ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #9

Joe Kent served 11 tours as a ranger in the Special Forces primarily in Iraq. His wife Shannon was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria while serving. Kent became politically active and was later a fervent supporter of Trump. He was appointed the head of the National Counterterroism Center under Tulsi Gabbard the director of national intelligence. For that role he was confirmed by the US Senate in July and had the highest security clearance. On March 17th, Kent resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, citing disagreement over U.S. involvement in the Iran war and the influence of Israel and the Israeli lobby in domestic politics. This is an episode about his first interview after that resignation.



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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The Danger of a Single Story." TED Global (2009) ["Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."]

Alexander, Rahne, Keith Gordon, and Mike White. "Head On (2004)." The Projection Booth #789 (March 4, 2026) ["Collision as courtship. Self-destruction as intimacy. Fatih Akın's Head-On (2004) opens with two suicide attempts and spirals into a sham marriage between Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), German Turks who weaponize matrimony to escape themselves. What begins as a performance of tradition mutates into volatile love, violence, prison, exile, and a reunion that refuses catharsis. Keith Gordon and Rahne Alexander join Mike to unpack Akın’s fusion of Sirkian melodrama, Fassbinder fatalism, and arabesk despair."] 

Banai, Hussein.. "War with Iran." Open  Source (March 6, 2026) ["We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, on the first weekend of the war, which President Trump says could go on for weeks. But to what end? On whose say-so? At what risk? Hussein Banai, known as Huss, is our guest—the guide we turn to partly because he was born and schooled in Iran. He is informed but not official, a professor of international studies at Indiana University in Bloomington."]

The Corporation (Canada: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot, 2003: 145 mins) ["Did you know that the legal system recognises a corporation as a person? What kind of ‘person’ is it then? What would happen if it sat down with a psychologist to discuss its behaviour and attitude towards society and the environment? Explored through specific examples, this film shows how and why the modern-day corporation has rapaciously pressed itself into the dominant institution of our time, posing big questions about what must be done if we want a equitable and sustainable world. What must we do when corporations are psychopaths?"]

Coviello, Peter. "Infrastructures of Escape." Filmmaker Quarterly 79.3 (2026)
["One Battle is not, as Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) rather successfully was, an “adaptation” of Pynchon. It is, I think, something looser, and weirder, and altogether better: an extended riff, that is also an extended reading, that is also—and here the heart swells—something like a fan’s notes, a loving tribute executed in the idiom of film. There are plenty of things to say about its formal accomplishments and deficits—about the textured 70 mm photography, the pivot from Vineland’s 1960s/1980s setting to the calamitous present tense, the badly fumbled ending, its casting, its plotting, the astounding kinetic vivacity of a film that’s engrossing over the whole course of its nearly three-hour run. But most of what I mean to say is that I fucking loved it. Whatever else Anderson may do in his reading, I think he gets impeccably and upliftingly correct that Pynchon is at heart a comic humanist and a vitriolic antifascist. And then, with a grace and ingenuity all his own, Anderson translates that signature novelistic disposition—the delirious sentences, off-kilter plots, lunatic counterfacutals—into a rollicking big-screen entertainment. I don’t know that it’s the easiest thing, just now, to make a credibly antifascist piece of mass culture. Anderson has done that, and Pynchon helped him do it. I’d like to give an account of what this means."]

Dennison, Stephanie and Alfredo Suppia. "The Secret Agent: gripping thriller reminds us why academic freedom needs protecting." The Conversation (February 19, 2026) ['One of the features that makes The Secret Agent, set predominantly in 1977, particularly compelling in this regard is its treatment of universities, as battlegrounds where memory, power and democracy collide. The film’s main character Armando, played by Oscar-nominated Moura, is not, in fact, a secret agent and has no obvious links to opposition movements. He is an academic forced into hiding after clashing with big business interests aligned with the authoritarian regime who want to get their hands on his research."]

Diamond, Adele. "The Science of Attention." On Being (2014) ["What Adele Diamond is learning about the brain challenges basic assumptions in modern education. Her work is scientifically illustrating the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization, and reflection. What nourishes the human spirit, the whole person, it turns out, also hones our minds."]

Doctorow, Cory. "How to Stop “Enshittification” Before It Kills the Internet." Capitalisn't (December 11, 2025) ["There’s a word that’s gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “enshittification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders. We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed. For Doctorow, "enshittification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors. Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior. Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution."]

Drimmer, Sonja and Christopher J. Nygren."Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education." Publiic Books (December 16, 2025) ["Though half a century ago, still, the demonstration resonates now. Today, it may seem to many that the cluster of technologies marketed as “AI” is entirely new, and, logically, that objection to it must likewise be unheard-of. But, as the demonstration shows, not only is “AI” not especially new; protesting it has a long history. Inspired by the collective objection represented in this photo, we are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education. We envision a resistance that is, by its very nature, a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction."]

Gemünden, Gerd. "When the Fantastic Meets Reality: An Interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho." Film Quarterly 79.3 (2026) ["O agente secreto (The Secret Agent, 2025), the latest feature by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, has been billed as a political thriller, but is better described as a stylish and frolicsome romp through Brazilian and North American film history that celebrates all that cinema is capable of. While beholden to the narrative of deception that propels many conventional thrillers, the film smoothly navigates an array of genres (the Western, noir, horror, even the family story) while nodding toward John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and other US horror films of the 1970s. Set in 1977, during the military dictatorship, The Secret Agent casts its tale of corruption and repression as a black comedy, presenting a strange and discomforting story in which nothing is what it seems, and in which the many subplots and detours matter more than the story’s central conceit, which revolves around a researcher called Marcelo (an alias; his real name is Armando) on the run from hired hitmen. In a metanarrative set in the present, two university students transcribe audiotapes that record the story of Marcelo/Armando—one of several ways in which The Secret Agent engages with the notion of the archive and links the past to the present."]

Holt, Jim. "The Grand Illusion." Lapham's Quarterly (ND) ["Does time have a future? Yes, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be."]

Iacono, Carlo.  "Books and Screens."  Aeon (February 19, 2026) ["Amy Orben, a psychologist studying technology panics, identifies the ‘Sisyphean cycle’: each generation fears new media will corrupt youth; politicians exploit these fears while deflecting from systemic issues like inequality and educational underfunding; research begins too late; and by the time evidence accumulates showing mixed effects dependent on context, a new technology emerges and the cycle restarts. What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology. These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications. This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses. If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints."]

Johnson, David. "The Doors of Perception." The Observing #3 (January 20, 2023) ["In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between observation and perception, how our own prejudices and preconceptions overlay what we experience, and what we can do to change that."]

Kemp, Luke. "Where are We Going? Societal Collapse - The Future." Past Present Future (March 8, 2026) ["In the fourth and final conversation in this series David talks to Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse, about where we might be heading. Where does the greatest risk of global collapse lie? Who is ultimately responsible for our fate? What makes states and corporations the agents of doom? How can we humans fight back?"]

---. " Where Are We Going? Societal Collapse – The Modern Age." Past Present Future (March 1, 2026) ["In today’s episode David talks to Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse, about the strengths and weaknesses of modern states and modern structures of authority. Are modern states any different from the criminal enterprises of coercion that preceded them? Does democracy change the dynamic of societal collapse? What are the lootable resources of the modern age? And why are all states essentially empires?"]

Larsen, Rasmus Rosenberg. "There are No Psychopaths." Aeon (February 27, 2026) ["Virtually everything you think you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on?"]

Modinger, John H. "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." Military Review (July/August 2022) ["The contention of Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is that senior military and political leaders routinely lied to the American public. If the title of the book has a familiar ring to it, that is no accident. It plays on the title of another dramatic release of information that revealed U.S. political and military leaders were lying about the state of affairs in Vietnam. With the release of The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg provided a war-weary people a trove of documents that clearly showed the American government and its military had been complicit in a long-running attempt to deceive the American public about the true situation in the Vietnam War. The fact of the matter was the war was going poorly, but leaders offered up a steady diet of sunshine and rainbows detached from the reality on the ground to sidestep uncomfortable questions and prolong the war—up until then America’s longest."]

Morrison, Grant. "The Enemies of Humanity are Wielding Occult Power." Team Human #360 (March 11, 2026) ["The tech elite are wielding occult power, but we have the imagination. Douglas Rushkoff sits down with legendary comic writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison for a deeply urgent conversation about reclaiming reality. Morrison argues that magic isn't just the supernatural; it's a mundane, everyday tool of collective agreement that we are all already using. While billionaires use algorithmic binding spells to predict our moves and trap us in a boring, materialist nightmare, we possess the ultimate counter-measure: our collective imagination.Finding the others is no longer enough. It's time to stop being NPCs in someone else's sterile simulation and start authoring our own pro-human reality."]

Muncer, Mike and Juliet Sugg. "MAN-MADE MONSTERS #26: Crash (1996) & Titane (2021)." The Evolution of Horror (February 19, 2026) ["Juliet Sugg joins Mike to discuss two transgressive body horror movies where flesh, sex, death, flesh and metal collide: David Cronenberg's Crash and Julia Ducournau's Titane."]

Pickard, Victor. "The Ellisons Prepare to Expand Their Media Empire." On the Media (February 27, 2026) ['Host Micah Loewinger speaks with  Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss why what’s happening at CBS, The Washington Post, and Paramount is simply the latest stage of a phenomena called "media capture," and what we can do to free ourselves from its binds."]

Puhak, Shelly. "The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster." New Books in Women's History (February 17, 2026) ["There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families-is a vicious killer. Some even say she bathes in the blood of her victims. When the king's men force their way into her manor house, she has blood on her hands, caught in the act of murdering yet another of her maids. She is walled up in a tower and never seen again, except in the uppermost barred window, where she broods over the countryside, cursing all those who dared speak up against her. Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster (Bloomsbury, 2026) Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness-a world where nothing is ever as it seems. In this exhilarating narrative, Puhak renders a vivid portrait of history's most dangerous woman and her tumultuous time, revealing just how far we will go to destroy a woman in power."]

Rovelli, Carlo. "All Reality is Interaction." On Being (March 12, 2020) ["Physicist Carlo Rovelli says humans don’t understand the world as made by things, “we understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses — happenings.” This everyday truth is as scientific as it is philosophical and political, and it unfolds with unexpected nuance in his science. Rovelli is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory and author of the tiny, bestselling book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. Seeing the world through his eyes, we understand that there is no such thing as “here” or “now.” Instead, he says, our senses convey a picture of reality that narrows our understanding of its fullness."]

Rushkoff, Douglas. "My Dinner With Jeffrey: What the Epstein Files Tell Us About All of Us." Team Human #356 (February 28, 2026) [""Why are you in the Epstein files?" It is a question Rushkoff received from his own daughter, and in this raw monologue, he gives the full answer. His name appears in the CC field of emails from his former literary agent alongside Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and yes, Jeffrey Epstein. But the story of why those names were grouped together reveals something much darker than a mailing list. Rushkoff recounts a disturbing mid-90s dinner party where he was physically grabbed by a host and scolded for "wasting his plus-one" on a brilliant female intellectual instead of "eye candy" to decorate the room for the male elites. He traces the lineage of this misogyny directly to the "scientism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, whose theories of humans as "meat machines" and "survival vehicles for genes" provided the perfect philosophical cover for sociopaths like Epstein to commodify and abuse women. This is not just a story about a predator; it is an indictment of the permission structure built by the scientific and tech elite. A worldview that dismisses human soul, consent, and morality as mere delusions."]

---. Will AI Eat the Earth?" Team Human (March 6, 2026) ["The digital world promises a frictionless existence of infinite growth, convenience, and total scale. But what happens when that virtual map starts consuming the real territory? Rushkoff reflects on his recent appointment to the Club of Rome and their legendary 1972 warning: The Limits to Growth. From the massive water and energy drained by AI data centers to Jeff Bezos' intentional dismantling of the Washington Post, Rushkoff breaks down how the tech elite are using the digital simulation to extract the last remaining value from the physical world. The oligarchs want a frictionless reality where they own the platform and avoid the messy negotiations of actual human connection. But reall life, and real democracy, requires friction. It requires the awkward, inefficient, and vital collisions of human beings sharing a local space. It is time to stop confusing the map with the territory. Find the others. Embrace the friction."]

Saini, Angela. "Junk Science: How belief in biological racial difference pollutes the world of science, from eugenics to genetics." American Scholar (August 9, 2019) ["For our 100th episode, we welcome back science journalist Angela Saini, whose work deflates the myths we tell ourselves about science existing in an apolitical vacuum. With far-right nationalism and white supremacy on the rise around the world, pseudoscientific and pseudointellectual justifications for racism are on the rise—and troublingly mainstream. Race is a relatively recent concept, but dress it up in a white lab coat and it becomes an incredibly toxic justification for a whole range of policies, from health to immigration. It is tempting to dismiss white-supremacist cranks who chug milk to show their superior lactose tolerance, but it’s harder to do so when those in positions of power—like senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller or pseudointellectual Jordan Peterson—spout the same rhetoric. The consequences can be more insidious, too: consider how we discuss the health outcomes for different groups of people as biological inevitabilities, not the results of social inequality. Drawing on archives and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, Saini shows how race science never really left us—and that in 2019, scientists are as obsessed as ever with the vanishingly small biological differences between us."]