... Eurocentrism ... is the view that enshrines the hierarchical stratifications inherited from Western colonial domination, assumed to be inevitable and even "progressive." Eurocentrism does not refer to Europe in its literal sense as a continent or a geopolitical unit but rather to an intellectual orientation rooted in colonial power, an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes, that perceives Europe (and the neo-Europes around the world) as universally normative (4). - Stam, Robert. Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics. Wiley/Blackwell, 2015.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Reality, considered in itself and as a whole, is a chaos so deep and immense that it exceeds any possibility of being understood or experienced. Even something as small as a pebble, if we consider it to the full extent of its existence, becomes a mystery beyond comprehension. We can detect only a fragment of this chaos, as filtered by our perceptive apparatus and cognitive limits. Through our imagination, based on our personal inclinations and on the cosmological assumptions of our society, we mould this remaining piece into one of the infinite forms that reality can take. This activity of the imagination provides us with a cosmos, a 'world': a place where we can develop those structures of sense that shelter us from the trauma of having been thrown unprepared into a mortal life. Then, spurred by the force of habit and by a desire for comfort, we become progressively convinced that the world we have constructed is an accurate picture of 'nature,' and that reality coincides with the metaphysical consensus of a particular society at a certain moment in history. We tend to forget the imaginary essence of the 'world' that we see around ourselves, and we start drawing hard distinctions between what we see as 'truly existing' and what we set aside as 'mere fantasy.' (4)
This, too, is a timely lesson: if rational languages, such as philosophy and science, aim to offer a structure of sense for human life, they must recognize themselves, at least in part, as forms of literature. If they want to make their hard logical kernel inhabitable by living creatures, they should not overlook the need to translate into the soft substance of narrative. (10)
Since the infinite chaos of reality will always exceed the limits of any conceptual system, we should recognize that all of our attempts at reducing it to a meaningful cosmos are merely 'likely stories' - like the eikos mythos of Plato's Timaeus - at once plagued by, and endowed with, the porous quality of literature. Every conceptual world that we might devise is ultimately a story for us to live by, and the better ones are not those that reach closer to an absolute truth beyond our grasp, but those that are spacious and flexible enough to offer an imaginary home where a dignified life for all becomes possible. (10 - 11)
Campagna, Frederico. Otherworldly: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Bloomsbury, 2025.
----------------------------------------------------------------
When I was working on my MA in Popular Culture/Cultural Studies I took two classes on serial killers when I was considering writing a thesis on the burgeoning late 90s cultural phenomenon of representations of the SK. One was a traditional Humanities course using novels/short stories, films, and theory books. It was a fascinating derive through the underbelly of American culture. The second one was a Criminology course taught by an ex-detective and it was a frightening dive into actual SKs, SK fandom, and SK hunters (not as well known at that time). We accessed the Body Farm, regularly watched a police cable station (not available to the public) that showed vivid/disturbing reports on SK activities, and other things that I would have preferred not to know. I was fully aware that SKs are rare and there are thousands of other ways I am more likely to die from, but it still infected me with a deep fear for a while. As a lifelong outdoor enthusiast, it put a damper on solo rough camping for a couple of years. I also SK proofed my apartment at the time (including strategically laying out weapons at key places). Laughing, sounds weird, when I write it out 😉
A part of my thesis on the phenomenon was that it was being overblown and used to stoke fear in a reactionary manner (using culture to fuel politicized fear, still prevalent in our culture today). Serial Killers do exist, but they are extremely rare, even if some are prolific. I’m much more scared of desk top/button pusher killers (this line of thought was initiated by my readings of Hannah Arendt), we need more focus on their role in human agony, death, and terror. - Michael D. Benton (10/30/25)
--------------------------------------------------------------
... in each successive drive to war or state sponsored sanctions against countries that do not play ball with American corporate interests, we see the same official government or corporate media experts, many with connections to private industries profiting off American wars, acting as “expert” talking heads on network and cable TV shows weighing in on whether America should invade or target a country. As David Barstow in The New York Times (April 20, 2008) states: “To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as ‘military analysts’ whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-9/11 world.” These experts are presented as objective, but they are clearly a part of a corporate/pentagon and presidential agenda to generate favorable coverage for war and intervention agendas. The public, and often the networks, do not understand these “experts” connections to the current administration and the military-industrial complex.
Meanwhile globally recognized experts on American political issues that raise critical questions about American foreign and domestic policies are marginalized or attacked in the corporate media. Noam Chomsky, one of the most important and globally celebrated political analysts is completely missing from corporate media. Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and national security analyst, is regularly attacked and dismissed because of his fierce criticisms of policy decisions regardless of which party is in power. The perceived problem isn't that he has a critical voice, it is instead that he critiques power in a systematic manner and calls out abuses no matter the politics of the offenders. In fact, polarized party politics and their media watchdogs have made it the ultimate sin for a conscious critic to stick to a focused critique of an important issue no matter who is in power. Many other important voices in the independent media and from around the world (the remaining 15% of media) are regularly ignored in the corporate media which informs the majority of American citizens. This stifling of critical questioning of the world-as-it-is and broad-based fearmongering seeks to reinforce our fealty to the dominant power structure. Knee-jerk patriotism and in-group bias in reality-show America is not simply a denial of critical thinking, it is also a targeted attempt to erase the realities of the marginalized (culturally, economically, geographically and socially). There have been many studies that have noted how heavy media consumption makes us much more afraid of the world outside because of the distorted realities of both news shows and repetitive entertainments that focus on a law and enforcement mentality as the only hope in a violent and chaotic world. This has only increased in a search algorithm and social media age that isolates unaware users in filter bubbles that situate them like betta fish in their tiny fishbowl staring out and viewing any other nearby betta fish as an enemy. The hatred and distrust resulting from these isolating and anxiety-inducing processes often most affects marginal populations, because the mainstream corporate culture mostly reflects the limited desires and fears of the dominant culture, which in turn, labels or targets those perceived as the "other." - Benton, Michael D. "Ideological Becoming." Dialogic Cinephilia (September 30, 2022)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]
A part of my thesis on the phenomenon was that it was being overblown and used to stoke fear in a reactionary manner (using culture to fuel politicized fear, still prevalent in our culture today). Serial Killers do exist, but they are extremely rare, even if some are prolific. I’m much more scared of desk top/button pusher killers (this line of thought was initiated by my readings of Hannah Arendt), we need more focus on their role in human agony, death, and terror. - Michael D. Benton (10/30/25)
--------------------------------------------------------------
... in each successive drive to war or state sponsored sanctions against countries that do not play ball with American corporate interests, we see the same official government or corporate media experts, many with connections to private industries profiting off American wars, acting as “expert” talking heads on network and cable TV shows weighing in on whether America should invade or target a country. As David Barstow in The New York Times (April 20, 2008) states: “To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as ‘military analysts’ whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-9/11 world.” These experts are presented as objective, but they are clearly a part of a corporate/pentagon and presidential agenda to generate favorable coverage for war and intervention agendas. The public, and often the networks, do not understand these “experts” connections to the current administration and the military-industrial complex.
Meanwhile globally recognized experts on American political issues that raise critical questions about American foreign and domestic policies are marginalized or attacked in the corporate media. Noam Chomsky, one of the most important and globally celebrated political analysts is completely missing from corporate media. Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and national security analyst, is regularly attacked and dismissed because of his fierce criticisms of policy decisions regardless of which party is in power. The perceived problem isn't that he has a critical voice, it is instead that he critiques power in a systematic manner and calls out abuses no matter the politics of the offenders. In fact, polarized party politics and their media watchdogs have made it the ultimate sin for a conscious critic to stick to a focused critique of an important issue no matter who is in power. Many other important voices in the independent media and from around the world (the remaining 15% of media) are regularly ignored in the corporate media which informs the majority of American citizens. This stifling of critical questioning of the world-as-it-is and broad-based fearmongering seeks to reinforce our fealty to the dominant power structure. Knee-jerk patriotism and in-group bias in reality-show America is not simply a denial of critical thinking, it is also a targeted attempt to erase the realities of the marginalized (culturally, economically, geographically and socially). There have been many studies that have noted how heavy media consumption makes us much more afraid of the world outside because of the distorted realities of both news shows and repetitive entertainments that focus on a law and enforcement mentality as the only hope in a violent and chaotic world. This has only increased in a search algorithm and social media age that isolates unaware users in filter bubbles that situate them like betta fish in their tiny fishbowl staring out and viewing any other nearby betta fish as an enemy. The hatred and distrust resulting from these isolating and anxiety-inducing processes often most affects marginal populations, because the mainstream corporate culture mostly reflects the limited desires and fears of the dominant culture, which in turn, labels or targets those perceived as the "other." - Benton, Michael D. "Ideological Becoming." Dialogic Cinephilia (September 30, 2022)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]
Benjamin, Ruha. "Race After Technology." Data After Society (November 26, 2019) ["Ruha Benjamin discusses the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development. In "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code," Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype, from everyday apps to complex algorithms, to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Presenting the concept of “the new Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite."]
Bray, Mark. "The New Power of Far Right Influencers." Uncanny Valley (October 16, 2025) ["History professor Mark Bray is no stranger to death threats. As the author of the book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, published in 2017, he has received backlash and harassment from far-right circles for almost a decade. But things recently escalated after the Trump administration designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and far-right influencers with a newfound power targeted Bray. Mike sits down with WIRED’s David Gilbert and Leah Feiger to discuss what went down, how the role of far-right influencers has expanded exponentially during the past year, and what responsibility tech companies carry."]
Budhathoki, Abishek. "After the Ban, Toward Enlightenment: Bhutan’s New Wave of Spiritual Cinema." Notebook (October 16, 2025) ["After a delayed start, Bhutanese filmmakers are creating a distinctive cinematic language grounded in their cultural memory, forging a new wave of cinema that stages a dialogue between tradition and innovation, spiritual insight and artistry. From this remarkably compressed timeframe has come a body of work that resists Western narrative and cinematic conventions. These films have proven that a national cinema does not require decades of development before achieving philosophical sophistication. Instead, by drawing directly from centuries of Buddhist thought and practice, Bhutan’s directors have created mature meditations on existence, attachment, and transcendence. As this youngest of all national cinemas continues to evolve, it stands as proof that innovation in film language comes from a thoughtful translation of tradition, essential insights, and storytelling strategies into contemporary forms."]
Cucarro, Clara. "Quiet Americans: Kelly Reichardt’s Cinema of Attention." Notebook (October 17, 2025) ["Across 30 years of Reichardt’s cinema, mundane details and subtle gestures are often tasked with conveying the essence of her human dramas. In a profile for The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix calls Reichardt America’s “finest observer of ordinary grit.” The description is apt, though her protagonists have depth as well as texture; their precise cultural and historical resonances belie their “ordinariness.” Reichardt’s filmography revolves around quiet Americans whose shyness, reticence, or reserve may be, at least in part, a response to the social conditions of their gender, class, and race. Think of Wendy (Michelle Williams), the drifter at the center of Wendy and Lucy (2008), whose economic precarity is evident in the way she counts her change and avoids eye contact; or Jamie (Lily Gladstone), the lonely Indigenous American ranch hand in Certain Women (2016), whose romantic longing for a professional white woman, Beth (Kristen Stewart), is never put into words. Avoiding unnatural dialogue that could reveal too much about her characters, Reichardt focuses on behavior, gesture, and routine, asking viewers to extrapolate character through visual cues rather than verbal exposition."]
Davis, Matthew. "On Mount Rushmore, Wounded Knee & Medals of Honor, Deadwood, the Lakota, Stone Mountain and the Klan, American Aesthetics, Custer, Whitman, Jackson, and the Black Hills." The History of Philosophy Audio Archive (January 6, 2026) ["Who do the Black Hills really belong to? Was George Armstrong Custer a hero, an idiot, or a fanatic? Who carved Mount Rushmore, and what was it supposed to represent (the "apotheosis of Western Civilization?") What happened at Wounded Knee (in 1890, and 1973) - and why does Secretary of War (sic) Pete Hegseth (sick) want to make sure that those Medals of Honor are preserved? ... Matthew Davis, [is the] author of A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. Books mentioned:
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard
Death Sonnet for Custer by Walt Whitman (later titled "From Far Dakota's Canons" in Leaves of Grass)]
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard
Death Sonnet for Custer by Walt Whitman (later titled "From Far Dakota's Canons" in Leaves of Grass)]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot." Weird Studies #77 (July 8, 2020) ["'What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away.' This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles." List of books mentioned/discussed on the page.]
Gavin, Francis. "The Lost Art of Thinking Historically." NOEMA (September 11, 2025) ["What we have lost, and what we desperately need to reclaim, is a different mode of cognition, a historical sensibility. This is not about memorizing dates and facts. It is, as the historian Gordon S. Wood describes it, a “different consciousness,” a way of understanding that profoundly influences how we see the world. It is a temperament that is comfortable with uncertainty, sensitive to context and aware of the powerful, often unpredictable rhythms of the past. To cultivate this sensibility is to acquire the intellectual virtues of modesty, curiosity and empathy — an antidote to the hubris of rigid, monocausal thinking. ... This process is fundamentally different from that of many other disciplines. Where social sciences often seek to create generalizable, predictive and parsimonious theories — the simplest explanation for the largest number of things — history revels in complexity. A historical sensibility is skeptical of master ideas or unitary historical motors. It recognizes that different things happen for different reasons, that direct causal connections can be elusive, and that the world is rife with unintended consequences. It makes no claim to predict the future; rather, it seeks to deepen our understanding of how the past unfolded into our present, reminding us, as British historian Sir Llewellyn Woodward said, that “our ignorance is very deep.” This sensibility compels us to reconsider concepts we take for granted. We use terms such as “capitalism” and “human rights” as if they are timeless and universal, when in fact they are concepts that emerged and evolved at particular historical moments, often identified and defined by historians. A historical consciousness demands that we seek the origins of things we thought we understood and empathize with the past in its own context. This is to imagine ourselves in the shoes of those who came before, wrestling with their dilemmas in their world. It doesn’t mean suspending moral judgment, but rather being less confident that we — here today — have a monopoly on timeless insight." This essay is adapted from his new book “Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy” (Yale University Press, 2025).]
Goi, Leonardo. "The Dream Machine: Bi Gan on Resurrection." Notebook (December 12, 2025) ["It’s difficult to feel pessimistic about the fate of cinema while watching a film like Resurrection (2025). Bi Gan’s third feature—his biggest and most ambitious production to date—is a work of art so unabashedly convinced of the medium’s capacity for wonder that the belief becomes contagious. Bi’s previous films—both set in Guizhou, his native province in Southwest China—radiate that same devotional love; like Resurrection, they’re pitched along the nebulous border between hallucinations and waking life. Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) do not just mimic an oneiric aesthetic but actually move like dreams, nowhere more convincingly than when Bi performs his high-wire act: the long, unbroken take, a meticulously choreographed feat of continuous motion that elevates his films to an ethereal, mesmeric realm. In his debut feature, the director undertook a 41-minute tracking shot that follows characters around a riverfront village; in his sophomore effort, the long take stretched across the film’s entire second hour, a 3D journey that sends us gliding down a cable tramway and into a sepulchral town. Resurrection too features one such sequence, but it is a measure of the film’s majesty that the 36-minute shot is only one of many sensational moments. Split into five chapters—each orbiting one of the senses and told in a distinct cinematic style—and sprinting through the twentieth century, Resurrection begins as a Blade Runner–esque sci-fi fairy tale. “In a wild era,” a title card warns, humanity has discovered that it is possible to achieve immortality if they are willing to stop dreaming altogether. But there are a select few who’d rather live shorter, more vivid lives, enlivened by those nighttime visions. Bi and his cowriter Zhai Xiaohui call them “Fantasmers,” melancholic wanderers who “bring chaos to history” and “make time jump”; they’re eternally pursued by the “Big Others,” vigilantes who can tell truth from fiction and must awake the Fantasmers to keep chronologies in check."]
Gourgouris, Stathis. "On Edward Said's Orientalism." Writ Large (November 8, 2022) ["Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,” laid bare the biases of Orientalist study, and transformed the course of humanities scholarship. Stathis Gourgouris is a professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era."]
Grady, Constance. "The right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings. But they don’t understand it." Vox (October 31, 2025) ["Among the many humiliations of being American in the current moment is this: Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class continually fetishize objects of nerd culture while also displaying a willful inability to grasp the very basic messages those objects are sending. While there are certainly worse problems (e.g. white nationalism in the White House), the blazing lack of reading comprehension from people who are allegedly smart does give one pause. Put simply, these people are bad nerds."]
Liu, Ken. "When the Machine Becomes the Medium." Futurology (November 4, 2025) ["The first machines mimicked our muscles. Today, they’ve learned to mirror our minds. Now they’re beginning to imitate something even closer to the core of our humanity – imagination itself. Sci-fi author, translator, and technologist Ken Liu calls this new medium the Noematagraph: a tool for capturing creativity and collaborating with AI in the same way cinema tells stories with actors, sound and a splash of light on a screen. In this episode of Futurology, Liu joins Berggruen Press’ Executive Editor Nils Gilman to explore how AI blurs the line between artist and audience, code and consciousness. They discuss why storytelling has always been humanity’s most powerful technology and how machines, by learning to tell their own stories, may change what it means to express emotion in the AI age."]
Mayor, Adrienne. "Cursed Mountains and Deathly Lakes: When Nature Is Explained By Myth." Literary Hub (October 22, 2025) ["Geomythology raises provocative questions: How far can cultural memory extend back in time? How long can geomyths maintain their relevance, impact, and value? How long do spoken traditions survive? The answers to these questions about the “longevity of orality” keep expanding as more evidence is gathered and analyzed around the world."]
Nichols, John. "'The Dark Side': Dick Cheney’s Legacy from Iraq Invasion to U.S. Torture Program." Democracy Now (November 4, 2025) ["Dick Cheney, the former vice president and one of the key architects of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died Monday at age 84. Cheney served six terms in Congress as Wyoming’s lone representative before serving as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, when he oversaw the first Gulf War and the bloody U.S. invasion of Panama that deposed former U.S. ally Manuel Noriega. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney served as chair and CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, before George W. Bush tapped him as his running mate. As vice president, Cheney was a leading proponent of invading and occupying Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized the entire region. Dick Cheney also steadfastly defended warantless mass surveillance programs and the use of torture against detainees of the so-called war on terror. We speak with The Nation’s John Nichols, author of multiple books about Cheney, who says the neoconservative leader had a “very destructive” impact on the world."]
Norton, Jack and Judah Schept. "ICE in Harlan County: The deportation machine’s local partners."
N + 1 #51 (Fall 2025) ["ICE is of course a worthy target for resistance. It is a federal law enforcement agency that increasingly resembles a secret police force, and it’s being used to target political dissidence and arbitrarily detain whomever it wants. Created in 2003, ICE is now poised to become the highest-funded federal police force in US history. But in addition to — and in coordination with — ICE, officers from numerous other agencies are working to abduct people from farms, factories, and the streets of big cities and small towns. The extent to which this expanding federal police state relies on a vast network of jails, prisons, and local police to do its brutal work is often overlooked. The US’s sprawling carceral infrastructure — built up across the land over decades, and designed from the start to dehumanize — enables the capture and deportation of increasing numbers of people. As the federal government deputizes these federal, state, and local agencies to partake in ICE’s work, it remakes existing infrastructure and political relationships in ICE’s image: remakes them, that is, toward fascism. A recent raid in rural Kentucky illustrated several features of this transformed and expanded deportation machine. On the afternoon of May 29, 2025, armed federal agents descended on the small city of Harlan in a fleet of black SUVs and a white unmarked van. The agents — employees not of ICE, but of the Drug Enforcement Administration — raided Sazon Steakhouse, a popular Mexican restaurant. According to Jennifer McDaniels, who reported on the raid and its aftermath for the local Tri-City News, the agents handcuffed “an unconfirmed number of individuals . . . and loaded them in an unmarked white van” before driving away. Some people in the Harlan community report that there was a simultaneous raid at El Charrito, a restaurant down the road from Sazon."]
O'Sullivan, James. "The Last Days of Social Media." NOEMA (September 2, 2025) ["Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog. Even influencer culture, for all its artifice, promised that behind the ring‑light stood an actual person. But the attention economy, and more recently, the generative AI-fueled late attention economy, have broken whatever social contract underpinned that illusion. The feed no longer feels crowded with people but crowded with content. At this point, it has far less to do with people than with consumers and consumption. In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet’s largest repositories of AI‑generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine‑written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half‑coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney."]
Risker, Paul. "Devastating Truths and Transformation Through 'Soft Power': An Interview with Farah Nabulsi." Cineaste (Fall 2025) ["Nabulsi describes The Teacher as a fiction film that is heavily rooted in truth, reality, and the injustices that are taking place. While she draws inspiration from different real-life stories, there is one that she says was a notable influence—the story of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006 and held until 2011. His eventual release secured the safe return of over a thousand Palestinian political prisoners. Nabulsi tells me that many of these prisoners were women and children that were held without trial or charge in administrative detention. “I was thinking, what an insane imbalance in value for human life.” The Teacher effectively penetrates the pseudo-complexity of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict by showing there's nothing complex about it. Mainstream news media and geopolitics have sought to create a myth of complexity, but Nabulsi takes us into the effects apartheid and forced occupation have on ordinary people. The Teacher is an important film because it gives a voice to the collective Palestinian trauma that is still denied by many in the international community."]
Stonebridge, Lyndsey. "Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience." Recall This Book (September 4, 2025) ["Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing."]
Stoop, Daan. "Peter Singer and Fifty Years of Animal Liberation." The Philosopher (June 4, 2025) ["In 2023’s Animal Liberation Now, the revised edition of Animal Liberation, Singer replaces outdated examples with new ones that are just as appalling. He calls the chapters on animal testing and industrial farming ‘shocking, both then and now’. Yet this grimness doesn’t prevent him from staying clear-headed. ‘I deliberately avoid emotional language,’ he once told The Guardian. ‘I’ve never considered myself an animal lover and I don’t want to speak only to animal lovers. I want people to see this as a fundamental moral wrong.’ Animal Liberation Now describes how old battery cages were replaced by ‘enriched’ ones; and how lab animals, while now somewhat better protected, are still used on a massive scale. The logic of exploitation remains: animals are still treated as machines that convert cheap feed into profitable meat. What appears to be progress often turns out to be merely cosmetic."]
Walker, Sara Imari. "The Death of the Scientist." NOEMA (December 11, 2025) ["Will AI kill science, or will it foster a scientific revolution? The answer depends on something no one knows: What is science? ... When you see the color red, a specific experience emerges from your neural architecture responding to wavelengths between 620 and 750 nanometers. I can point to something red, and you can acknowledge you are also seeing red, but we cannot transfer the actual experience of redness from your consciousness to mine. We cannot know if we share the same inner experience. All we can share are descriptions. This is where science radically differs from experience: It is fundamentally intersubjective. If something exists only in one mind and cannot be shared, it cannot become scientific knowledge. Science requires verifying each other’s observations, building on a lineage of past discoveries and developing intergenerational consensus about reality. Scientific models must therefore be expressible in symbols, mathematics and language, because they must be copyable and interpretable between minds. Science is definitionally unstable because it is not an objective feature of reality; instead, it is more accurately understood as an evolving cultural system, bred of consensus representation and adaptive to the new knowledge we generate."]
Walter, Shoshanna. "Rehab: An American Scandal." New Books in Drugs, Addiction, and Recovery (November 8, 2025) ["In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isn’t it working? The answer is that in America—where anyone can get addicted—only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, our default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients. We’ve heard a great deal about the opioid crisis foisted on America by Big Pharma, but we’ve heard too little about the other half of this epidemic—the reason why so many remain mired in addiction. Until now. In this book, you’ll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery. April is a black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the government’s punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her own mother’s recovery—and then her own. Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies. Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programs—yet law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again. Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, who would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Together, these four stories illustrate the pitfalls of a system that not only fails to meet the needs of people with addiction, but actively benefits from maintaining their lower status. They also offer insight into how we might fix that system and save lives."]
West, Stephen. "Authenticity and the history of the self - Charles Taylor." Philosophize This! #239 (October 17, 2025) ["Today we talk about the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor. First, we trace the historical origins of how he views the modern self. From the Greeks to the Reformation. From Descartes to Rousseau. The modern self to him is something "irreconcilably multileveled". Then we talk about our modern focus on authenticity as a moral ideal and why Taylor thinks many people misunderstand what it requires." This episode focuses on ideas from Taylor's books The Ethics of Authenticity and Sources of the Self.]
---. "Michel Foucault Pt. 3 - Power." Philosophize This #123 (September 24, 2018) ["This episode continues the series on Michel Foucault by exploring how he challenged the idea that truth is universal and progress is rational. Building on earlier discussions of Kant, science, and criminal justice, it focuses on Madness and Civilization, where Foucault argues that modern approaches to mental illness are not more humane, but part of a broader system that objectifies and controls people under the guise of care. His method evolves from “archaeology,” which uncovers forgotten ways of thinking, to “genealogy,” which traces how ideas develop through power. Foucault reveals that modern power is no longer top-down and repressive, but diffuse and productive, shaping norms, behaviors, and identities through what he calls biopower. Rather than silencing us, power invites confession, self-surveillance, and conformity to scientific discourse. The episode closes by emphasizing that Foucault’s aim isn’t to replace dominant narratives, but to question them—revealing how they shape our lives and asking what might lie beyond them. Further Reading: Foucault: A Very Short Introduction by Gary Gutting (2005); The Philosophy of Foucault by Todd May (2006); Biopower: Foucault and Beyond edited by Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar (2015)."]
---. "The Stoics Are Wrong - Nietzsche, Schopenhauer." Philosophize This! #237 (September 30, 2025) ["Today we talk about two famous critiques of Stoicism. One by Friedrich Nietzsche who thought the Stoics weren’t life affirming enough and so rob themselves of some of the best parts of life. The other by Arthur Schopenhauer who thought the Stoics were too life-affirming of worldly things to ever reach a deep understanding of things."]
---. "Susan Sontag - Do you criticize yourself the way you criticize a movie?" Philosophize This! (March 1, 2023) [A discussion of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation." "In this episode, we explore how Susan Sontag—a fierce cultural critic inspired by Simone Weil—challenged the modern obsession with interpretation, both in psychoanalysis and in art. Sontag admired Weil’s uncompromising stance against the status quo and echoed that same resistance by criticizing how analysis can distance us from the immediacy of lived experience. She warned that filtering emotions and art through normative theories often alienates people from their own reality, granting undue power to experts while reducing complex experiences to predictable patterns. Instead, Sontag called for an "erotics of art"—a renewed way of engaging with form and style that invites visceral, transformative encounters rather than detached interpretation. Through this lens, she argued, we open ourselves to art—and life—in ways that allow discomfort, openness, and even confusion to shape us. The episode closes by linking this sensibility to Sontag’s belief that truth demands sacrifice, and that progress requires voices from the margins, not just those who play by the rules of reason."]
---. "The Stoics Are Wrong - Nietzsche, Schopenhauer." Philosophize This! #237 (September 30, 2025) ["Today we talk about two famous critiques of Stoicism. One by Friedrich Nietzsche who thought the Stoics weren’t life affirming enough and so rob themselves of some of the best parts of life. The other by Arthur Schopenhauer who thought the Stoics were too life-affirming of worldly things to ever reach a deep understanding of things."]
---. "Susan Sontag - Do you criticize yourself the way you criticize a movie?" Philosophize This! (March 1, 2023) [A discussion of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation." "In this episode, we explore how Susan Sontag—a fierce cultural critic inspired by Simone Weil—challenged the modern obsession with interpretation, both in psychoanalysis and in art. Sontag admired Weil’s uncompromising stance against the status quo and echoed that same resistance by criticizing how analysis can distance us from the immediacy of lived experience. She warned that filtering emotions and art through normative theories often alienates people from their own reality, granting undue power to experts while reducing complex experiences to predictable patterns. Instead, Sontag called for an "erotics of art"—a renewed way of engaging with form and style that invites visceral, transformative encounters rather than detached interpretation. Through this lens, she argued, we open ourselves to art—and life—in ways that allow discomfort, openness, and even confusion to shape us. The episode closes by linking this sensibility to Sontag’s belief that truth demands sacrifice, and that progress requires voices from the margins, not just those who play by the rules of reason."]
Wittenberg, Ariel. "'How come I can’t breathe?': Musk's data company draws a backlash in Memphis." Politico (May 6, 2025) ["The company’s turbines — enough to power 280,000 homes — run without emission controls in an area that leads Tennessee in asthma hospitalizations."]
No comments:
Post a Comment