Odell, Jenny."Another Kind of Time." Emergence Magazine Podcast (April 25, 2023) ["How we experience time is, ultimately, how we experience our lives. In this conversation with Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, she describes the social and cultural ideas that underpin our sense of standardized, mechanized time, which has laid an abstract grid over the living world. What choices, what futures, might become possible, she asks, if we allowed ourselves to slip free of the grip of linear, predictable chronos time and be swept into dynamic, interruptive kairos time?"]
Pin-Fat, Veronique and Maja Zehfuss. "How Do We Begin to Think of the World." Global Politics 2nd Edition. ed. Veronique Pin-Fat and Maja Zehfuss. Taylor and Francis, 2013: 1 - 19. ["Ethics and politics look at both how we should regard and accommodate each other and what kind of things make it possible to, for example, treat each other with respect and what kinds of things don't. That I might view you as "weird" or even "inhuman" (politics) may very much dictate how I then treat you (ethics). When we examine more closely how we think about the world, it turns out that ethics and politics are inseparable. (21)"]
Reichardt, Kelly. "On Showing Up." The Film Comment Podcast (April 4, 2023) ["Kelly Reichardt’s latest feature, Showing Up, is a delicate, witty, yet deeply profound film about the messy ways in which living and surviving can get in the way of art-making. The film follows a ceramics artist, Lizzy (Michelle Williams), who prepares for an upcoming gallery show while wrangling family issues, the interpersonal politics of her day job at an art school, and problems with her landlord, who happens to be none other than her more successful colleague, Jo (Hong Chau). Not to mention the injured pigeon that Lizzy is suddenly forced to care for... It’s a new riff on themes familiar from Reichardt’s work, like friendship and the ways in which precarity impinges upon community, but it’s also the director's funniest film yet, one that finds joy and comedy in its milieu of eccentric, sometimes petty, yet infectiously passionate artists. With Showing Up arriving in theaters this week, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish interviewed Reichardt about the making of the film, the casting of Williams and Chau, the work of Cynthia Lahti, Michelle Segre, and the various other artists who are featured in the film, and much more."]
Robin, Corey. "Clarence Thomas' Unshaken Belief in Big Money." On the Media (April 21, 2023) ["Earlier this month, ProPublica broke the news that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had been accepting luxurious gifts from Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow for two decades. The gifts included lavish vacations, trips on private yachts and jets — and even a trip to Indonesia valued at half a million dollars. Most of these gifts went undisclosed, despite that being required by law. But this isn’t Thomas’ first rodeo. He has reportedly accepted a slew of gifts in the past, including $1200 worth of tires from an Omaha businessman, and a bust of President Lincoln valued at $15,000. This week, Brooke speaks to Corey Robin, a journalist and political science professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, about the long history of Clarence Thomas' connection to the wieldy power of money in politics and Robin’s recent article in Politico, The Clarence Thomas Scandal Is About More Than Corruption. It’s about his jurisprudence." Corey Robin is the author of the book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.]
Slobodian, Quinn. "Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books 2023)." New Books in Intellectual History (April 17, 2023) ["Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023) follows the most notorious radical libertarians--from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel--around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy. A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future. Quinn Slobodian is a professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College."]
Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Fear of Folk: The Blood on Satan's Claw." Faculty of Horror #117 (April 25, 2023) ["We’re back on our old stomping grounds of Salem Horror Fest to plow the fertile fields of themes and metaphors to unearth why the British folk horror classic, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, left us feeling so icky. From teens and occultism to PSAs and power, we dig deep."]
Tubali, Shai. "Hannah Arendt and the Human Duty to Think." Philosophy Now #125 (2018) ["Many complain nowadays that their thinking is too active. What they mean is they feel that their brain is chattering with itself too much; that there are too many thoughts of worry and distress, frustration and struggle, going on in their mind. They then try to quieten their stormy over-thinking through different methods of meditation or relaxation. Indeed, quietude in one’s mind, especially when life’s challenges are unbearably intense, sounds a very nice state to be in. However, Arendt’s reflections tell us the very opposite: that our thinking is often not active enough – that people tend to shut down the activity of right thinking and judging. In light of Arendt’s own thinking, it becomes clear that most of the time we are not really actively thinking, we are daydreaming. Daydreaming may be intense at times, yet it does not help us develop a thinking which leads us to wakefully engage with the world. Thinking as an act of gathering one’s mental forces in order to understand or to realize something for oneself, is a relatively rare phenomenon in peoples’ lives. Interestingly, recent research affirms this criticism of human thinking. As research into cognitive bias informs us, the human brain does not really like to think. In fact, most of the time it puts itself in a mode of energy preservation. Most of the time, when things are relaxed, the brain/mind shifts to an ‘automatic pilot’ mode, a state of reaction without much creative thinking. We undergo the mental strain of reflective thought only when we don’t have a choice – for example, when confronting new difficult tasks at the office or facing acute and demanding challenges elsewhere. The brain’s natural effort is dedicated to maintaining an effortless state. Moreover, for the brain, the privilege of ‘being lazy’ implies much more: it means there is no threat, that everything is going well. That is why cognitive ease is associated with good mood and good feeling, and intense thinking with crisis. Things become more complicated when we realize that cognitive ease is also associated with truthfulness, and that our telling right from wrong is too often guided by the hidden wish of the brain not to think too much about things. According to research, most of our judgments are made by the brain’s lazy system of reactive thinking, not at all by our capacity to deeply engage in consideration and thoughtful observation. Therefore the brain’s default position is that an easy answer is also a true answer, and that a quick judgment is a right judgment."]
Warren, Ethan. "The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia University Press, 2023) New Books in Film (March 29, 2023) ["Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance. The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynamics of gender and religious faith, biological and found families, and his native San Fernando Valley―as well as his screenwriting methods and his relationship to his influences. Warren argues that Anderson’s films conjure up an alternate American history that exaggerates and elides verifiable facts in search of a heightened truth marked by a deeper level of emotional hyperrealism. This book is at once an unconventional primer on Anderson’s films and a provocative reframing of what makes his work so essential."]
West, Stephen. "Why is Consciousness Something Worth Talking About?" Philosophize This! #179 (April 24, 2023)
Wilson, Charles Reagan. "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)." New Books on the American South (April 29, 2023) ["How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class. Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (UNC Press, 2023) takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change."]
Zweerde, Evert van der. "Russian Political Philosophy: Anarchy, Authority, Autocracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)." New Books on Russia and Eurasia (April 26, 2023) ["Evert van der Zweerde in his 2022 book Russian Political Philosophy: Anarchy, Authority, Autocracy (Edinburgh University Press) details a thorough history of political thought from the very beginning of the Rus' era up to the 21st century. Political philosophy in Russia has always sought, and sometimes found, a middle way between embracing anarchy and searching for authority. Political philosophy in Russia has never before been the subject of a scholarly monograph. While historical factors make this understandable, the topic deserves our attention more than ever, now that Russia, after a short Soviet century, has regained self-assurance as a world power. Its unique historical trajectory, and the specific role of philosophy in it, are of interest to many fields of research and, beyond that, broader audiences. A focus on political philosophy as it existed and exists in Russia despite periods of marginalisation and suppression, allows us to understand its specific character, importance and relevance, and to realise that, in trying to think philosophically, critically, and reflectively about the political reality that shapes them, Russian thinkers are not essentially different from philosophers elsewhere. Hence, many lessons that can be learned from this subject."]
