ENG 102 2026: Resources Archive #16

"Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen . . ."
Mary Oliver, "Mindful"

Vesica Piscis by Joe Goodwin (2015: Acrylic on canvas and board)

Presented at a conference on art and psyche in Siracusa, Italy - Vesica Piscis, by contemporary artist Joe Goodwin, is an exercise in synchronicity. The work, not then complete, was noted by the artistas having a 'glaring compositional problem,' in the form of empty space. The addition of an off-centre circle, overlapping the one already on the canvas, resulted in an important symbol of sacred geometry, representing the intersection of the world of the divine with the world of matter and also the beginning of creation. Given that the conference held an audience mostly composed of Jungian analysts, the process and experience was well understood. - Elizabeth, S. The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic. White Lion Publishing, 2020: 24.

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Amad, Thaer, Feroze Sidhwa, and Poh Si Teng. "“American Doctor”: New Film Follows U.S. Doctors to Gaza as Israel Bombs Hospitals, Kills Staff, Patients." Democracy Now (August 14, 2026) ["The new documentary American Doctor tells the story of how the besieged hospitals of Gaza have continued to treat the sick and wounded throughout Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian territory, with local medical staff risking their own lives in the process. According to Palestinian officials, Israeli attacks have killed about 1,700 healthcare workers in Gaza since October 2023. The documentary follows three U.S. doctors as they volunteer in Gaza hospitals. Director Poh Si Teng says the film rose out of her “deep despair” over what was happening in Gaza, including deadly Israeli attacks on her former Al Jazeera colleagues. American Doctor is her attempt “to bring Palestine back to the United States,” Teng says. We also speak with two of the subjects of the film: trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and emergency physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who is Palestinian American."]

Beaupre, Mitchell. "Flesh and Fluids: Jane Schoenbrun on fighting repression through Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Letterboxd (August 6, 2026) ["Our relationship to sex as a culture is so unhealthy. So, of course we try to compartmentalize it or keep it on our browser window and never share it with another human being. I don’t think that is serving us as a people. I think that repression is the enemy, and especially the enemy of the artist, and this is a movie against repression." —⁠Jane Schoenbrun]

Berry, Wendell. "The Work of Local Culture." What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990: 153-169 [Excerpts posted on Dialogic with links to the entire text: July 8, 2012]

Bird, Kai. "On Roy Cohn, a Founding Father of Donald Trump’s America." The New Yorker Radio Hour (August 28, 2026) ["During the height of Roy Cohn’s friendship with Donald Trump, according to the historian Kai Bird, “they were on the phone with each other a dozen times a day.” Bird’s new book, “American Scoundrel,” details Cohn’s profound influence on Trump—whom he met as a young real-estate heir in the nineteen-seventies—and how Cohn is “haunting” politics in our time. “I had written about Roy Cohn in [previous biographies] as this nefarious, minor, awful figure who was disruptive and divisive and unethical. And I suddenly realized that the establishment that I’d been writing about for forty years is gone. Their values and culture, the politics, the bipartisanship . . . that’s all gone,” he tells David Remnick. “Roy Cohn explains something about the dark side of America that I just didn’t understand.” They discuss Cohn’s early career as a prosecutor and his role as the “mastermind” of the McCarthy purges; his service as a lawyer and fixer for Mafia members, politicians, and celebrities; and an allegation of being involved in sex trafficking."]

Bui, Kevin. "Knives Out: Johnnie To's Election." Senses of Cinema #118 (May 2026) ["The specific intricacies of triad society have formed the backbone for many of To’s most acclaimed works since the creation of his Milkyway Image production banner, with films such as Chan sam ying hung (A Hero Never Dies, 1998) and Cheung foh (The Mission, 1999) probing the ways in which gang members juggle codes of loyalty and honour in their day-to-day duties, while others like PTU (2003) and Dai si gin (Breaking News, 2004) explore the group’s inextricably parasitic relationships with the police and the media. Premiering at Cannes in the spring of 2005, the synopsis of Hak se wui (Election, 2005) places it in the same breath as To’s other crime sagas. Another two years have passed, and it’s time for the elders of the Wo Shing to place their votes on who will be the organisation’s next chairman. A significant contingent voice their support for Lok (Simon Yam), a level-headed, ‘professional’ career criminal who would likely run the business with the discretion and finesse required to stay out of the warpath of the Hong Kong Police Force. But others in the committee make it known that they would rather have Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai) in charge; the much more volatile but otherwise effective candidate who they believe will strike fear back into the hearts of their enemies."]

Goldin, Hana Lee. "Books Have Always Been Destroyed. But Never Like This."  Card Catalog (August 25, 2026) ["Every one of these books, preserved to the letter, can now be read by no one. The scanned texts sit in Anthropic’s private collection, a library with no reading room and no public catalog. Models trained on that collection are built to avoid quoting it at length, because reproducing long passages for users is the copyright violation no court has excused. So the machines answer questions about books without ever showing the books themselves. When someone asks a model about a title that survives only in that collection, what comes back is a summary, written in the model’s words, with the original nowhere in reach. That arrangement changes something basic about how we can know things. Checking a claim against its source is the foundation of thinking for ourselves. When we can pull the book, find the page, and read the passage in context, we get to judge whether the summary was faithful and whether the quote meant what someone claims it meant. Remove the book and that judgment has nowhere to stand. We’re left taking the summary on trust, with no way to confirm and no standing to doubt. Whatever the model says the book said becomes, for all practical purposes, what the book said. That’s a transfer of authority from the page to the tool, from a source anyone could check to an answer nobody can. The transfer happens one unreachable book at a time. Maddeningly, every piece of this design is legal. Each one also removes a question that used to have an answer. The anonymous purchasing means nobody can list which books were destroyed, so nobody can rule out that some were the last copies anywhere. With the collection sealed, nobody can compare a stored text against the printed original it replaced, so even perfect fidelity can never be shown. As for whether the buying ever stopped, nobody outside knows that either, since the only reason anyone knows it started is that a piracy lawsuit dragged the records into the open. None of this took a conspiracy, only ordinary business decisions about what to disclose, all of them legal and every one of them closing a door."]

---. "The Unspoken Rules of Information Etiquette." Card Catalog (July 28, 2026) ["The rules of information etiquette can be traced by looking at where they get broken. Six come up over and over across every kind of exchange between people who know each other. Each is a norm we already follow most of the time, and every one registers as felt friction the moment it gets broken."]

Gullifer-Laurie, Isabella. "Through the Looking Glass: The Gold Diggers." Senses of Cinema #118 (May 2026) ["Sally Potter characterised her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983), as “a musical describing a female quest.” A labyrinthine, post-punk exploration of “the connections between gold, money and women,” Potter’s film is a mischievous, magic, anti-realist countercinema. It was poorly received in some quarters. “By any reasonable earthly standard,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times, “this thing – a 1983 oddity, sort of a feminist, deconstructionist, riddle-filled anti-musical, much of it set on the Icelandic tundra – is pure torture.” Indeed Potter’s film evinced a “promiscuous cross-breeding of avant-garde and mainstream” styles, mixing anti-capitalist satire with film theory about the male gaze, and Marxist conceptions of class and labour. “Perhaps,” as Sophie Mayer writes, it was the “determination to laugh in the face of power [that] upset those critics more than anything that the film says explicitly.” The Gold Diggers is challenging and erudite, a witty, ambiguous experiment resourced by inventive plans, schemes, and dreams."]

 Hinman, Ed. "The Barbarian in You: Vigor, Wonder, and Fellowship." The Personal Success Podcast #186 (August 24, 2026) ["Ed Hinman graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, played four years of college football, served eight years in the Marine Corps, earned a master's degree in history, and has spent the last seventeen and a half years in public figure protection at Gavin de Becker & Associates. On paper that reads like a straight line. It was not. In this conversation, Ed lays out the idea behind his book, The Barbarian in You: we inherited bodies and nervous systems built for vigor, wonder, and fellowship, and almost everything about modern life pulls us away from all three. Vigor is physical effort and the state change that follows it. Wonder is the spiritual and imaginative side, the part you reach through nature, art, reading, or belief. Fellowship is the one Ed says we are losing fastest, especially men. Ed explains why he redefines barbarian as anyone who lives with those three things, which is how a book about Julius Caesar and the Battle of Hastings also has chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and David Lee Roth. The turn in the conversation comes when Ryan asks where Ed's self-trust came from. Ed describes standing at a service academy career conference, surrounded by employers who wanted to hire him, feeling like a product on a shelf. He went home and told his wife he would rather eat baloney cereal than take one of those jobs. Ryan shares his own version of that moment, finishing an MBA and realizing he had completed somebody else's checklist. They also get into the part most conversations about this skip. Ed does not tell anyone to quit. He says there is honor in doing work you do not want to do so you can provide for your family, and then moves the question to the hours you actually control. What are you doing at home? The back half turns to men, fellowship, and resistance. Ed's advice on checking in on a struggling friend is two words long, and it is the most useful thing in the episode."]

Hudson, David. "We Will Always Love Dolly Parton." The Daily (August 27, 2026) ["“I try not to get into the politics of everything,” Parton told Mesfin Fekadu in the Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “I try to get into the human element of it. I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts—all within my own family. I know and love them all, and I do not judge . . . If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”"]

Huh, Minj. "Embodied allegory in Sorry to Bother You: art, performance and movement in neoliberal capitalist ruins." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023 - 2024) ["In this paper, I examine how Riley brings art and politics together in Sorry to Bother You, specifically through embodied allegory. Such a deployment of allegory in recovering the bodies of the marginalized—in this case racially- and gender-marked laborers—resonates with how Annabel Patterson in Fables of Power (1991) shifts our attention towards Aesop as a “philosopher of materialism and the body” (38), an essential facet of Aesop which has long been eclipsed by “the legend of the witty Aethiopian slave” (34). To be sure, many episodes in Aesopian fables function as a critique of unequal power relations. The political message of these fables grasps wage laborers’ attention to this day when the urge to liberate oneself from the social hierarchy is still founded in capitalism, whose internal mechanism has an uneasy proximity to enslaved labor in pre-capitalist societies. I propose that Sorry to Bother You is a viable fable for this day and age, alerting us to the possible subversion of official values and dominant culture, and at the same time, encouraging us to attend to another device of allegory, which is the historical situatedness of its current author."]

Moon, Alexis. "Inherit the Wind: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner." Notebook (August 31, 2026)  ["“I think this act of taking something that we cannot typically see and then, through its movement, being able to confirm its existence—to show us and reassure us that it’s actually there—is very much akin to cinematic expression itself,” Kurosawa told The Film Stage. “So wind, to me, is not so much something that is spiritual, but I think of cinema as something that is there for us to be able to capture the wind … [it is] almost like cinematic expression itself. The finale is divorced from that which came before, seemingly standing outside of both time and space, with an ascension for the characters who have abandoned their agendas in favour of responding appropriately to the way the wind blows.”"]

Moor, Robert. "Tree Thinking." Wonder Cabinet (August 29, 2026) ['Can you imagine being a tree? Robert Moor has spent years trying—climbing into their canopies, studying their biology and learning to see trees in ways most of us don’t. He considers himself a “tree person.” Moor believes that when you spend a lot of time in trees, time slows down—and branching and pruning can become life lessons. He’s interested not just in how trees grow, but in what they might teach us about ourselves. In his book In Trees, he says his goal isn’t to anthropomorphize trees but to “arborize” humanity. Moor has taken his obsession with trees to unusual places: climbing to the tops of giant sequoias; traveling to Tokyo to meet master bonsai artists; becoming a “tree sitter” to protest an oil pipeline. He’s fascinated by “family trees” and Darwin’s Tree of Life, and by our own evolutionary history in the trees of Africa. He traveled to Ethiopia to see Lucy, the famous 3-million-year-old fossil skeleton, and to Tanzania to sleep in a chimpanzee nest. (It was a miserable experience.) He knows something about living among trees: 13 years ago, he and his husband moved from New York City to a cabin in the woods of British Columbia—and never left."]

Mrachacz, Lena. "Cinema as Commons: The Radical Act of Going to the Movies." Notebook August 24, 2026) ["A cinema as commons is not simply a different way of programming films. It is a different kind of social proposition altogether. What happens when a community gathers to watch a film it has chosen together, in a space it has collectively claimed, cannot be replicated by watching the same film alone. The film becomes a shared reference point, a starting place for conversation, a way of recognizing something in each other. The room produces a temporary public, and that public, however briefly, understands itself as one. People sit in the same room, encounter the same thing, and agree or disagree about what it means. That is very close to what democratic culture requires in order to function. It is also worth asking what those spaces are fighting against, or rather, what kind of relationship to cinema they are refusing. The dominant model of moving-image consumption today is not simply commercial; it is algorithmic. A small number of platforms now control not just distribution but also the conditions under which films get made, the data that determines what gets commissioned, the interface through which most people on earth encounter moving images. The logic is one of personalization: Every scroll, every pause, every abandoned film feeds a system designed to predict and preempt your next choice. What gets optimized, in the end, is your continued individual engagement with the platform. This is a form of enclosure of attention, of taste, of the very capacity to be surprised by something you didn’t already know you wanted. What gets lost is the condition of watching together in a room, with strangers and friends. This is why gathering matters. Streaming has made watching films easier, cheaper, and more solitary than at any point in cinema’s history. It has also made the act of gathering to watch something together feel, quietly, like a choice, one that requires a little more intention than it used to. But what the history of cinema as commons suggests is that this gathering was never incidental, that the room has always been part of the argument, as much as the film inside it. That idea is worth holding onto: a cinema that refuses to offer a service and insists on building a commons, and a public that understands itself as such. The cinemas carrying this impulse forward today are not simply alternatives to the multiplex but a response to a specific moment. It is not a coincidence that they are multiplying now, in a moment when public space is contracting, when political life feels increasingly managed from above, when the simple act of gathering together has started to feel like a position in itself. What these cinemas insist on, each in its own way, is that cinema can be more than entertainment delivered to an audience, that the room, and who fills it, and what happens after the lights come up, are themselves political questions worth taking seriously, and that those questions don’t resolve themselves once and for all. They have to be asked again and again, by every community. The cinema has always had the potential to function as a commons. In certain moments of political urgency, people have insisted on it. This is one of those moments."]   

Orleck, Annelise, et al. "Worker protections help (almost) everyone (Labor Rights)." Best of the Left #1263 (April 9, 2019) ["Today we take a look at the overwhelming benefits to society of labor, health and safety regulations and how the only people who don't come out ahead are those who have to pay for them."]

O'Sullivan, Suzanne. "The History of Bad Ideas: Overdiagnosis." Past Present Future (August 12, 2026) ["We come to the end of this series of bad ideas with a conversation with neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan about the problems of living in an age of diagnosis, when all medical conditions need a label and new labels appear all the time. What happens when the classification criteria for conditions like autism and ADHD get broader and broader? Are doctors or patients driving this? When does predictive testing do more harm than good? Why does advocacy for sufferers get in the way of good health? Is de-diagnosis achievable? The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan is available now https://bit.ly/3U1ZwOu]

Palmquist, Ben. "The 80 Year PR Campaign That Killed Universal Healthcare." Citations Needed #134 (April 21, 2021) ["Almost every wealthy country in the world has some type of universal healthcare system--except for the United States. With over 170 million of its citizens left to fend for themselves in a sprawling and complex maze of Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, tax credits, child care subsidies, co-pays, deductibles and cost-sharing, the U.S. has not only the largest uninsured population, but also the most expensive system on Earth per capita. Why America doesn’t have a universal healthcare system has historically been explained away with a reductionist mix of pathologizing and circular reasoning. "America hates big government," "we love choice," "Americans distrust anything that reeks of socialism." And while this is true in some limited sense, it avoids the bigger question of why has American so-called "democracy" rejected the numerous proposals to enact a single payer or other forms of universal healthcare? While there may be some innate Protestant work ethic or rugged individual mentality at work here, there’s also been a decades-long multimillion dollar campaign funded by big business, doctor, pharmaceutical and hospital industry interests, and the insurance industry to convince the public to reject universal public healthcare. Indeed, if Americans were somehow intractably opposed to the notion––if they were hardwired to reject socialized medicine––these forces would never have had to spend so much money in the first place. On this episode, we explore the 80-year long campaign by capital to convince you to not support universal health programs, how these campaigns have historically fear-mongered against Communists, immigrants and African Americans, who benefits from a precarious, employer-controlled healthcare insurance system, and how this propaganda war on the American mind is anything but over. Our guest is Ben Palmquist, Director of the Health Care and Economic Democracy Program at Partners for Dignity and Rights."]

Richardson, Heather Cox. "The Right to Run For Office." Letters from an American (August 29, 2026) ["Republican lawmakers are attempting to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office, At least five Republican members of Congress want to prohibit them from holding federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships as well, Americans have struggled over questions of equality and immigration for more than a century, Anti-immigrant sentiment on the East Coast over Irish immigrants and on the West Coast over Chinese immigrants led to limits to their rights and created a caste system, Abraham Lincoln understood that giving up the principle of equality is an excuse for enslaving people and that we cannot make exceptions to the Declaration of Independence, Americans added the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to ensure that these exceptions could not be made, The Constitution's requirements for officeholders are the only allowable qualifications, neither states nor the federal government can add additional qualifications, The idea of discriminating against naturalized citizens is, in the words of law professor Pamela Karlan, "ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.""]

Scheonbrun, Jane. "On Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Film Comment (August 6, 2026) ["Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s third narrative feature, opens in theaters tomorrow. Dizzyingly meta-textual and deliciously, well, campy, the film stars Hannah Einbinder as an emerging queer filmmaker tasked with directing a reboot of a fictional ’80s slasher franchise titled Camp Miasma. She decides to visit the final girl of the original movie who is now an eccentric middle-aged recluse, played by Gillian Anderson, who’s living on the campgrounds where the first movie was shot. What unfolds is, in the of our critic Nathan Lee, a “gore-soaked, titty-bouncing, sexploitation fever dream girded by real conceptual brio.” Meditations on the perverse riddles of desire as well as the queer subtexts of many slasher films and the kind of strange identification they invite from the spectator are rendered with perfectly pitched horror theatrics and laugh-out-loud humor. Film Comment Editor Devika Girish spoke with Schoenbrun about this very rich text, trying to unpack the film’s layers—but not too hard, because if there’s one thing you can take away from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, it’s that analysis is a boner-killer and mystery is hot."]

Stryker, Susan. "Changing Gender." LARB Radio Hour (August 28, 2026) ["Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Susan Stryker about her new book Changing Gender. Part cultural history, part grammar lesson, and part memoir, Changing Gender confronts not only the long historical slipperiness of gender and identity in U.S. culture, but also the ways in which the very language we use to describe and understand gender becomes a cultural battleground for meaning and identity. Stryker discusses the relatively recent origins of our thinking about "gender," the ways that thinking has been misunderstood and misappropriated for political skirmishes, and the difficulty of pinning down exactly what we're talking about when we talk about gender."]

Suri, Jeremi. "American Civil War." Lex Fridman Podcast (January 25, 2023) [Jeremi Suri discussing his latest book Civil War By Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy "The Civil War may have ended on the battlefield, but the fight for equality never did. In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before. In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point. What emerges is a vivid and at times unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself, but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history. "]

Torchin, Leshu. "Themed Playlist: The Female Gaze." Screen Culture (April 8, 2020) ["... a female gaze. This is a term often used as counterpoint to the male gaze, a term introduced by Laura Mulvey but which has enjoyed considerable escape velocity into popular culture. Whilst the male gaze centres a male spectator to identify with an active male protagonist in stories that speak to him, and which render female figures little more than an object or narrative device, a female gaze intervenes and expands and shatters this framework. A female gaze centres women and their desires. A female gaze can willfully displace the male gaze that derives pleasure from but refuses the agency of women on screen."]

Turner, Kyle. "Why Do Movies Look Like That Now?" AV Club (August 20, 2026) ["Cinematographers, colorists, and camera operators explain how shifting technologies and business expectations are blurring modern cinema's images together."]

Uzuner, Mustafa. "Universal Language: Grief is a Thing with Feathers." Off/Screen (July 2025) ["Matthew Rankin’s filmography is a kaleidoscope of surrealism, historical revisionism, and deadpan absurdism, rooted in a deep affection for what might be termed Canadiana—the quirks, contradictions, and mythologies of Canadian identity. From his early experimental shorts to his audacious feature debut, The Twentieth Century (2019), Rankin has carved a niche as a provocateur of national introspection, blending bureaucratic satire with Freudian psychodrama and visionary set design. Yet his latest film, Universal Language (2024), marks a striking evolution: a tender, cross-cultural ode to friendship, displacement, and the transcendent power of cinema. By tracing Rankin’s journey—from Québécois prime ministers and masturbating premiers to a Persian-inflected Winnipeg dreamscape—we encounter an artist whose work now bridges Canadian eccentricity with the humanist poetics of Iranian masters like Abbas Kiarostami. This synthesis situates Universal Language within transnational cinema, framing cultural hybridity not as a point of conflict but as an ongoing dialogue."]

West, Stephen. "Socrates and the Sophists." Philosophize This! #3 (June 23, 2013) ["This episode talks about how, in ancient Athens, teachers called sophists taught people how to argue well, even if they weren’t right. They believed truth was different for everyone. Socrates disagreed—he thought there were real answers about right and wrong. He spent his life asking people tough questions to help them think more clearly. People didn’t always like this, and eventually he was put on trial and sentenced to death. But his way of thinking inspired philosophy for generations." Further Reading: Socrates and the Sophists, Plato (2011); The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb (2000); Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Gregory Vlastos (1991)]