, magic, witchcraft, mythology and occultism.' He was the founder of the now defunct Meta-Realist group." - source: The Door of Perception
Symbol Reader provides an interpretation-reading of his painting "Virgo" below. His series on the zodiac signs was produced between 1974 and 1975:
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"One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15–24. Depression kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the US. Drug overdoses kill 70,000 in the USA. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 25–50 million people in the US. What is going on? The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr. Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.
“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.”
— Gabor Maté
In The Wisdom of Trauma, we travel alongside bestselling author and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Gabor Maté to explore why Western society is facing such epidemics.
This is a journey alongside a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma, and society.
“Trauma is not what happens to you.
Trauma is what happens inside you,
as a result of what happens to you.”
— Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul."
“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.”
— Gabor Maté
In The Wisdom of Trauma, we travel alongside bestselling author and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Gabor Maté to explore why Western society is facing such epidemics.
This is a journey alongside a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma, and society.
“Trauma is not what happens to you.
Trauma is what happens inside you,
as a result of what happens to you.”
— Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul."
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Bayne, Tim. "Exploring the Boundaries of Consciousness." NOEMA (July 25, 2024) ["A journey into the mystical hillsides of Nepal in search of answers to questions about which beings we can call conscious."]
Blight, David W. "Dreams of Our Nation." The New York Review of Books (June 11, 2026) ["Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity. Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity. These subjects—many of them now under attack by Trumpist censors—have greatly enriched our understanding of the United States. But is there not still reason to study how Americans, from within their infinite chorus of difference and pluralism, have understood their nation as a whole? If historians don’t, advocates of “patriotic” history will do that work for us. Two distinguished American historians, Edward Ayers and Richard Slotkin, have written quite different books that bring the nation back into full focus. In American Visions, Ayers, one of our greatest scholars of the South and the Civil War, argues that to understand this nation readers must search for its roots in the period from 1800 to 1860, a time of enormous growth, expansion, and conquest alongside a surging slave society that put the entire country in peril. In A Great Disorder, Slotkin, our most prolific scholar of national myth, examines the concepts that, he contends, Americans have, knowingly or not, used to understand themselves and act in the world, often violently. Both books were written before the 2024 election, yet they have much to tell us about our current crisis of severe polarization as well as the assaults on the historical professions and cultural institutions by the Trump administration."]
Cole, David. "The Second Redemption." The New York Review of Books (June 11, 2026) ["The Voting Rights Act is dead. The law, very likely the most consequential civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed, died on April 29, 2026. It was not a natural death. Congress did not repeal it, having concluded, for example, that it was no longer needed. On the contrary, Congress has reauthorized the statute four times since its initial passage in 1965, and has only expanded, not narrowed its scope. The perpetrator was instead the Supreme Court—or, more accurately, its six Republican-appointed members. In a deeply disingenuous decision, Justice Samuel Alito claimed only to be “updating” the act. In fact the Court radically rewrote the law to eliminate the protections it has long secured for minority voters throughout the nation. The decision in Louisiana v. Callais may be the Roberts Court’s most radical and far-reaching yet, rivaled only by the 2022 elimination of the right to abortion. It will almost certainly usher in a bleaching of the nation’s legislative bodies—federal, state, and local—unlike anything this country has seen since the “Redemption” of 1873–1877 ended Reconstruction and returned white supremacists to power throughout the South. In theory Congress can correct the Court’s egregious error, because it purports to merely be interpreting Congress’s statute. Indeed, Congress has done so before. If Democrats take Congress and the presidency in 2028, restoring the Voting Rights Act should be at the top of their agenda. But the very gerrymandering the decision invites will make getting there more difficult than ever, as Republicans in red states will in the meantime be free to cement their partisan advantage by disenfranchising black voters with impunity."]
Enfield, Nick. "What is Language For?" Many Minds (April 13, 2022) ["Today’s show takes on a disarmingly simple question: What is language for? As in, why do we say things to each other? What do words do for us? Why do our languages label some aspects of the world, but not others? My guest today is Dr. Nick Enfield. He’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Nick has authored or edited more than a dozen books on different aspects of human language and communication—books on word meaning, gesture, conversation, social interaction, the languages of Southeast Asia, and more. His latest book, just published by MIT press, is titled Language vs Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists. In it, Nick argues that language is pretty awful at capturing reality—but actually that’s fine, because capturing reality isn’t the primary reason we use it. The real reason, in his view, is to coordinate with others. In this conversation, Nick and I flesh out this way of thinking about language as foremost a social coordination tool. Along the way, we talk about the two “reductions” that happen as brute reality gets transmuted into words. We discuss the economist Thomas Schelling and so-called Schelling maps. We talk about color words and plant names, salt and spoons, the insights of Benjamin Lee Whorf, the idea of “verbal overshadowing,” and a bunch of other phenomena and thinkers. As I say in the interview, Nick has one of the most expansive views of human language of anyone I know. He draws on anthropology, economics, primatology, developmental psychology, not to mention decades of his own fieldwork in Laos. That expansive—one might say, “many minded”—perspective is on full display here."]
"Get in the Cage." Post 45 (Special Issue on Nicolas Cage: 2021) ["Who is Nicolas Cage? The name itself is enough to conjure a whole host of associations not easily reconciled. There's the star of beloved indies like Raising Arizona (1987) and Wild at Heart (1990), the action hero of Con Air (1997) and National Treasure (2004), and the Oscar-winning/nominated performer in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Adaptation (2002). There's Nicolas Kim Coppola, the heir of cinematic royalty hiding in plain sight; there's the money-crazed Cage of absurd opulence and subsequent financial meltdown; and, perhaps more than anything, there are the memes. Regardless of how many Cage films you've watched, you've almost certainly encountered him as a .gif, a YouTube supercut, or in a clip like the famous scene from The Wicker Man (2006), in which Cage screams "Not the bees! Not the bees!" as he is tortured to death by the white-clad cult that walked so Midsommar's could run."]
Gibney, Alex, et al. "On Elon Musk Documentary." Reuters (September 8, 2026) ["Documentarist Alex Gibney speaks at a press conference for his new Elon Musk documentary ahead of its Venice Film Festival premiere."]
Gillan, Zach. "Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism." The Ancillary Review (May 2, 2025) ["It boils down, I think, to two axioms: 1) To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root. 2) To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.) The first step toward envisioning a better world is recognizing what is wrong with this one. Weird fiction prepares us for the process of seeing society’s dominant ideology not only as Wrong—an unsettled, disturbing way of interpreting and interacting with the world—but also as irreal, as fictional. It gives us a metaphor—dark, disturbing, alarming—for the theory and structure of thought that precedes the action of praxis, and engage in active resistance. This action is key: not to fall into the nihilistic madness of the Lovecraftian victim or the passivity of the status quo. Weird fiction must prepare us not to surrender to or deny the horrors of the world, but to read and understand them. Before it was killed and messily reanimated as a boogieman by the Right, this is what Black activists meant by “woke”—the injunction to have your eyes open and consciousness aware of the horrific structures underlying daily life. Weird fiction is a useful metaphor for this awakening; we must, in other words, read the social world in which we live as a work of weird fiction. "]
Goldin, Hana Lee. "A Field Guide to Media Ownership." Card Catalog (September 8, 2026) ["Media is not a neutral stream of information; it is made by people and institutions whose priorities can influence what they publish. Tracing who is behind a source shows where those priorities may come from and gives us a clearer basis for deciding how much to rely on it. It turns the question from simply “Is this true?” to “Who made this, and what conditions may have influenced how it reached me?”"]
Griffiths, David. "Queer Theory for Lichens." Undercurrents #19 (2015) ["The symbiotic view of life suggests that we are not individuals, and that we have never been individuals. While the traditional view of organisms (including humans) is that they are self-contained, discrete, and autonomous individuals, scientific research is increasingly suggesting that this is misleading; the view of organisms as individuals is perhaps no longer viable. This is illustrated in the symbiotic bacterial ancestry of the mitochondria in “human” cells, as well as in the contemporary symbiotic relationships that are at work in the human gut microbiota. Eating, digesting and living are impossible without our symbiotic relationships. The brief natural cultural history of lichens that I have offered illustrates these points and demonstrates that if life and nature are to be found anywhere, it is not autonomous individuals but the constitutive comminglings, involvements, and interconnected relationships that make up the ecological mesh."]
Hudson, David. "Alex Gibney's Musk." The Daily (September 16, 2026) ["It’s screening this month in Toronto and is slated for a theatrical release next month, but Paramount’s eventual takeover of Warner Bros. may lead to a dead end at HBO Max. “Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter,” noted Gibney on Sunday. “And his son David Ellison,” the current CEO of Paramount Skydance, “has shown he’ll twist whatever facts are at his disposal in order to please the Capo dei Capi who happens to be the President of the United States. So that is a deep concern. But so far, so good.” If the Ellisons turn out to be a roadblock, reviews will certainly not be. “If most of what [Gibney] presents here about Musk isn’t particularly new,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times, “there is a fearsome power to the way the director brings it all together. Musk isn’t just a pesky fixture in the news cycle. Gibney’s mega-portrait asks us to look at the sum of his actions and take him seriously as a threat to democracy.” “None of what we have seen and thought about Musk can fully ready us for what the filmmaker has done here,” writes Steven Zeitchik. Musk is “an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches—but [he] can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.”"]
Johnson, Adam and Nima Shirazi. "Hollywood & Anti-Muslim Racism (Part 1) - Action and Adventure Schlock." Citations Needed #113 (July 8, 2020) ["The United States and its close allies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing and occupying large sections of the so-called “Muslim world” for decades – drastically ramping up after the 9/11 attacks and seemingly with no end in sight. The U.S., like all empires, cannot operate a large, complex system premised on violence, meddling and subjugation without a moral pretext. This moral pretext, even before 9/11, was primarily about fighting a war on so-called “Terrorism” or “Islamic extremism” while allegedly promoting “stability,” “freedom” and “democracy.” Along with American news media’s constant fear-mongering over scary Muslims lurking in the shadows, a major pillar propping up this moral pretext is pop culture – namely the cultural products coming out of Hollywood. Our decades-long "War on Terror" would no doubt be much more difficult to sustain without a constant reminder from TV and film that, despite the fact that the average American is more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a terrorist attack, the threat of Islamic terrorism remains ever-present and existential, marked by an inevitable “clash of civilizations” devoid of context or any notion that the U.S. is a primary driver of violence across the globe. Over the course of three episodes, we'll be taking a look at how Hollywood’s television and studio film output helps prop up America’s military aggression in the Middle East, engages in both casual and explicit racism, strips conflicts of any historical or imperial context pushes the idea the only Good Muslim is a snitch or CIA agent, and generally leaves its audience angry and ill-informed. In this episode, we review Hollywood’s long history of anti-Muslim racism in both classic and campy action/adventure films and TV and how it both primed us for – and sustains – the never-ending and self-perpetuating "War on Terror.""]
Johnson, David. "The Anti-Guru: U.G. Krishnamurti and the End of Seeking." The Observing I (September 15, 2026) ["Self-improvement is a funny old thing because, on the face of it, it makes perfect sense. There are obviously things we can change about ourselves. If you keep losing your temper with people, maybe work on that. If you sleep four hours a night, live on caffeine and wonder why you feel dreadful, there are probably a few clues lying around. But it can creep. You fix one thing, notice another, read a book, learn a new term, start monitoring a few habits, and before you know it you’ve become both the employee and the deeply disappointed manager of your own personality. That’s the bit that interests me about U.G. Krishnamurti. Not because I think we should all stop trying to change. That gets silly very quickly. But because U.G. spent most of his life trying to become enlightened and eventually decided that the whole business of trying to become something was the problem. Which, after decades of spiritual practice, is quite an awkward conclusion to arrive at."]
Lifton, Robert Jay. "Malignant Normality." Dissent (Spring 2017) ["Extreme ideologues do much to create a malignant normality, which comes to pervade most institutions, including medical ones. Then ordinary people who work in those institutions adhere to that normality, often aided by bits and pieces of the extreme ideology. The prevailing normality can be decisive because it excludes alternatives and provides strong pressures for destructive behavior."]
Lim, Dennis. "The Before Trilogy: Time Regained." Current (March 1, 2017) ["Think of this as time travel.” So goes one of the great pickup lines in all of cinema, arriving mere minutes into Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and inaugurating a screen romance unlike any other. Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young Texan on a train in eastern Europe, has just struck up a conversation with Celine (Julie Delpy), a young Parisienne who’s heading home from a visit with her grandmother in Budapest. A strong mutual attraction is evident from their effortless banter, which darts from whimsical (Jesse riffs on his idea for a yearlong, real-time public-access cable experiment) to solemn (Celine reveals that she’s constantly terrified of death) to confessional (they share childhood memories and discuss the burden of parental expectations). When the train pulls in to Vienna, where Jesse will catch a flight home the next morning, he persuades Celine to hop off and continue talking as they explore the city. He pitches this as a way to forestall doubt: when her future self looks back, she won’t have to wonder if that interesting guy she once met on the train was a missed opportunity. The shifting meaning of a moment—as it is anticipated and then experienced, as it is remembered or misremembered, as it gains or loses luster in a year, a decade, or more—is the existential question that animates the story of Jesse and Celine, which has now played out over three films spanning nearly two decades. Before Sunrise depicts the charmed brief encounter of this bright, self-conscious, hyperverbal, sometimes maddening, mostly endearing pair; Before Sunset (2004) stages the rueful deferred reunion that characters and viewers alike long yearned for; and Before Midnight (2013) catches up with them on the cusp of middle-aged domesticity, in medias res, as they go about the business of living."]
Lupyan, Gary and Bill Thompson. "Lost in Translation." Many Minds (November 11, 2020) ["This episode takes on a timeless question: Do concepts differ from one language to the next, or are they basically the same? Maybe you think we already know the answer. You’ve probably heard of cases where one language labels a concept that other languages don’t—the German word schaudenfreude, or the Danish notion of hygge, or, my favorite, the Japan concept of tsundoku. These examples are fun and get a lot of attention, and they certainly make it clear that there’s at least some variation. But a more provocative possibility is that even everyday words that seem easy to translate—words for concepts like chair, beautiful, or walk—might actually differ considerably from one language to the next. Today I talk to Dr. Bill Thompson, a postdoc at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gary Lupyan, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology. Along with their co-author Sean Roberts, they published a paper this summer that looks at just this issue, at whether basic words have the same meanings across languages. The paper’s title is: “Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment.” We talk about the computational approach they use to quantify the similarity of word meanings. We consider their finding that certain kinds of concepts are more similar across languages than others. We discuss the role of culture in shaping concepts. And we talk a bit about why their paper caused something of a stir online. I found this to be a really thought-provoking conversation. It circles around one of the deepest questions we can ask about the human mind: Where do our concepts come from? Spoiler: we don’t settle the question once and for all here. But we do throw some light on it—perhaps."]
Luxenberg, Steve. "Separate and Unequal." On the Media (March 8, 2019) ["Throughout the 1800s, the question at the heart of nearly every political, cultural and academic conversation dealt in some capacity with whether Black Americans were eligible for full citizenship. Our collective understanding of 19th-century racial politics depends on the landmark civil rights legislation that came out of the era. One notorious decision was Plessy v. Ferguson, the case in which the Supreme Court confirmed the constitutionality of racial separation, helping to pave the way for nearly 60 years of Jim Crow laws. Though the decision was overturned by the 1954Brown v. Board of Education decision, the de facto segregation Plessy codified continues into the present. But at the time, Plessy wasn’t deemed newsworthy — at least not by the white-dominated, partisan press. To contextualize the road to Plessy, Bob spoke with Steve Luxenberg, author of the new book, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation."]
Scahill, Jeremy. "Jeremy Scahill Exposes Shocking Depravity In U.S. Iran School Bombing." Breaking Points (September 30, 2026) ["Ryan and Emily are joined by Jeremy Scahill to discuss the US bombing of the Minab girls school in Iran."]
Schlosser, Eric. "Fast Food Nation, Mystery Meat & Trump’s Dismantling of U.S. Food Safety System." Democracy Now (September 17, 2026) ["Amid growing concerns over food safety in the United States, President Donald Trump last month authorized the duty-free importation of 660 million pounds of cheap beef trimmings that will get mixed in with other cuts to make ground beef. Imported beef and pork were once labeled with their country of origin, but Congress voted in 2015 to end that requirement, so customers at the grocery store will have no way to identify this “mystery meat,” which is coming mostly from Brazil. President Trump’s proclamation in August came just a day after he met in the White House with Joesley Batista, whose family controls the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world. JBS is notorious for food safety violations and admitted in 2017 to bribing thousands of Brazilian officials for favorable treatment. “It smells like a pretty corrupt deal,” says investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. He says Trump’s move is “basically screwing over American ranchers,” and the imported beef is “some of the meat most likely to be contaminated.” Schlosser is author of the landmark book Fast Food Nation, published in 2001. He says that in the 25 years since then, the United States has developed “two food systems.” While affluent and well-educated people increasingly favor sustainable, organic foods and care deeply about how food is grown and consumed, working people and the poor are relegated to the “fast-food industrial system” of cheap, mass-produced food of dubious safety."]
Schnel, Alex. "The Savvy Cephalopod." Many Minds (January 20, 2021) ["Today we’ve got another “behind the paper” episode for you. In it, we’re talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, ‘How intelligent is a cephalopod?’ I’ve been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You’ve probably seen those videos of octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what’s really going on—cognitively—behind these behaviors. What’s happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess? This really is the core issue in Alex’s paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex’s studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it. I’ve been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It’s convinced me that we still have a ton to learn about—and probably from—these brainy, shape-shifting creatures."]
Seerval, Shanoor. "Limiting Abortion Access for American Women Impacts Health, Economic Security: An International Comparison." To the Point (January 12, 2023) ["In June, the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, changing America’s health care landscape. This triggered new and existing legislation in states seeking to restrict abortion, which will deepen already-existing inequities among states in terms of access to abortion, maternal health, and reproductive health services. These new laws will have a disproportionate impact on low-income women and women of color as a result of factors including an increased likelihood of being uninsured and decreased likelihood of having jobs with adequate wages or employer-based coverage. In this post, we examine how reproductive health care in the United States compares with care in other high-income countries to draw lessons for how U.S. policymakers could work to improve women’s health."]
Smalley, Gregory J. "Being John Malkovich (1999)." 366 Weird Movies (August 29, 2010) ["Synecdoche, New York may be Charlie Kaufman‘s weirdest script, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his most emotionally affecting, and Adaptation his cleverest, but he’s never written anything funnier than his debut, Being John Malkovich. From the moment Craig Schwartz steps onto the 7 1/2th floor, stooping so he doesn’t hit the ceiling, talks to executive liaison who believes his name is Juarez, interviews with the boss who insists he has a speech impediment, and watches the orientation video where an 19th century industrialist (who talks like a pirate) explains he built this floor for his short-statured wife so there would be one place on earth where her and her “accursed kind” could live in peace, Being John Malkovich demonstrates its devotion to deadpan absurdist yuks. Add in running jokes at the expense of puppeteers, a chimp undergoing psychoanalysis, the low comedy of John Malkovich being struck on the head by a beer can thrown from a passing vehicle, and about a dozen other crazed gags, and you have a movie that’s like what might happen if someone found a cache of old unused Monty Python sketches and miraculously crafted them into all into a coherent narrative."]
"The State of the Nation's Housing 2025." Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University (2025) ["In 2025, households and housing markets face an ever-more challenging environment. High home prices and elevated interest rates reduced homebuying to its lowest level since the mid-1990s. Increases in both insurance premiums and property taxes have heightened financial stress on homeowners and landlords. And, despite an abundance of new apartments, high rents have left more people than ever cost burdened, and have contributed to a sharp rise in homelessness. Meanwhile, unprecedented destruction from wildfires has further highlighted the growing threat to the housing stock from climate-related disasters. At the same time, federal housing support is lessening, creating uncertainty regarding the availability of crucial assistance programs. The looming possibility of an economic downturn is exacerbating the nation’s already-enormous housing challenges."]
West, Stephen. "Everything that connects us is slowly disappearing. - Byung Chul Han pt. 2." Philosophize This! #189 (October 3, 2023) ["This episode continues exploring the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, who argues that today’s society is not best represented by Orwell’s 1984 but by Huxley’s Brave New World, where people voluntarily embrace control through pleasure and self-optimization. Han claims that modern neoliberalism, with its slogans of authenticity and empowerment, actually dissolves community bonds, rituals, and shared narratives, leading to widespread narcissism, anxiety, and disconnection. What disappears, he says, is “constructive negativity”—the pauses, transitions, and moments of reflection that allow for deep understanding, real difference, and truth. As rituals vanish and information floods perception, Han sees society replacing meaningful communication with shallow noise, flattening culture and weakening democracy. In this world obsessed with transparency and efficiency, he suggests a radical antidote: be an “idiot”—someone who slows down, embraces uncertainty, and reconnects with the depth and discomfort that make life and love real." Further Reading: The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han (2015); Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han (2017); The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present by Byung-Chul Han (2020)]
