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)---------------------------------------------------
person/group/theory/discipline/profession/religion/culture/nation to grasp and understand.
-- Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)
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."]
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. "]
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."]
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?"]
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