"The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope. To possess a telescope without its other essential half - the microscope - seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension." - Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
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Benjamin, Ruha. "The New Artificial Intelligentsia." Los Angeles Review of Books (October 18, 2024) ["Behind this duplicity lies a familiar calculus: if AI evangelists can convince us that AGI is possible, imminent, and dangerous, we might be compelled to entrust our fate to them. Hype and doom, in other words, are two sides of the same (bit)coin. “AI safety” principles, teams, and initiatives are proliferating in part to hoard power and resources and, ultimately, to engineer the future in their own image. The aim: To lull us into acquiescence so that they can carry on business as usual. I have analyzed elsewhere the harmful impacts of AI. In the rest of this essay, I focus on AI’s insidious inputs—the eugenic values and logics of those who create these systems, cloaking them in the rhetoric of salvation. Breathless buzzwords like “efficiency,” “novelty,” and “productivity” conceal a self-serving vision: the future imagined by AI evangelists is meant only for a small sliver of humanity. The rest of us will be left clamoring to survive on a boiling planet. Take the autonomous weapons systems raining hell on Palestinians—why else give them saccharine-sounding names like Lavender and the Gospel if not to make these deadly inventions seem benevolent? If we listen carefully to the good word of tech evangelists, we can hear the groans of those buried under the rubble of progress. Many of the same people behind the technologies wreaking havoc today—workplace algorithms intensifying the pace of work, facial recognition software leading to false arrests, automated triage systems rationing quality healthcare, and “smart” weapons ripping through flesh with a click—also brand themselves as humanity’s saviors. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pronounced that “it is a golden age. […] We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were … in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades.” In a 2015 essay for an interfaith magazine, PayPal and surveillance tech firm Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel argued, Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present. Likewise, the home page of Singularity University, a company founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, affirms the organization’s belief that “technology and entrepreneurship can solve the world’s greatest challenges.” As a group, the artificial intelligentsia promises to guide us into the Future™, positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they engineer the crises against which we must guard."]
Benton, Michael D. "Introduction and Discussion of The Battle of Algiers." Dialogic Cinephilia (April 5, 2026) [In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was released to critical acclaim as well as official condemnation. In France it was banned until 1974 when it was finally screened in a cut version. The film examines the early part of what is known as the Algerian War (1954-1962) when the colonized Algerian population threw off the century-long yoke of the French colonizers (they invaded Algeria in 1830). Pontecorvo’s film is unique in many ways.]
Chungyalpa, Dekila."On the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth." Wonder Cabinet (April 11, 2026) ["Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth. For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance. In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing was often female, and where land itself—especially the sacred Himalayan landscape of Sikkim—was alive with presence, meaning, and obligation. Today, she is a global conservationist and founding director of the Loka Initiative, building unlikely partnerships between climate scientists and religious leaders across traditions—from Buddhist monastics to Catholic clergy, Indigenous elders to Muslim clerics and Evangelical pastors. Her work suggests that the climate crisis is not only scientific or political—but spiritual."]
Crabapple, Molly.
"The History of the Jewish Bund." American Prestige (August 12, 2026) ["Danny and Derek speak with artist and writer
Molly Crabapple about her book on the history of the Jewish Labor Bund,
Here Where We Live Is Our Country. They discuss Molly's personal connection to the story, the Pale of Settlement and Jewish emancipation, the founding of the Bund in 1897, the Bund's armed self-defense against pogroms, its fraught relationship with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Bund's rivalry with Zionism, the flourishing of Bundist culture in interwar Poland, and the lessons of the Bund’s story for the Jewish left today."]
Davies, Jr., Akinola. "My Father's Shadow — Akinola Davies Jr. dreams of 90s Nigeria." MUBI (April 9, 2026) ["Akinola Davies Jr. never really knew his dad. But in MY FATHER’S SHADOW, his BAFTA-winning debut feature set in 90s Nigeria, the director imagines what it would be like to spend the day with him. Akinola tells guest host Simran Hans how he recreated his own hazy childhood memories, and about his ingenious methods for getting a pair of remarkable performances from two young kids who had never acted on screen before."]
Goldin, Hanna Lee.
"The Atlas of Learning." Card Catalog (August 11, 2026) ["A librarian’s map of where knowledge lives, and how to find our way through the research world."]
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"From Ataris to AI: The Millennial Reckoning With Relentless Change." Card Catalog (March 3, 2026) ["This isn’t a single adjustment. It’s been the continuous condition of our entire adult lives. We didn’t watch the world change and then settle. We watched the world change, adapted to that change, and then watched it change again before the adaptation had even fully landed. We grew up inside the acceleration, and the acceleration has never stopped. On one side of us: an older generation that experienced technology largely as a series of arriving conveniences, things that made existing tasks easier rather than as the ground beneath their feet constantly shifting. On the other: a generation behind us for whom the internet isn’t a place you go but simply the texture of existence, who have no memory of a world that worked differently. We are the bridge generation: old enough to remember before, young enough to be living through the middle, and bearing the particular exhaustion of people who can see both shores but can’t quite stand on either."]
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"In Praise of Serendipity." Card Catalog (April 2, 2026) ["On staying open to the unexpected: We teach search as technique: how to construct a query, which databases to use, how to evaluate a source. What we don’t teach is the limit built into all of those tools: they can only return what we already know to ask for. Everything we don’t know to ask for requires a different approach entirely. AI extends that limit further. A language model synthesizes from what we’ve already thought to ask about, which means it’s only as generative as the questions we bring to it. Some of the most generative questions arrive through wandering, through the accidental encounter that reframes what we thought we were looking for, and that’s something current AI tools aren’t designed to do. The library tradition has long understood that knowledge develops through exposure to the unexpected and through the slow accumulation of encounters that couldn't have been planned. Following a thread without knowing where it leads is how the connections start to form on their own. The practices above aren’t a romantic supplement to serious research. They’re part of how serious research has always developed. Serendipity has a research literature and a documented role in how knowledge develops. But the reason any of that matters is simpler: the world occasionally offers something we didn't know we needed, arriving from a direction we never would have thought to look. We stumble into it less than we used to, but it's still there when we make room for it."]
Goodman, Amy.
"How Media Silences Anti-War Voices." Current Affairs (April 12, 2026) ["Amy Goodman is the longtime host of Democracy Now!, the independent news program she helped launch 30 years ago, which has since grown from a small network of community radio stations into a global media institution. She spoke to Current Affairs Editor-in-Chief Nathan Robinson and Digital Editor John Ross, alongside filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, about the new documentary Steal This Story, Please!, which traces the history of Democracy Now! and Goodman’s career in independent journalism." What makes Democracy Now! different from corporate media. Amy Goodman’s approach to journalism. How antiwar voices get sidelined in corporate media. Who corporate media really serves. Objectivity vs. taking a stance. What Democracy Now! adds to the historical record.]
Hapootlian, Amanda.
"How One Playwright is Using Theatre to Expose the Surveillance State." ACLU (March 26, 2026) ["As the ACLU fights to protect people’s privacy, playwright Matthew Libby discusses his play about the private companies fueling the government’s surveillance of immigrants. ... Without safeguards, federal agencies will continue to exploit their partnerships with tech companies to sow fear and violate our rights, which is why the ACLU is advocating for Congress to pass legislation that would protect our privacy in the digital age. These bills include the
ICE Out of Our Faces Act, which would ban ICE and other immigration agencies from buying, acquiring, or using facial recognition software and the
Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a bipartisan bill that would ban the government from buying our data from Palantir and other companies without a warrant. ... Matthew Libby, the creator of a new off-Broadway play called “
DATA,” is using theater to fight against the surveillance state. He became inspired to write the play after seeing how Big Tech companies are used to supercharge President Trump’s deportation agenda. Below, we discuss how “DATA” pushes back against public-private surveillance partnerships, and how we should all speak out against this obscene government overreach."]
Horgan, John.
"Do Voters Adore Trump Because They Dread Death?: “Terror Management” Theorist Sheldon Solomon Explains How Subliminal Fear of Death Can Affect Us on a Personal and Political Level." Scientific American (June 6, 2016) [An interview with the psychologist co-author of the book
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Random House, 2015): "A transformative, fascinating theory--based on robust and groundbreaking experimental research--reveals how our unconscious fear of death powers almost everything we do, shining a light on the hidden motives that drive human behavior. More than one hundred years ago, the American philosopher William James dubbed the knowledge that we must die "the worm at the core" of the human condition. In 1974, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, arguing that the terror of death has a pervasive effect on human affairs. Now authors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski clarify with wide-ranging evidence the many ways the worm at the core guides our thoughts and actions, from the great art we create to the devastating wars we wage. The Worm at the Core is the product of twenty-five years of in-depth research. Drawing from innovative experiments conducted around the globe, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski show conclusively that the fear of death and the desire to transcend it inspire us to buy expensive cars, crave fame, put our health at risk, and disguise our animal nature. The fear of death can also prompt judges to dole out harsher punishments, make children react negatively to people different from themselves, and inflame intolerance and violence. But the worm at the core need not consume us. Emerging from their research is a unique and compelling approach to these deeply existential issues: terror management theory. TMT proposes that human culture infuses our lives with order, stability, significance, and purpose, and these anchors enable us to function moment to moment without becoming overwhelmed by the knowledge of our ultimate fate. The authors immerse us in a new way of understanding human evolution, child development, history, religion, art, science, mental health, war, and politics in the twenty-first century. In so doing, they also reveal how we can better come to terms with death and learn to lead lives of courage, creativity, and compassion. Written in an accessible, jargon-free style, The Worm at the Core offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the choices we make in life--and a pathway toward divesting ourselves of the cultural and personal illusions that keep us from accepting the end that awaits us all."]
Johnson, David.
"Monks, Mystics, and Madmen." The Observing I #102 (February 23, 2025) ["Have you ever tried sitting in complete silence with nothing but your own thoughts? No phone. No music. No distractions. Just you. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone, and that’s exactly the problem.In this episode of The Observing I, we dive deep into the lost art of solitude - why being alone has become something we fear, how history’s greatest thinkers and mystics embraced isolation, and how modern life is engineered to keep you constantly distracted. And if you think this is just another self-improvement gimmick, think again - because at the end of this episode, I’m challenging you to something radical: 24 hours without screens, without social media, without external input. Just you, alone, facing your own mind. Most people won’t do it.The question is: Will you?"]
Johnson, M. Sellers.
"Americana Anderson: Nested Narratives in Asteroid City." Off Screen 30.2/3 (March 2026) ["Asteroid City is at once a familiar and a more daring Anderson film. Its general acclaim and eager expectations are reflected in its early reviews, as well as its nomination for the Palme d’Or this year (a third return for Anderson, following Cannes’ top prize considerations for The French Dispatch in 2021 and Moonrise Kingdom in 2012). The film certainly postures time-honored Anderson themes—unconventional families forging eclectic communities, solitary people sublimating their feelings of loneliness into comradery, and poetic gestures toward the unknown—but does Asteroid City’s quality of emotionality equate with its quality of style? While his works often are conceptually fantastic, it would appear in recent years that the artificial style that he has long been celebrated for now overwhelms his dramatic execution. However, instead of evaluating the film as a stand-alone project, perhaps it is best to gauge Asteroid City in the larger canon of Anderson’s projects. The film is certainly visually stunning and delightfully wry, as one might expect, but how does Asteroid City measure up in the larger scope of Anderson’s filmography?"]
Martin, Laura J.
"The War on Weeds." NOEMA (May 14, 2024) ["Pesticides and herbicides made from fossil fuels that are freely available to unwitting consumers poison our land, our bodies and life all around."]
Merchant, Brian.
"It's open season for refusing AI: There's been a wave of successful efforts to ban, reject and shut down AI." Blood In the Machine (April 3, 2026) ["In a November conversation at the
Urban Consulate in Detroit, the great writer and thinker
Tressie McMillan Cottom was asked by host Orlando P. Bailey, “Do you have a daring idea for us to ponder and sit with for our collective future?” McMillan Cottom replied with this: “When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse."]
Moor, Robert.
"On Trees." The World in Time (April 10, 2026) ["“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees."]
Rubsam, Robert.
"America's Cinematic Salvation." Liberties (March 2026) ["Coiled at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a shadowy club committed to the “racial purification” of the American populace. Meeting in luxury hotel suites and bland office towers, these lumpy, balding men — generals, politicians, titans of industry — want to rebalance the composition of their country, and possibly the world. They call themselves the Christmas Adventurers, and they profess a creed of strict racial hygiene, inducting only “white Americans by Gentile-born,” in the hope of segregating white Americans away from the refuse of the worldwide underclass. “You want to save the planet,” says head Adventurer Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn), “you start with immigration.” Does that sound so farfetched to you? Based on a Thomas Pynchon novel published in 1990, first conceived around the turn of the 21st century, and filmed entirely before the 2024 general election, Anderson’s film arrived in theaters last fall at a time when immigration had become the battlefield on which all of America’s domestic conflicts are being fought. In the past year, the president has signed an executive order illegally ending birthright citizenship, and has openly yearned to denaturalize, deport, and even detain abroad U.S. citizens. “Homegrowns,” he said last year, “are next.” These policies have been backed up and egged-on by a coterie of American white nationalists, among them Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, who believe that America’s “cultural coherence,” established by early generations of white Anglo-Saxon immigrants, has been fatally compromised by nearly 150 years of immigration from places all across the globe. The only real Americans, they believe, are the descendants of those early settlers, a group now called “Heritage Americans.” Everyone else is, at best, a second-class citizen — though, given the pitch of their ethnonationalist rhetoric, invader would probably be the more accurate term. Miller apparently believes the country would be better off with about 100 million residents — a task that would involve removing more than 240 million people. "]
Singh, Manvir.
"Was Shamanism the First Religion?" Wonder Cabinet (April 4, 2026) ["Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience? Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds. How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions. Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?"]
Topping, Emily. "Why America is Obsessed with Protein (And War)." Current Affairs (March 26, 2026) ["The wave of high-protein everything shows a country trying to eat its way out of weakness."]
Velocci, Beans. "Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary." New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies (April 11, 2026) ["In Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke UP, 2026), Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex’s incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it’s the categories that flex to make them fit. Beans Velocci is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania."]
Walter, Damien. "The Matrix and the Archetypes of Carl Jung." Science Fiction (December 2021) ["There’s a question about The Matrix I’ve been asking myself since the franchise established itself in the collective unconscious of humanity back in the early 00s. What is Sigmund Freud doing in these movies?"]
Williams, Adrienne, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru. "The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence." NOEMA (October 13, 2024) ["Tech companies that have branded themselves “AI first” depend on heavily surveilled gig workers like data labelers, delivery drivers and content moderators. Startups are even hiring people to impersonate AI systems like chatbots, due to the pressure by venture capitalists to incorporate so-called AI into their products. In fact, London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures surveyed 2,830 AI startups in the EU and found that 40% of them didn’t use AI in a meaningful way. Far from the sophisticated, sentient machines portrayed in media and pop culture, so-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems. In this article, we give examples of the labor exploitation driving so-called AI systems and argue that supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in discussions pertaining to AI ethics."]
Zimmerman, John. "The President and the Universities." Liberties (April 2026) ["What would it mean to reconstitute our universities around that goal? Several universities — including my own — are developing new core courses for first-year students that explore the history and the challenges of democratic government, alongside other fundamental themes in the humanities. Other schools have established programs around civic engagement and “dialogue across difference,” which has become something of a cliché at the Trump-era university. And sixty-one leaders of higher education — calling themselves College Presidents for Civic Preparedness — have partnered with the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) to create new classes and other campus initiatives to “prepare the next generation of well-informed, productively engaged, and committed citizens.” This is all fine and good — indeed, it is great — but it also feels a bit like our Centers for Teaching and Learning: if we embraced our civic purpose fully and honestly, we would not need to create special courses and initiatives to enhance it. Nor would we need separate schools of civic thought and leadership, which have sprouted at thirteen public universities in eight different Republican-dominated states. They aren’t just new programs or classes; they are full-fledged degree programs, with faculty lines and student majors and the other hallmarks of academic expansion. The GOP lawmakers who endowed them were not at all wrong about the lack of civic knowledge and engagement among our students. And neither are they wrong about the left-wing groupthink of the academy. But so long as the civics schools are coded politically red, they are destined to fail. The Trump administration recently announced a set of grants to promote civic education around this year’s momentous anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; priority will go to universities that have established “independent academic units dedicated to civic thought, Constitutional studies, American history, leadership, and economic liberty.” Get the picture? These American principles are now imagined as “conservative,” which subverts the shared civic purpose that the new schools purport to uphold. And we certainly will not revive that purpose by relying on artificial intelligence, the other shiny object of the modern academy. The nation’s largest university system, Cal State, recently inked a deal with Open A.I. to make it America’s “first and largest A.I.-empowered university.” It will embed AI tutors across the system’s twenty-two campuses and prepare its 460,000 students for “A.I.-driven careers,” whatever that means. The jury is very much out on whether AI can help students learn, instead of simply doing their homework for them. Yet it is safe to say, I think, that AI is unlikely to make them better citizens. Genuine citizenship requires people to deliberate their common fate with others. According to the report to Harry Truman in 1947, universities should teach “the practice as well as the theory of democracy.” Let us agree that the practice as well as the theory of democracy is more than a prompt to ChatGPT. Does anyone seriously think that a robot can enhance democratic citizenship? Shouldn’t we instead worry about it eroding our democratic capacities, by substituting a bot’s judgment for our own?"]
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