"Robbery, butchery, and theft - they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace." - R.F. Kuang's Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators's Revolution (Audio edition: Harper Voyager, 2022)
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Anderson, Ellie and David Peña-Guzmán. "Treason." Overthink #155 (January 6, 2025) ["Do we ever have a duty to commit treason? In episode 155 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about “the crime of crimes.” They look at the emergence of this legal concept and its evolution over time, and discuss some of the most important historical cases involving treason: Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, and John Brown. Can we say that treason is always bad when America's founding itself depended on an act of treason? Who is capable of committing a treasonous act? And is treason ever morally permissible? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss how treason is seen in Hobbes’ political philosophy and whether we need to recover insurrection as a political possibility."]
Bächle, Thomas Christian and Jascha Bereis. "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons." New Books in Science, Technology, and Society (August 19, 2025) ["Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape power dynamics through their mere possibility. These systems epitomize what the editors call "the fluidity of violence"—warfare that dissolves traditional boundaries between human decision and machine action, between targeted strikes and algorithmic inevitability. Bareis and his contributors trace fascinating connections between fictional representations and military doctrine—how Terminator narratives influence Pentagon planning while actual weapons development feeds back into artistic imagination. The book wrestles with maintaining "meaningful human control" over systems designed to operate faster than human thought, a challenge that grows more urgent as militaries worldwide race toward greater autonomy. Each chapter reveals how thoroughly we need to rethink human-machine relationships in warfare, from the gendered coding of robot soldiers in film to the way AI imaginaries differ between Silicon Valley and New Delhi. Autonomous weapons force us to confront uncomfortable realities about agency, violence, and the increasingly blurred line between human judgment and algorithmic certainty."]
Campagna, Federico. "Myth, Nostalgia, and Liberation: Federico Campagna’s Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History." Lepht Hand (August 23, 2025) ["Can myth itself serve as a material force in struggles for liberation? Federico Campagna joins me to discuss how myth—too often dismissed as escapism or co-opted by reaction—can instead become a practice of imagination, solidarity, and survival. We look at myth’s place in anti-capitalist politics, its tension with materialism, and its role in resisting despair. What emerges is a vision of myth as a politics of possibility against history’s catastrophes."]
Engelland, Chad. "Amo, Ergo Cogito: A Philosopher on Love as a Way of Seeing." The MIT Press Reader (May 13, 2021) ["Love is a way of taking in the whole world as seen through the eyes of the beloved."]
Hughes, Chris. "Revealing the Secret Architects of Capitalism." Capitalisn't (July 10, 2025) ["After the 2008 financial crisis, and especially after the COVID pandemic of 2020, an increasing number of Americans are questioning the wisdom of unregulated markets and envisioning a more active role for the state. Scholars have coined a panoply of neologisms to capture this view of the political economy, including political scientist Steven Vogel’s “marketcraft.” The term indicates that the state not only lays the foundation for markets through the protection of the rule of law and property rights, but it also shapes market economies through policy interventions and regulatory institutions like the Federal Trade Commission. Chris Hughes’ new book, Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy, traces how governments led by both major parties have worked with the private sector since the country’s founding to intentionally and strategically shape markets. The narrative reveals how Adam Smith’s proverbial “invisible” hand has always been rather quite visible. Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook who left the company in 2007 to work for former President Barack Obama and is now completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Hughes joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the government’s historical role, both in success and failure, of marketcrafting to rebalance economic power and create fairer and more efficient markets. Their journey takes us from the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 in response to a series of banking failures to recent mass investment in the semiconductor industry. Together, they discuss how to stop marketcrafting from becoming a victim of the political process, how it is operationalized differently in times of normalcy versus times of crisis, and how it must navigate the limits of individual and institutional power. Finally, they also discuss whether it is truly possible to craft markets in advance or only to correct market flaws after a crisis, with Hughes’ own prior stomping grounds at Facebook as their case study."]
Klippenstein, Ken. "Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism 'Indicators.'" Substack (September 27, 2025) ["Trump has signed NSPM-7, a national security directive vastly expanding federal powers against “domestic terrorism,” allowing agencies including the Department of Justice, FBI, Treasury, IRS, and Department of Homeland Security to act against individuals or groups before any violence occurs. The order retools the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to include “civil disorder,” lets the attorney general designate domestic groups as terrorists, and targets funding and tax status of organizations deemed supportive. Extremism indicators now include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “hostility” toward “traditional” family values, effectively criminalizing protest and dissent, according to reporting by Ken Klippenstein."]
Rollins, Oliver. "Murderous Genes and Criminal Brains." Los Angeles Review of Books (July 6, 2025) ["ON OCTOBER 7, 2024, in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, then–presidential candidate Donald Trump said of immigrants that “many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Although Trump’s campaign would later pretend that this comment was “clearly” directed at “murderers” and not immigrants, and more specifically at those “illegal” persons “invading” the country at the southern border, similar statements from his 2024 campaign, not to mention his pre-government days, make clear that they are a Trumpian refrain rather than an aberration. This refrain, which derives from our country’s long history of eugenic “science,” clearly continues to operate actively and prescriptively in the present. A kind of living relic of that science, the phrase is often deployed to imply instinctive criminality. When wrapped in nativist fantasies of racial purity, “bad genes” mobilizes the nation’s long-standing fear of the nonwhite Other, typically portrayed as “unfit,” “illegal,” and not a real citizen. The zombielike repetition of eugenic slogans like this one is ultimately about who can and should be a US citizen, who can expect the civil rights protections theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution. The phrase, in short, is about the politics of belonging. Carriers of “bad genes” do not belong."]
Scheele, Judith. "Shifting Sands of the Sahara." Converging Dialogues #434 (July 3, 2025) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Judith Scheele about the human history of the Sahara. They discuss the perceptions of the Sahara, landscape of the Sahara, sand and freshwater, multiple uses of camels, peoples of the Sahara, Slavery and race in the Sahara, Islam, contemporary Sahara, and many more topics. Judith Scheele is professor of social anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, EHESS). She has spent almost two decades living in and researching Saharan societies. She is the author of three previous books and is the author of the recent book, Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara."]
Stanley, Jason. "Introduction: The Problem of Propaganda." How Propaganda Works. Princeton University Press, 2015: 1 - 26. ["Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us―not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy―particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality―and how it has damaged democracies of the past. Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere."]
Stevenson, Bryan. "A Case for Confronting the Past." On the Media (January 2, 2026) ["Host Brooke Gladstone sits down with Bryan Stevenson, public interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, to talk about the Trump Administration's war on museums, especially those that deal with our nation's history of racism."]
"Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism." Open Culture (November 1, 2024) ["It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”"]
Vahini, Vera. "John J. Lennon on Humanity in Prison and the Sensationalism of the True Crime Genre." Lit Hub Daily (September 22, 2025) ["The following year, Lennon was accepted to work with me as his mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project, where mentors guide authors in writing and publishing book-length projects. He’d proposed a fascinating project that he hoped would invert the problematic true-crime genre. He wanted to write about men who had murdered and investigate how the crime had taken place, but without the genre’s usual obsession with salacious plotting. Instead he wanted to investigate the social conditions that both enable murder and inhibit murderers’ genuine attempts to reckon with their crimes. Complicating the narrative, obviously, was John’s own relationship with his subject. John pulled off The Tragedy of True Crime—a masterful feat of journalism that is both deeply reported and deeply felt—under circumstances far more difficult, both practically and emotionally, than those of most colleagues I’ve met. He spoke to me from Sing Sing Correctional Facility about the book, how he wrote it and what’s next."]
Vallor, Shannon. "The History of Bad Ideas: Value-Free Tech." Past Present Future (July 6, 2025) ["For today’s episode in the history of bad ideas David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about the myth that technology can be value free. It’s easy to see why Silicon Valley is so keen on the idea that it’s never the fault of the tech, only of the people who use it. But why do we let them get away with it? Where did this idea come from? How has it also poisoned arguments about gun laws and nuclear weapons? And what can we do to fight it and try to get technology that works with – not against – basic human values?"]
West, Stephen. "Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration." Philosophize This! #232 (July 7, 2025) ["Today we talk about the book The Crisis of Narration by the philosopher Byung Chul Han. We talk about the history of storytelling. Walter Benjamin's distinction between a Paris fire and a revolution in Madrid. The effects of social media on memory. Story telling vs story selling. AI as pure Intelligenz lacking Geist. The ability for stories to give shape to suffering. The importance of boredom for self-discovery."]
---. "Michel Foucault (Part 1)." Philosophize This (August 15, 2018) ["This episode introduces Michel Foucault through his book Discipline and Punish, exploring how societies shifted from public executions to controlling people through discipline and routine. Foucault argues that modern punishment isn't about justice—it's about maintaining power. He explains how systems like prisons, schools, and workplaces use surveillance, rules, and constant evaluation to shape behavior. Inspired by the panopticon—a design where prisoners never know when they’re being watched—Foucault shows how this logic now runs through all of modern life. We internalize these systems, watching and judging ourselves to fit into what society tells us is “normal.” Power, he says, doesn’t just come from governments or wealth, but from the knowledge that defines who we are and how we live." Further Reading: The Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord (1967); The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction – Michel Foucault (1976); Punishment and Social Structure – Georg Rusche & Otto Kirchheimer (1939)]
---. "Michel Foucault Pt. 2 - The Order of Things." Philosophize This! #122 (September 24, 2018) ["This episode continues the exploration of Michel Foucault by examining how scientific knowledge is shaped not just by discovery, but by deep, often invisible cultural assumptions. Living in a time of great faith in science, Foucault challenged the idea that progress in fields like physics or biology leads to objective truth. Instead, he focused on epistemes—unconscious frameworks that shape what societies consider knowable or valid. Through works like The Order of Things and The Birth of the Clinic, he showed how institutions such as hospitals and prisons are influenced by shifting language and norms, not just function. Foucault distinguishes between repressive power (force) and normalizing power (internalized expectations), arguing that modern societies maintain control by shaping how people see themselves. Ultimately, he urges us to question the dominant narratives we take for granted, revealing them as historically contingent systems grounded in power." Further Reading: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault (1970); The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction by Michel Foucault (1978); Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (1998).]
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