Breaking Points: On America and Israel Attacking Iran

Propaganda = Persuasion Without Consent (Music Mix 53)

 Daniele Luppi; Parquet Courts; Karen O; Pond; Tracy Bryant; Rising Appalachia; Savoy Motel; La Luz; Wolf Alice; Porcupine Tree; New Candys; Delerium; Sarah McLachlan; Pixies; Fontaines D.C.; The Cars; Kate Bush; Emma Ruth Rundle; Die Spitz; Highly Suspect; SAULT; De La Soul; Shintaro Sakamoto; Frank Zappa; Jethro Tull; The Budos Band; Tunde Adebimpe; Turnstile; Nektar; Ghostface Killer; Adrian Younge; Raekwon; RZA; Cardinals; The Smile; Elton John; Steely Dan; Minnie Riperton; Fiona Apple; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; Tool; The Beatles; Beans; Blonde Redhead; Stick Figure; Max Winter; Bill Callahan; Modern Woman; Maxine Funk; James Gang

Propaganda = Persuasion Without Consent (Music Mix 53)

ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #7

 "It is far from easy to be a good man. In fact, as one gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to know what a good man is. Yet it also becomes increasingly important to at least try." -- Rudolph Wegener, The Man in the High Castle (1.10)

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People who think philosophy is useless also tend to think that society does not need to change. If you want to maintain the status quo, teaching people to question everything is a pretty stupid thing to do. (Existential Comics, March 21, 2018) 

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“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but we must take it because our conscience tells us that it is right.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Proper Sense of Priorities" (1968)

MB: During my morning coffee ritual, I was reading about the 1961 Freedom Rides through Alabama and Mississippi in Mark Hamilton Lytle's excellent narrative history America's Uncivil Wars about the social/political conflicts of the long 1960s (mid 1950s to mid 1970s). The courage of these young activists and the vision of James Farmer is breathtaking to read about. I highly recommend the book, it reads with intensity, and it is thorough in its scope. It is relevant for out current era of sociopolitical conflicts.

 

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Armenikus, Vashik. "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli." Artidote (September 5, 2026) ["Why did Sir Isaac Newton spend decades studying alchemy? Is the octopus the closest creature that we have on Earth to alien life-forms? Which science is closer to Faith? Why did Einstein make so many errors in his calculations? How do we form Ideas? These are just a few topics that Rovelli covers in his essays and if any of those questions intrigued you I believe you will enjoy reading this book. Rovelli is peerless in his skill of communicating complex ideas in just two pages. For example his essay ‘Dante, Einstein and the Three-Sphere’ is only two and a half pages long. However, Rovelli explained to me Einstein’s theory of Three-Spherical cosmos, gave me a short commentary on Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, and then finished by showing me how Dante ‘predicted’ (for the lack of better word) what Einstein would discover seven centuries later. But what I enjoyed most of all is Rovelli’s open-mindedness to everything in the world. Whilst some scientists (such as Stephen Hawking whom Rovelli admired) tend to disregard philosophy, poetry and generally everything that is not rooted in the material world - Rovelli finds science and art to be inseparable from each other."]

Bariach, Ben. "When AI and Human Worlds Collide."  NOEMA (January 20, 2026)  ["These challenges are profound, but they are not inevitable. The science of world models remains in relative infancy, with a long horizon expected before it matures into wide deployment. Thoughtful engagement with the world model paradigm now will shape not just how such future agents learn, but what values their actions represent and how they might interact with people. An overly precautionary approach risks its own moral failure. Just as the printing press democratized knowledge despite enabling propaganda, and cars transformed transportation while producing new perils, world models promise benefits that may far outweigh their risks. The question isn’t whether to build them, but how to design them to best harness their benefits."]

Bissonnette, Gilles and Sarah Hinger. "Department of Education Backs Down on Unlawful Directive Targeting Educational Equity." ACLU (February 18. 2026)  ["Across the country, educators do everything in their power to support every student, so each feels safe, seen, and is prepared for the future. Donald Trump and Linda McMahon tried to use politically motivated attacks and vague directives to stifle speech and erase essential teaching and learning in our schools and universities. The courts rejected that attack on public education. While Trump and McMahon want to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion, educators know these values are at the core of our nation. Diversity is our uniqueness and our strength. Equity means every student gets what they need, when they need it, and in the way that serves them best. And inclusion means all students are seen, valued, respected, and have access to opportunities and support,” said Becky Pringle, president at the National Education Association. "The Trump administration’s unlawful Dear Colleague Letter and certification requirement have now been vacated and abandoned, underscoring how badly Trump and McMahon overreached in their attempt to interfere with curriculum and instruction. Educators, parents, and community leaders will continue to organize, mobilize, and take action to protect our students and their futures."]

Brabandere, Luc de. "A Very Short History of Critical Thinking." Philosophy Now #172 (2026) ["In Greece in the fifth century BC, some public speakers who were certainly cultured but who were also unscrupulous, made the most of their oratorical talents by turning them into a particularly lucrative profession. Armed with misleading arguments and fallacious reasoning, they were called Sophists. They were so good at arguing any case they were able to simultaneously demonstrate something and its opposite. To be a sophist is to argue in a way that appears to be valid, but where the argument has been deliberately manipulated to distract or mislead the listener. Sophism is not a way of thinking; it’s a way of arguing designed to dazzle and trick an opponent; or if they should suspect foul play, to cause them logical embarrassment. It then proves hard to refute the argument because the flaw is subtly concealed. A sophist cares not about ethics or justice. They have little regard for truth. What they’re interested in is power. If it takes a lie to win, then go ahead and lie! If cheating is necessary to get through, then go ahead and cheat! In the end it doesn’t matter, because the goal is not to prove, but to be approved, regardless of the route used. Whilst a good debate often starts with ‘May the best man win!’, according to sophists, the opposite is true: whoever wins is the best man. ... There are many definitions of ‘critical thinking’, but they all agree on one point: the necessity of intellectual rigour. Critical thinking is not linked to a particular discipline or a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it must operate through all disciplines and should aim to preserve the advantages of skepticism without having to pay the price of ignorance. Thinking in a critical manner means trusting with caution while being wary of four elements: the reliability of a source, the strength of the argument, the medium, and our own ability to judge the matter at hand. The emergence and subsequent rise of ChatGPT and other so-called ‘generative’ AIs make critical thinking more essential today than ever before."]

Capper, Daniel. "Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World." Emergence (February 5, 2024) ["Daniel Capper's book Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World (Cornell UP, 2022) delves into ecological experiences in seven Buddhist worlds, spanning ancient India to the modern West, offering a comprehensive analysis of Buddhist environmental ethics. Capper critically examines theories, practices, and real-world outcomes related to Buddhist perspectives on vegetarianism, meat consumption, nature mysticism, and spirituality in nonhuman animals. While Buddhist environmental ethics are often seen as tools against climate change, the book highlights two issues: uncritical acceptance of ideals without assessing practical impacts and a lack of communication among Buddhists, hindering coordinated responses to issues like climate change. The book, with an accessible style and a focus on personhood ethics, appeals to those concerned about human-nonhuman interactions."]

Carocci, Max. "What is a Shaman?" The Bureau of Lost Culture (February 3, 2026) ["Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels. In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power. Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites. But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation. Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised. Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss."]

Carroll, James, et al. "The Moral Crisis Faced by Christianity." Ideas (May 6, 2019) ["Christianity is the world's largest religion. One third of humanity identifies as Christian. Christian rituals and symbols have a special power even among non-believers in western countries — witness the outpouring of shock and sorrow over the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The moral codes of Christianity are intrinsic to western societies and form the foundation of the ethics and mores of hundreds of millions of people. And yet, some of Christianity's most daunting challenges have derived from the moral failures of its biggest institutions and the failures of Christians to follow their religion's core teachings. The object of worship may be divine, but the church and the worshippers are very human. Some of the crises facing contemporary Christianity are obvious, such as the ever-widening revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and the role of bishops in covering it up. Some are less obvious, such as the embrace of anti-immigrant, xenophobic political movements in countries with large Christian majorities. On this month's edition of The Enright Files, conversations about the moral authority of the Church — and the struggles of Christians to live up to the principles of their faith — in the face of anxious, angry times and the Church's own crimes."]

Case, Oren. "The Wealth of Wall Street." The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (February 11, 2026) ["As the stock market continues to break records, Jon is joined by Oren Cass, Chief Economist at American Compass, to examine how America's economy was reengineered to serve shareholders instead of workers. Together, they trace the history of financialization that enabled this transformation, explore how shareholder capitalism has hollowed out worker prosperity, and consider what policy interventions could rebuild an economy that delivers shared gains."]

Chang, Ha Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. ["Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers-from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea-all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and-via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization-ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world. Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct-but developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth-but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps."]

Eckholm, Andrew. "The Art of Nostalgia: Wes Anderson's History Films." The Point #36 (February 1, 2026) ["Most of us, at least once, come to a moment when the contradictions between the world as we prefer to imagine it and the world as it apparently is become impossible to ignore. Our defenses overwhelmed and our sustaining delusions exposed, we feel an acute sense of loss, a falling away of fixity and coherence. It is at these moments that nostalgia’s pull is strongest. The same could be said in times of cultural and political crisis. The world is burning; the country is collapsing; the only thing certain about the future is that it won’t look like the past. In this situation, we can argue with our feelings and prove the safety we yearn for is another delusion: our childhood wasn’t actually happy; our nation’s past was full of horrors. Or we can pick up the sword of reaction: take our longing for the past at face value and attempt to reorder the world back into its proper shape. Both quests, however, are quixotic and never-ending. Nostalgia is ineradicable: dangerous when channeled, but even more dangerous to ignore. The question, then, is not whether to feel nostalgia but what to do with it. When the rush of events debunks our received wisdom about history and our place in it, new myths must be made that can explain how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t that way, at least not yet. New objects for our nostalgia are needed. In America, the argument over what those new objects should be, the debate over when things went wrong (2016, 2008, 1992, 1964, 1865, 1776, 1619) is what we call “culture war.” And it’s a marker of the depth of our crisis, in symbolic terms at least, that politics and culture war have become virtually synonymous."]

Fitzpatrick, Megan C., et al. "Improving the Prognosis of Healthcare in America." The Lancet (February 15, 2020) ["Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."]

Folbre, Nancy. "Making Care Affordable is Key to Our Economic Future." UC Press Blog (January 2, 2026) ["At some point in our lives, most of us commit time and money to taking care of others, especially children, the elderly and people experiencing illness or disability. Most of us consider such commitments both morally valuable and personally satisfying. Yet there is widespread disregard for their economic value to society as a whole—a disregard that contributes to mounting private costs. My forthcoming book, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First, traces this long history of misplaced priorities. It explains how unpaid care came to be disqualified as productive work and how expenditures on ourselves and others came to be classified as consumption rather than investment. Not everything we produce can be bought or sold, and market prices seldom reflect the social benefits of good care or the social costs of failing to provide it."]

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. "]

Grimm, Ryan and Emily Kashinsky. "Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers For BIOHACKING 'Manhattan Project'." Breaking Points (February 11, 2026) ["Ryan and Emily discuss Epstein recruiting NSA codebreakers for biohacking."]

Kampf-Lassin, Miles. "Let's Legalize Public Drinking."  Current Affairs (February 10, 2026) ["Laws against public drinking criminalize working-class people and make public life less fun. It’s time to repeal them."]

Koebler, Jason. "Our Zine About ICE Surveillance Is Here." 404 Media (February 2, 2026) ["We are very proud to present 404 Media’s zine on the surveillance technology used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While we have always covered surveillance and privacy, for the last year, you may have noticed that we have spent an outsized amount of our attention and time reporting on the ways technology companies are powering Donald Trump’s deportation raids. When we announced this zine in early December, we hoped that people would want it. Trump’s dehumanizing mass deportation campaign is perhaps the bleakest, most horrifying aspect of an administration that has reveled in its attacks on civil liberties, science, and government expertise."]

Rovelli, Carlo. "Mein Kampf." The Word / Te Kupu (March 14, 2022) ["We are going through some seriously trying times right now, times that are unprecedented for all of us - and as is usually the case during such times, uncertainty and fear creep in. Trying to rationalise global affairs is hard during such time, so I felt the need to record something that could perhaps shed at least a little light on what is happening in the world. So, here just a short podcast to try and frame what is going on, not from a geopolitical perspective, but more from a human and psychological one. In this episode I read an essay by Carlo Rovelli, one of the greatest minds of the 21st century, an essay he penned 6 years ago in response to the re-publication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Italy. It is a poignant analysis of what really drives dictators and tyrants to do what they do. This essay is one of many recorded in Rovelli’s genius book There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness. A mesmerising journey through science, philosophy and history, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness is a luminous new collection of essays from the 'the poet of modern physics' Carlo Rovelli - I highly recommend it. Will make you feel better about the planet we currently call home."]

---. "White Holes, Where Time Dissolves." To the Best of Our Knowledge (November 18, 2023) ["Carlo Rovelli takes us into the heart of a black hole, where space and time dissolve and a white hole is born. As a theoretical physicist, Rovelli has devoted his career to bridging the gap between Einstein's time-warping relativity theory and the unpredictability of quantum mechanics. In "White Holes," the beloved author of the internationally best-selling "The Order of Time," and "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" returns to the subjects that fascinate him most: time and impermanence, which he says have brought him a kind of serenity."]

Rubsam, Robert. "Wild Facts: Varieties of Spiritual Cinema." The Baffler (February 11, 2026)  ["Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict. Yet it reaches all the same. Practitioners of the art pursue what William James called “wild facts,” that mixture of the impossible and the unassimilable which crops up in any study of the affective dimensions of human culture. Levitation is a wild fact; so are mystic visions, holy apparitions, and inexplicable physical transformations. James called such events “paradoxical absurdities,” yet he sought to understand them all the same. In his book They Flew, the historian Carlos Eire attempted to parse what such impossible absurdities meant to the people who believed in them—and what it might mean for those on the other side of modernity, with its redefinition of the line between the rational and the irrational, to allow themselves at least the potential for belief. I’d venture that anyone who hopes to make a great work of art must do something similar: to believe, like the Shakers, in the possibility of impossible things. In taking seriously the visions of Ann Lee, Fastvold does this. So does Caroline Golum, the director and cowriter of Revelations of Divine Love. Golum’s film is many things: a dramatization of the life of the fourteenth-century anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich; a catalog of her holy visions; a plague story; a rebellion story; an expression of the persistent supremacy of love in a world of nearly unbearable suffering. It is both period-accurate and pointedly anachronistic, carefully handmade and plainly artificial. It is totally remarkable, and then some. ... Our age is not fit for angels. I don’t mean this literally, or even spiritually. I’m talking about art here. Ours is a culture of persistent literalism, a society which routinely mistakes surfaces for depths. We celebrate finely formed but ultimately shallow novels, films that serve only to demonstrate their maker’s formidable technique. Whether secular or religious, such artists are incapable of reaching beyond themselves, because they do not believe any other world to be possible. This is not just about the presence of miraculous or impossible events, such as those our ancestors routinely allowed themselves to experience. You don’t have to be religious, and you certainly don’t need to be Christian; Fastvold and Golum certainly aren’t. But you must have the sense that something—anything—might reside beyond the visible world, and that we might attempt to reach it. ... If you never expect more from the world, how could your art ever hope to? ... I want this: an art of expectation and aspiration, an art that levitates and revelates, that shakes and speaks in unknown tongues—a miraculous art that pushes beyond itself, that reaches toward the impossible, and makes contact. I want the art of wild facts. Don’t you?"]

Sarkar, Sahotra. "Defining when human life begins is not a question science can answer – it’s a question of politics and ethical values." The Conversation (September 1, 2017) ["The overall point is that biology does not determine when human life begins. It is a question that can only be answered by appealing to our values, examining what we take to be human. Perhaps biologists of the future will learn more. Until then, when human life begins during fetal developments is a question for philosophers and theologians. And policies based on an answer to that question will remain up to politicians – and judges."]

Schaake, Marietje. "Can Democracy Coexist with Big Tech." Capitalisn't (September 26, 2024) ["International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at the expense of the public and democratic institutions, Schaake writes. Schaake joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss proposals for reversing this shift of power and maintaining the balance between innovation and regulation in the digital age. If a "tech coup" is really underway, how did we get here? And if so, how can we safeguard democracy and individual rights in an era of algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism? Marietje Schaake’s new book, “The Tech Coup: Saving Democracy From Silicon Valley."]

Tabor, James. "On the Real Mother of Jesus." Radio West (December 16, 2025) ["Jesus’s mother Mary likely lived for over 40 years, but many believers only think of her in two places, the Nativity and the Crucifixion. The scholar James Tabor wants to change that. Tabor’s new book is called “The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus.” It’s the result of many years of work, trying to piece together who Mary really was. Which isn’t easy, because as Tabor says, the actual Mary — the Jewish woman living in Galilee, the mother of eight children and central figure in the Jesus movement — has been largely erased by a religious idea of Mary, the eternal virgin of the utmost purity. James Tabor joins us to reintroduce her. He calls Mary the best known, and least known, woman in history."]

Wilkerson, Isabel. “We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be.” On Being (March 9, 2023) ["In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson’s eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings “caste” into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but “caste is the bones.” And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that."Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.]

Wilkinson, Richard. "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies." TED Talks (November 2, 2011) ["We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust."]

Williams, Michelle A. "How W.E.B. DuBois and James McCune Smith Helped Combat Medical Racism in America." Literary Hub (February 4, 2026) ["The most prominent of Du Bois’s intellectual influences was James McCune Smith. Brilliant and uncompromising, Smith was a public intellectual with the distinction of being the United States’ first university-trained Black doctor. In 1846, in a stinging and exhaustively researched rebuttal, he showed how John Calhoun’s racist analysis was spurious. Using the relatively new field of biostatistics, along with demographics, he exposed the Southern senator’s questionable claims. Specifically, he did a spatial analysis using latitude coordinates to show that Black people lived longer in states that abolished slavery, like New Hampshire and Connecticut, than in Georgia where slavery was legal. He also stratified mortality rates by age, race, and place to demonstrate that Black people in New England lived longer than those in the South. And finally, he showed that racial differences in longevity were due to socioeconomic factors and were not inherently biological. “There are sufficient grounds for the belief that the slaves…under all [their] disadvantages, would, if freed from slavery, attain a longevity not very much below that attained by the Europe-American population.”"]

Recommended Books That I Read in 2026

(An ongoing year long archive)

Read:

Jones, Stephen Graham. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Titan Books, 2025. ["A chilling historical horror set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. Perfect for fans of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab and Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice. Etsy Beaucarne is an academic who needs to get published. So when a journal written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure. As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather, and a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. The journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow. A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror."]

Labatut, Benjamin. The MANIAC. Penguin, 2024. ["From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI. Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control. A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species."]

Langan, John. The Fisherman. Wood Horde, 2016. [Reread: In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.]

Mantel, Hillary. Wolf Hall. Fourth Estate, 2010. ["England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage."]

McRobert, Neil. Good Boy. Wild Hunt Books, 2025. ["After a boy vanishes on the outskirts of a small Northern town, a woman spies from her window a mysterious man digging a grave in the exact spot of the disappearance. However, when she confronts him, the man's true purpose is far more chilling than she could have imagined and the history of the town's fatal past unfolds. What has been hiding in this small northern town all these years?"]

Rovelli, Carlo. There are Places in This World Where Rules are Less Important Than Kindness. Penguin, 2020. ["One of the most inspiring thinkers of our age, the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics transforms the way we think about the world with his reflections on science, history and humanity. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, Carlo Rovelli follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, history, philosophy and politics. Written with his usual clarity and wit, these pieces range widely across time and space: from Newton's alchemy to Einstein's mistakes, from Nabokov's butterflies to Dante's cosmology, from travels in Africa to the consciousness of an octopus, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism. Charming, pithy and elegant, this book is the perfect gateway to the universe of one of the most influential scientists of our age."]

Stern, Steve. A Fool's Kabbalah. Melville House, 2025. ["In the ruins of postwar Europe, the world's leading expert on the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism goes on a hair-raising journey to recover sacred books stolen by the Nazis . . . At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent. The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies. Steve Stern's A Fool’s Kabbalah, a novel featuring numerous real-life historic figures, reimagines Gershom Scholem’s quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin. At the heart of that legacy was the idea that humor is an essential tool of redemption. In a parallel narrative, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behavior, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village. As Menke’s efforts collide with the monstrous reality of the Holocaust, we see—in another place and time--evidence that Dr. Scholem, in defiance of his austere reputation, has begun to develop the anarchic characteristics of a clown. A Fool’s Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who, though poles apart, complement one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humor and a little magic."]

Currently Reading:

Lytle, Mark Hamilton. America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon. Oxford University Press, 2006. ["In contrast with most histories of this period, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon does not treat the 1960s as a single historical moment or as successive waves of activism. Rather, it employs a chronological narrative to identify three distinct phases during which events of the era unfolded. The first began with the cultural ferment of the 1950s and ended with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. During the second phase, from 1964-1968, the "uncivil" wars began in earnest: Americans disagreed about new social and cultural mores, protests against the Vietnam War increased in size and vehemence, and American cities erupted in racial violence. From 1967 through 1968, all of these forces combined to divide Americans more deeply than they had been since the Civil War. In the third phase, Richard Nixon promised to bring Americans together. However, a host of new value and identity movements--environmentalists, consumer advocates, feminists, gay, Latino, and Native American activists--frustrated his design. Only after the Watergate scandals forced this polarizing figure from office did a measure of civility return to the nation's public discourse.America's Uncivil Wars captures the broad sweep of this tumultuous era, analyzing both the cultural and political influences on the movements of the 1960s. Paying particular attention to Latinos, Native Americans, feminism, and gay liberation, it integrates the politics of gender and race into the central political narrative. The book also covers such topics as McCarthyism; the FBI; rock and roll; teen culture in the 1950s; the origins of SDS, SNCC, and YAF; and the environmental and consumer movements. With its engaging narrative style and broad cultural emphasis, America's Uncivil Wars brings a fresh approach to our understanding of not only the 1960s but also U.S. history since 1945."]

Nayler, Ray Where the Axe is Buried. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2025. ["All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end. In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world. As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere. Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom."]

Price, Neil. The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of Vikings. Penguin Books, 2022. ["The 'Viking Age' is traditionally held to begin in June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, and to end in September 1066, when King Harald Hardrada of Norway died leading the charge against the English line at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This book, the most wide-ranging and comprehensive assessment of the current state of our knowledge, takes a refreshingly different view. It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, and traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were.
The narrative ranges across the whole of the Viking diaspora, from Vinland on the eastern American seaboard to Constantinople and Uzbekistan, with contacts as far away as China. Based on the latest archaeology, it explores the complex origins of the Viking phenomenon and traces the seismic shifts in Scandinavian society that resulted from an economy geared to maritime war. Some of its most striking discoveries include the central role of slavery in Viking life and trade, and the previously unsuspected pirate communities and family migrations that were part of the Viking 'armies' - not least in England.
Especially, Neil Price takes us inside the Norse mind and spirit-world, and across their borders of identity and gender, to reveal startlingly different Vikings to the barbarian marauders of stereotype. He cuts through centuries of received wisdom to try to see the Vikings as they saw themselves - descendants of the first human couple, the Children of Ash and Elm. Healso reminds us of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of the past, of how much we cannot know, alongside the discoveries that change the landscape of our understanding. This is an eye-opening and surprisingly moving book."]

ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #6

In talking about how these discourses frame our political beliefs and actions, the word ideology is commonly used. Ideologies (systematic ideas) also act as lenses that filter the way we view the world and quite literally request we see the world in a certain way. When we completely adopt a particular ideology, a way of seeing the world, we begin to ignore any other way of seeing the world. What does it mean to be an American? An urbanite? A global citizen? A conservative or liberal? A capitalist or socialist? A Christian or an atheist? We could provide an endless list of identities, or labels, that we accept unthinkingly, as if they are obvious, when most of these terms are contested, limited, and problematic. Our unthinking acceptance of social labels and social cues (symbols) can be difficult to recognize, unless we visit another culture and then it is quite clear in “our minds” how they think and act strangely (for instance, comments of how they drive on the wrong side of the rode, eat disgusting foods, dress funny, etc…). A key critical recognition, then, is to recognize that they are not weird, ignorant, or wrong, they are just different from how we have been trained to think. -- Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)

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Dialogic Cinephilia Exercises #10: In American History X (1998) there is a memorable flashback where a character realizes the development of his own violent, racist worldview, began through his conditioning as a child from the racist remarks of his father. The film is about the racist violence of the older brother Derek and his later deprogramming through engagement with what a mentor figure describes as an alternative history. In Slam (1998), the protagonist Ray (played by the poet Saul Williams) is a minor drug dealer that has been caught up by the legal system for drug offenses and is put into the violent environment of a New York prison. He is caught between violent forces within the prison that seek to force him to choose a side upon the threat of death. In a freestyle rap epiphany “Amethyst Rock,” Ray confronts both sides with his slam poetry claiming that they are doing the work of their oppressors in their violent acts against each other, and in doing so stopping the impending violence. Choose a film in which a character is raised to view the world violently and analyze how they learn to view the world in another way. - Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)

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Recognize the power of questions and do not let others silence/stifle your curiosity. Remember all knowledge is incomplete and in development. Life is too vast for any one
person/group/theory/discipline/profession/religion/culture/nation to grasp and understand.

Take responsibility for your education/understanding. Learning is not passive. Any teacher/mentor worth the title knows that they are at best facilitators for your learning. Good teachers lay out a map, point out the paths for potential discovery, detours and connections. Remember education or instruction (of any type - if it has a narrative, it is constructing a worldview) is never objective - pay attention to the way that knowledge is presented/represented to you. 
-- Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)

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Barrett, Brian, Tim Marchmann, and Zoe Schiffer. "Minneapolis Misinformation ; TikTok’s New Owners ; Moltbot Hype." Uncanny Valley (January 29, 2026) ["In today’s episode, Brian and Zoë are joined by WIRED’s Tim Marchman to discuss the news of the week — including how far-right influencers spread misinformation in Minneapolis, and why TikTok’s US version is off to a rocky start. Plus, why are some people obsessed with the AI assistant Moltbot?"]

Christie, George. "The Life of a Hells Angel." Soft White Underbelly (February 1, 2026) [MB: I was recently referred to this podcast by my good friend Eric who recognized my curiosity about different ways of being in the world. I'll be honest, some of the interviews can be very difficult/challenging (subject manner and challenging my prejudices). I found this interview with Christie to be very interesting. He is in his 80s and is still remarkably sharp. His discussion of the early days of Outlaw biker culture and his reasons for identifying with it. The early history of the Hells Angels (a good corrective to Sonny Barger). Also, this particular perspective is very rooted to my homeland culture where HA's were a visible presence when I was growing up and in which there were strong mythos about the subculture circulating. I also was interested in his later progression out of the culture, and his emphasis on reconciliation between the various biker groups. "Soft White Underbelly interview and portrait of George Christie, the ex-president of the Los Angeles Hells Angels chapter."]

Cramer, Ruby and Emily Witt. "The City of Minneapolis vs. Donald Trump." The New Yorker Radio Hour (January 30, 2026) [New Yorker "staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Cramer discuss the situation in Minneapolis, a city effectively under siege by militaristic federal agents. “This is a city where there’s a police force of about six hundred officers [compared] to three thousand federal agents,” Witt points out. Cramer shares her interview with Mayor Jacob Frey, who talks about how Minneapolis was just beginning to recover from the trauma of George Floyd’s murder and its aftermath, and with the police chief Brian O’Hara, who critiques the lack of discipline he sees from immigration-enforcement officers. Witt shares her interviews with two U.S. citizens who were detained after following an ICE vehicle; one describes an interrogation in which he was encouraged to identify protest organizers and undocumented people, in exchange for favors from immigration authorities."]

Fancourt, Daisy. "How the Arts Can Transform Your Health and Help You Live Longer." New Books in Critical Theory (January 23, 2026) ["Is culture good for you? In Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives (Cornerstone Press, 2026) Daisy Fancourt, a Professor of Psychobiology & Epidemiology and head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group at University College London offers a comprehensive and compelling argument for the ways arts and culture offer health and social benefits for individuals and societies. The book offers both the evidence for the benefits of arts and culture, whilst at the same time showing how many people and places are missing out and excluded from the positive impact of engagement and experiences. A powerful call for the importance of art and culture, backed by a blend of rigorous scientific and medical evidence, as well as engaging personal stories and narratives, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and sciences."]

Gleick, James. "How the Web Was Lost: The Internet was not Supposed to Suck." The New York Review of Books (December 4, 2025) [Review of these 3 books: This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt; Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture, and Why It Matters by Joanna Walsh;  Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow]

Gould, Rebecca Ruth. "Edward Said and the Task of the Intellectual Today." Los Angeles Review of Books (February 2, 2026) ["The Genocide in Gaza has revealed with brutal clarity how an entire class of intellectuals, along with the institutions that make their work possible, can be obliterated in real time while the states that fund and arm this destruction look away. Israeli forces used North American– and European-manufactured weapons to destroy all the universities in Gaza, including Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University–Gaza, Al-Quds Open University, Gaza University, Islamic University of Gaza, Israa University, Palestine Technical College, University College of Applied Sciences, University of Palestine, the Palestine College of Nursing, and Hassan II University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. Even after their physical infrastructures have been hollowed out, education in Palestine continues. Israel’s targeting of intellectuals over the past two years has shown the centrality of their role in resisting genocide. While the Israel Defense Forces have claimed that universities were destroyed in order to fight Hamas, the real targets were the intellectuals who keep memory alive and show their people how to turn education into resistance. Between 2023 and 2025, Israeli attacks murdered over 1,000 teachers and many more students. The destruction of Palestinian education has given new currency to scholasticide, a term first used by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi to describe Israel’s methods of offensive warfare in 2009. Taking the concept even further, Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a form of genocidal epistemicide that aims not just at the eradication of an educational system in the present but also at the destruction of its very possibility in the future."]

Guariglia, Matthew and Brian Hochman. "Unearthing and Reckoning with the Intelligence Excesses of the Cold War." Lawfare Daily (February 4, 2026) ["Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman to discuss their new book, “The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State,” in which they chronicle the law enforcement and intelligence community’s Cold War excesses, the Senate committee which uncovered them, and what we can learn about the resulting report in terms of our own era."]

Huberman, Andrew. "The Science of Creativity & How to Enhance Creative Innovation." The Huberman Lab (December 19, 2022) ["MB: An understanding of creativity from a neuroscientist. The base line definition and explanation of creativity is excellent, the explanation of how we all are essentially creative is helpful (use it or lose it, but even more, you need to cultivate it), the functionality of our brain and the centers which control and modulate our creative impulses is enlightening, also ways to increase your creativity and hindrances to your potential creativity (some which literally kill it). At the bottom of the page there are links to more resources. "In this episode, I explain how the brain engages in creative thinking and, based on that mechanistic understanding, the tools to improve one’s ability to think creatively and innovate in any area. I discuss how convergent and divergent thinking are essential for generating creative ideas and provide three types of meditation tools (open monitoring meditation, focused attention meditation & non-sleep deep rest; NSDR), which improve our ability to engage in these creative thinking patterns in specific and powerful ways. I also discuss how dopamine and mood contribute to the creative process and describe behavioral, nutritional and supplementation-based approaches for increasing dopamine to engage in creative thought and implementation. I explain how movement and storytelling (narrative) approaches can generate novel creative ideas and how substances like alcohol, cannabis, and psilocybin impact our creative ability. Excitingly, creativity is a skill that can be cultivated and enhanced; this episode outlines many tools to help anyone access creativity and apply."]

Hudson, David. "Luis Buñuel: Desire and Deviance." The Daily (January 28, 2026) ["In 1929, the poster boy of the movement, Salvador Dalí, teamed up with a fellow Spaniard, Luis Buñuel, who at the time was working in France as an assistant director for Jean Epstein, to turn their dreams into a screenplay that became Un chien andalou (1929). From this first, now-classic short through “to his final feature, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977),” wrote Adrian Martin in 2020, “Buñuel always stayed true to those primary surrealist principles with which he most identified: a spirit of revolt; the subversive power of passionate love, both romantic and erotic; a belief in the creativity of the unconscious (dreams and fantasies); a pronounced taste for black humor; and, last but never least, an abiding contempt for institutional religion and its representatives.”"]

Johnson, David. "Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self." The Observing (February 10, 2026) ["There are two kinds of voices living inside you. The authoritative word arrives with credentials, with institutional backing, with the collected wisdom of everyone who came before you and decided how things should be. It does not negotiate. It announces itself and waits for you to comply. Your parents spoke it. Your religion spoke it. Your culture spoke it. And you absorbed it so completely that by the time you were old enough to question it, you could not tell where the voice ended and you began. The internally persuasive word is different. It emerges from dialogue. From the messy, uncertain process of testing ideas against experience. It is the thought that keeps coming back even when you try to ignore it. The question that will not let you sleep. The feeling that something is wrong even though you cannot articulate what or why. The internally persuasive word does not give you answers. It gives you better questions. You change through dialogue. Through conversation where neither person walks away the same. Where words move between you and transform in transit and come back different than they left. But most people never make it past the authoritative word. Because the internally persuasive word is uncomfortable. It says maybe everything you were told was wrong. Maybe the life you built is not the life you want. Maybe the person you have been performing is not the person you are."]

Jones, Kent. "To Live or Clarify the Moment: Rick Linklater’s Waking Life." Senses of Cinema (March 2002) ["The alleged “indie” movement, always primed to make “heartfelt gems” rather than masterpieces, now seems to be on its last legs. Odd to remember that Jim Jarmusch and Rick Linklater, its two most noteworthy originators, are unapologetically artistic types. Of the two, Linklater has always been the more unassuming. Not unlike one of his charming, intelligent, loquacious characters, he wears his artistry lightly. If Jarmusch is the poet of American bitterness, then Linklater is the poet of American freedom, his characters comfortably operating as solitary satellites or within supportive enclaves of artists and eccentrics, free from alienation and freely giving voice to their obsessions and impressions. Many people regard Linklater’s films as “small,” hip,” “mellow,” “pleasingly low-key” – lifestyle components, befitting the indie profile as it evolved into a marketing tool. It’s not an uncommon occurrence in film criticism to get the artist mixed up with his/her subjects – just as Scorsese is often confused with his De Niro/Pesci characters, Linklater will probably always be thought of as a charming slacker. In fact, he’s a supremely attentive artist, to small things like the mood in a coffee shop or a 7-11, or the precise way that time passes on a long train ride. On another level, he has an acute understanding of the endless searching that lies at the heart of every well-examined life. It’s easy to miss the undercurrent of tension in Linklater’s work, perhaps because it’s a form of tension that haunts us all at one time or another, consciously or unconsciously: whether to seize the moment, clarify it or just live it."]

Koch, Christof. "Consciousness and the Human Experience." Converging Dialogues #472 (February 8, 2026) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Christof Koch on the nature of consciousness. They talk about why consciousness is important to study, differences with subjective experiences and phenomenology, selfhood, thinking beyond interoceptive perceptions, and Cartesian dualism. They discuss panpsychism, neural correlates of consciousness, vision, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), psychedelics, the future of consciousness research, and many more topics. Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute, chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of many books, including his latest book, Then I Am Myself the World."]

Kolk, Bessel van der. "Trauma, the Body, and 2021." On Being (November 11, 2021) ["When Krista interviewed the psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time, his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published. She described him then as “an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences on people and society.” She catches up with him in 2021 — as we are living through one vast overwhelming experience after the other. And The Body Keeps the Score is now one of the most widely read books in the pandemic world. His perspective is utterly unique and very practically helpful — on what’s been happening in our bodies and our brains, and how that relationship can become severed and restored." Bessel van der Kolk is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s also a professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School. His books include Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on the Mind, Body, and Society and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.]

Lee, Nathan. "Buried in the Mind: On The Shrouds, David Cronenberg’s Grief-Stricken Techno-Thriller." Notebook (April 18, 2025) ["In defense of The Shrouds (2024), the new film by David Cronenberg, I propose a moratorium on our fixation with “the body” when considering one of the great filmmakers of the mind. My intention is neither to be perverse nor provocative, qualities The Shrouds offers in abundance; nor to minimize that its plot centers on a technology that allows the bereaved to observe in real time the rotting corpses of buried loved ones. Bodies⎯alive and dead, material and imagined, actual and virtual, whole and dismembered⎯are indeed a central problem in The Shrouds, as they were in Crimes of the Future (2022). But just as that film’s tale of an ecological dystopia where the human body sprouts organs of unknown purpose was fundamentally concerned with how we assign meaning to the body, The Shrouds is an extended meditation on images of the body, including the body of the film we’re watching. "]

Marano, Mark.  "Melania - An Aggressively Dull Travesty."  The Arts Fuse (February 2, 2026)  ["All that I mention above, the aggressive lack of substance, underlines that Melania is an atrocious, badly made movie. Evil as they are, the Satanic cinematic genius of Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation can’t be denied. But those were works of propaganda, the propagation of which requires innovation, competence, and craft for the purpose of injecting their ideas into the minds of their audiences. Confirmaganda requires the opposite—utterly shitty, numbing filmmaking that doesn’t dominate through its presentation of ideas, but the removal of ideas. As O’Brien said in 1984: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
The human minds welcoming Melania haven’t been torn apart in Room 101. The lasting achievement of Melania is that it reinforces your love of Melania—Big Mother—through generous doses of aggressive, assertively dull banality."]

McDouagall, James. "A Global History of Islam." Converging Dialogues #466 (January 19, 2026) ["In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with James McDougall about a global history of Islam. They discuss the global spread and diversity of Islam, Arabia before Muhammad, succession after Muhammad, the five pillars of Islam, emphasis on law and doctrine within Islam, Hadiths, the Ottoman Empire and spread of Islam, Islamists, Islam in the 21st century, and many more topics. James McDougall has taught history at Princeton; the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of numerous books including the most recent book, Worlds of Islam: A Global History."]

Nieman, Susan. "Where Wokeness Went Wrong." The New York Review of Books (December 4, 2025) ["Now that the war on wokeness has gone nuclear, waged with all the resources of an administration that views every struggle against racism, sexism, or homophobia as an affront, it is harder to discuss than ever. Is wokeness simply, as some argue, a phantom invented by conservatives opposed to any challenge to the established order?1 Like its predecessor “political correctness,” “wokeness” quickly became a term of abuse, complicating the already thorny attempts to define it. Attacks on “woke Marxist lunatics” betray so much ignorance that it’s tempting to give up analysis entirely. Yet analysis is needed, for criticisms of wokeness have come from across the political spectrum. Let’s start with what it is not. It isn’t cancel culture, which has been around since Plato banned Homer from his republic. That’s not an idea but a tactic that can be used by all sides—most drastically by the MAGA right in recent months. Nor is it dogmatic puritanism, which appears in many political movements. John McWhorter’s comparison of woke ness to fundamentalist religion is illuminating, but it doesn’t claim to be a definition. Wokeness is hard to define because it’s an incoherent concept, built on a contradiction between feeling and thought. It’s fueled by emotions traditionally held by the left. When in doubt, stand by those on the margins: the tired, the poor, the hungry, those yearning to breathe free. Those emotions, however, are undermined by beliefs that have traditionally belonged to the right. What are called identity politics—misleadingly, since they reduce our rich and various identities to our ethnic and gender origins—assume that you will have real connections and deep obligations only to those who belong to your own tribe, though others may be useful as allies. Calls for justice are sometimes viewed as liberal attempts to impose (Eurocentric) values on others; anyone who claims to be acting for the sake of a universal humanity is deceptive. Finally, apparent steps toward progress are simply subtler forms of oppression. Add to all of this the suspicion that reason is a form of domination that replaced more honest struggles for power, and you have a worldview that is not far from one held by the worst reactionaries. I am not arguing, as is commonly suggested, that wokeness was on the right track but went too far. Rather, by unwittingly accepting deeply regressive philosophical assumptions, it went in the wrong direction entirely."]

Robinson, Marilynne. "At What Cost?" The New York Review of Books (January 16, 2026): 15. ["Here is one final example of the cheapening of labor that demonstrates the readiness of the American population to be duped. This willingness is a tendency that must be taken into account if future abuses are to be forestalled. Some of us are old enough to remember when one income was sufficient to support a household. During that time the standard of living—measured in terms of homeownership, durable goods, access to higher education, and so on—rose sharply. Then the labor force grew dramatically, and it took two incomes, in some cases three or four jobs, to support a household. There is nothing more certain than that anything is cheapened when it is in surplus or when demand for it is weak. If two incomes have the same purchasing power as one, then both earners are working for some fraction of what would have been the single earner’s pay, corrected for inflation. Lives are harrowing and expensive because they have been entirely overtaken with work. There has been no adjustment of income to compensate for the expenses involved in childcare and transportation, among many other things. While it is true that the women’s movement, trying for equality, contributed very importantly to these changes, no kind of equity can justify absorbing a working woman’s earnings into the same level of income her household had before she made a financial contribution through her work. This by itself would have unbalanced the economy. It is a fundamental injustice affecting all those who live by their work, a cause of disappointment, weariness, bitterness. Yet their faith in the system is strong enough to let them limit their criticism to the high price of groceries rather than to the lowering valuation of their work, their health, and their time. AI fits entirely too well into this landscape. It seems perfectly designed to produce rapidly diminishing returns, at incalculable cost to society."]

Rovelli, Carlo. "Cosmic Mysteries and the Politic of Wonder." Wonder Cabinet (February 7, 2026) ["Carlo Rovelli’s quest to understand the nature of reality began not in a physics lab, but in youthful experiments with consciousness, political protest and a restless hunger for meaning—years before he “fell madly in love with physics.” Today, Rovelli is famous for his bestselling books, including "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" and "Reality Is Not What It Seems," and his pioneering work on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, including black holes and quantum gravity. In a wide-ranging conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Rovelli about his early, profound experiences with LSD; his discovery of the "spectacular" beauty of general relativity and quantum mechanics; his lifelong search for purpose in both the cosmos and his own life; and why scientists need to be politically engaged. Carlo also tells us about the big idea that he’d put in our own wonder cabinet. This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. We also play a short excerpt from Anne Strainchamps’ earlier interview with Rovelli that originally aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge."]

Rushton, Michael. "The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan 2023)." New Books in Critical Theory (November 25, 2023) ["Should governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, explores a variety of frameworks for thinking about this question, from liberal and egalitarian justifications, through to communitarian, conservative, and multiculturalist ideas. The book outlines the economic method for thinking about the arts, and uses this as a starting point to understand what various political philosophies might tell policymakers and the public today. A rich and deep intervention on a pressing social and governmental question, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and cultural policy. Prof Rushton blogs at both Substack and Artsjournal and you can read open access papers covering some of the key ideas in the book here and here."]

Sagar, Paul. "What’s Wrong with Political Philosophy? Learning from Aristotle." Past Present Future (February 1, 2026) ["Today it’s the first episode in a new series asking why contemporary political philosophy struggles to make sense of the deepest problems of politics and exploring how the history of ideas might help. David talks to political theorist Paul Sagar about why looking for justice might be the wrong place to start. Instead, Paul suggests we start with Aristotle, for whom the search for justice was the problem not the solution. So what should we do instead?"]

Schmalzer, Sigrid and Charles Schwarz. "Science Against the People." Darts and Letters #68 (November 14, 2022) ["Today, right-wingers attack science and liberals defend it. Science good, anti-science Republicans bad–that’s the prevailing narrative, especially so during the March for Science in 2017. However, it’s not so simple. Perhaps science should be defended from reactionary attacks, but not uncritically defended as inherently good. That’s the message of Science for the People,a radical movement of scientists and educators who argue that science has always served capitalism, patriarchy, and empire. So, science doesn’t need to be simply defended–it needs to change. We examine the group’s Vietnam-era origins, with the story of one of its founders, physicist Charles Schwartz. Schwartz’ work initially supported the US war effort, but he became a thorn in the side of the military and scientific establishment for over two decades. However, in the 1980s Science for the People went dormant. Since the mid-2010s, it’s back. We then speak to a current member, and also the historian who brought them back together. Sigrid Schmalzer is co-editor of a collection of the group’s writing, entitled Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists, 1969-1989. We cover how the group came back together, how this incarnation is different, and how they traverse the complicated politics between pro-science liberals and anti-science reactionaries."]

Seth, Anil. "How we build perception from the inside out." Psyche (January 16, 2026) ["It’s easy to mistake our conscious experience for an ongoing, accurate account of reality. After all, the information we recover from our senses is, of course, the only window we’ll ever have into the outside world. And for most people most of the time, our perception certainly feels real. But the notion that our senses capture an objective external reality can be dispelled by considering something as fundamental as colour, which can be culturally influenced and, even within a single culture, leave the population split between seeing the same picture of a dress as black and blue or white and gold. In this Aeon Original, Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK, puts our imperfect relationship with reality in perspective. In conversation with Nigel Warburton, consultant senior editor at Aeon, Seth argues that it’s not just that our perceptions provide flawed accounts of the outside world, but that our brains aren’t in the business of recovering the outside world to begin with. So it’s more accurate to think of our conscious experience as a series of predictions that we’re incessantly and subconsciously fine-tuning – a world we build from the inside out, rather than the outside in."]

Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020. ["A mind-bending journey into the hidden world of fungi that will change your understanding of life on earth. "A dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing book . . . I ended it wonderstruck at the fungal world--the secrets of which modern science is only now beginning to fathom."--Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland. When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In Entangled Life, the brilliant young biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us the world from a fungal point of view, providing an exhilarating change of perspective. Sheldrake's vivid exploration takes us from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the "Wood Wide Web," to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life's processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms--and our relationships with them--are changing our understanding of how life works."]

Strand, Sophie. "Ecological Storytelling and Mythic Imagination." Wonder Cabinet (January 31, 2026) ["Writer and ecologist Sophie Strand thinks at a scale that can feel dizzying—in the best way. In a single conversation, she can move from the chemical structure of cells to mushroom spores, from ancient weather gods to mycorrhizal fungi, from Bronze Age collapse to the slow intelligence of soil. In this episode of Wonder Cabinet, we talk with Strand about wonder that doesn’t float upward but roots downward—into bodies, ecosystems, decay, and deep time. We begin with her essay “Your Body Is an Ancestor,” published shortly before Halloween and the Day of the Dead, and follow her imagery into our shared prehistoric past. The conversation also explores how Strand’s experience of chronic illness reshaped her understanding of nature, selfhood, and health. Rather than seeing the sick body as broken, she turns to ecological metaphors: spider webs, soil structures, caterpillars dissolving inside cocoons. What might it mean to understand ourselves not as machines that fail, but as landscapes that change? Along the way, we talk about fantasy and “romantasy,” Tolkien, Harry Potter, Dramione fan fiction and communal storytelling rituals. This is a conversation about wonder with dirt under its fingernails: embodied, mythic, ecological, and deeply alive to the cycles of death and regeneration that bind us all."]

Turfah, Mary. "The Most Moral Army." Los Angeles Review of Books (October 1, 2024) ["Mary Turfah examines Israeli officials’ weaponization of language, particularly that of medicine, in an attempt to reframe their genocide in Gaza."]

---. "No Other Land for Whom?" The Notebook (February 11, 2025)  ["The documentary captures how ethnic cleansing serves the Zionist state-building project. The Palestinians of Masafer Yatta lack building permits, and so their Israeli overseers are legally—and, in a state shaped to suit the eyes of a vindictive god, morally—obligated to lay down the law, to destroy everything. In No Other Land we see that for the Palestinian to have “no permit” means the Israeli has license to fill water wells with cement, to clumsily take military-grade hedge-clippers to water pipes, bulldozer to schoolhouse, gun to Palestinian. And we see the mundanity of these exercises of state power: soldiers shuffling off to carry out orders, almost bored by their tasks. "]

Current Problems in American Culture

 1) Our corporate media I've seen the best minds of multiple generations, but in particular the older ones, rotted and emptied-out by corporate media. MSNBC is just as bad as FOX. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, etc... The social media platforms - ridiculous propaganda channels. We are the most propagandized society that has ever believed it was freely educated/informed (there are worse authoritarian societies, but the people knew the state of things). That is not to say they do not provide good information, instead you must recognize the obvious bias (always present in any human dissemination of information) of the media you consume. If you believe the news you consume is free of bias, sorry, you are ignorant.

2) Our corporate parties (2 in particular). Bought and paid for. The check has been issued, both sides bend the knee to billionaires. Where does that leave the rest of us. A special note. One of the most loathsome political acts is to blame others for your side losing an election. Such cowardice should not be ignored. It is the act of abusers: "I did it because of this." No, take responsibility for your failures, learn from them, grow, and become something better.

3) Our corporate education model. What happens when multiple generations are taught to answer questions on quizzes/tests, instead of immersing themselves in environments, peoples/cultures, and issues they want to explore. Americans are sadly, overwhelmingly, anti-intellectual. It is a damning statement about our culture. People fear knowledge. Let that sink in, people fear knowledge. It's enough to make you wonder whether this dumbing down of America is intentional. Sadly, people also fear difference, the strange, the unique. Have we arrived at a point where people just want the same people and the same things throughout their lives. Where people want a culture where everyone think, looks, and acts the same? I would consider this - cultural insanity.

4) Us, all of us, you and me and them. Quit slinging blanket dismissals of people and cultures. Focus your intellect and criticism to the root of the problems/issues.

"There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”
--Raymond Williams

"Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all (15-16)." - Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook. (1957) Translated by Martin Brady. NY: Bloomsbury, 2013.

"For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?" - Marie Howe "Singularity"

"The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n." - John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1