This extreme anxiety led to the construction of a psychological defense system that relied upon a smooth and seamless internalization of social myths about gender and sexuality, so effective that I forgot that I had ever thought or felt differently. Even more disturbing, I have had to recognize that my self-destructive internalization of restrictive sexual and gender roles led to my own complicity in reproducing the violence and oppression of our society. I was no longer the kind, sensitive kid who wanted to create something beautiful; instead, I was the angry, anti-social bully who was going to make others pay for my pain. Like Zachary growing up in the working-class male world of Quebec (C.R.A.Z.Y. https://youtu.be/sCvQ2OpCj8A ), I sought to erase my empathy for others and adopted the hard tough guise. Slowly, later in life, through the patient guidance of caring people who taught me about love, I learned to recognize my betrayal of my inner self in order to fit into society’s strict gender roles. As I once again began to open myself up to my creative side, I also became very interested in how other artists understand and portray identity issues. This helped me to recognize the warring selves inside me and allowed me to put them into dialogue with each other, with positive role models in my community, and with the cinema I study. -- Michael D. Benton, "Dialogic Cinephilia" (2022)
Pistor, Katerina. "How Inequality Distorts the Law." Capitalisn't (February 19, 2026) ['If we want to understand why capitalism feels broken, do we need to stop looking at the economy and start looking at the legal code that underpins it? In our system, capital is often described as money, machinery, or raw materials. But Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor argues that capital is actually a legal invention. An asset, whether it's a plot of land, an idea, or a promise of future pay, only becomes capital when it is given the right legal coding. Pistor suggests that lawyers are the true coders of capitalism. They use the law to "enclose" assets, from land to user data, giving owners the power to exclude others and monetize that value. She argues for injecting principles of "fairness and reciprocity" back into private law, ensuring that contracts aren't just tools for the powerful to extract value from the weak. Luigi Zingales suggests that large corporations have become so powerful we may need a new branch of "quasi-public law" to govern the asymmetry between an individual consumer and a corporate giant. This episode explores the deep, often invisible architecture of our economic system and asks whether we can ever truly tame corporate power without rewriting the rules of the game."]
Robson, Leo. "Godardorama." New Left Review (February 17, 2026) ["Richard Linklater’s shrewd and absorbing film catches this ‘feeling of freedom’ that Godard invoked. Shot in black-and-white with a French-speaking cast, it tells the story of the making of À Bout de Souffle, which Godard, a critic and reporter with a handful of shorts to his name, shot for little money over twenty days in the late summer of 1959. There was no script, only a set-up, derived by François Truffaut from a news story. Michel, after stealing a car from an American soldier at Marseilles Old Port, shoots a policeman who was trying to flag him down, then hitches a ride to Paris, where he steals money from his girlfriend Liliane and hangs around with his ‘favourite’ girlfriend Patricia, an American student and aspiring journalist, until she decides to turn him in. À Bout de Souffle is now a monument, as reflected in the existence of Linklater’s portrait, but its central properties are casualness and offhand intimacy. The director Roger Vadim claimed that when he bumped into Godard shortly before production began, all he had was a few phrases scrawled on the inside of a matchbook, among them ‘She has an accent’ and ‘It ends badly. Well, no. Finally it ends well. Or it ends badly.’"]
Solnit, Rebecca. "Hope After the End." Wonder Cabinet (February 14, 2026) ["How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us. But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book "The Beginning Comes After the End," writer and activist Rebecca Solnit makes the case that something is dying, all right — because something better is being born. A rising worldview that embraces antiracism, feminism, environmental thinking, Indigenous and non-Western ideas, and a vision of a more interconnected, compassionate world. Solnit is an engaged writer and intellectual in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. Her new book picks up where her earlier bestseller “Hope in the Dark” left off — with an argument against despair and historical amnesia. In this conversation, we explore the extraordinary scale of progressive social, political, scientific and cultural change over the past century, the roots of Solnit’s stance of “pragmatic, embodied hope,” her thoughts on “moral wonder, “ and her years in San Francisco’s underground punk rock scene. She also tells us what she’d put in our own wonder cabinet: an AIDS Memorial Quilt square sewn by Rosa Parks."]
Suh, Elissa. "Against Nature: Feral Eating and Feminist Performance." Notebook (February 20, 2026) ["In cinema, the image of a woman eating is seldom incidental: Romcoms are rife with Bridget Joneses who cannot control themselves. By contrast, for men, eating is often a display of authority or menace, of power rather than pathology. Perhaps this additional scrutiny can work as an advantage. When a camera watches women eat, it opens the possibility of performance before they even speak, turning their appetite into a subtle assertion of oneself—a rejection of expectations or a claim to private desires. How or what she eats marks her difference: It can measure her position in the world or the distance she keeps from it. Like Vitti, these women can be feral, which is above all a mark of refusal; they are not domesticated, not assimilated, but fragile and dangerous, out of bounds."]
Suton, Koraljka. "Villeneuve’s Arrival: A Deep Exploration of the Importance of Language, the Nature of Time and the Dichotomy of Human Existence." Cinephilia and Beyond (November 18, 2024) ["Being a linguist, Louise knows very well that language is the foundation of civilization. It is “the glue that holds a people together,” as she states in her book, making it possible for us to communicate effectively and find common ground. Language helps us bring forth our internal landscapes in ways that are extremely basic and deeply profound. Much like music, it enables us to convey and share with one another the intricacies that make up the human experience, which, in turn, gives us a chance to feel seen and understood. This striving for true understanding is not just inherent in Louise’s vocation as a linguist but is also one of her core qualities as a person. Unlike the majority of the world and its leaders, she is not the least bit interested in playing zero-sum games but rather seeks to utilize our ability for meaningful interpersonal connection so as to arrive at a win-win. Even though the aliens in Arrival are as unhuman-like as it gets, both in terms of language and appearance, Louise’s primary objective is, and remains throughout the film, to truly understand them. And, in doing so, bridge the gap between the ‘self’ and ‘other’. How does she do it? By connecting with them—being to being. This delicate unfolding is touching and awe-inspiring to behold."]
Thrasher, Steven W. "From Gaza to Minneapolis We Are Still Being Told to Disbelieve Our Eyes." Literary Hub (February 4, 2026) ["The far more dangerous problem has been western news outlets and governments pretending that horrors that actually did happen did not occur. Journalists, more than 270 of them, gave their lives to show the world the genocide in Gaza. So did more than 300 United Nations workers and more than 1,500 healthcare workers. As did tens of thousands of Palestinians, many who pleaded with the world for help, human-to-human, mother-to-mother, child-to-child, using their phone cameras to prove to the world the depth of their desperation and persecution. There is little excuse for not knowing what happened in Gaza; everyday, it was as if the screams of 10,000 Anne Franks had been beamed right into the pockets of millions of Americans during World War II. And the people of the world largely believed their fellow humans in Gaza, when they heard them scream and cry. But the news media and the governments of the West pretended that what was happening was not, in fact, happening. They proved that the denial of verifiable reality is as dangerous as manufactured propaganda. They physically beat, expelled and even deported students who said the genocide was unacceptable. They fired journalists and blacklisted professors who reported what anyone could see, if they chose to. They cancelled the visas of artists who spoke the truth."]
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