In episode 19 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay are joined by fellow BISR faculty Joseph Earl Thomas to discuss Ghost of Yotei, Sucker Punch Productions' much-anticipated sequel to Ghost of Tsushima. To kick off the episode, Isi and Ajay chat about recent cultural news and highlights, from the Japanese government calling on OpenAI to refrain from using anime and manga as training data, to the #SwiftiesAgainstAI campaign, to Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Turning to Ghost of Yotei, Isi, Ajay, and Joseph consider where the game succeeds (its strong start, visual beauty, sharp soundtrack, and the satisfying chunkiness and texture of its combat scenes) and where it doesn't (its loadout system, simplistic puzzles, dearth of opportunities for stealth mode, and social and political quandaries its narrative and design raise). They explore the films and television shows that influenced Yotei—from Lady Snowblood and Samurai Champloo to the films of Takashi Miike, Akira Kurosawa, and Sergio Leone) and ask whether and where the game successfully incorporates cinematic techniques and conventions into its storyline. Along the way, they discuss the game's dicey depiction of the Ainu and the colonization of Hokkaido, consider whether the pleasure of open-world gaming has diminished or transformed in the years between Yotei and Tsushima, and interrogate the shape of the game's revenge plot.

(Pop) Cultural Marxism is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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Show notes

On Japan and OpenAI: https://www.ign.com/articles/japanese-government-calls-on-sora-2-maker-openai-to-refrain-from-copyright-infringement-says-characters-from-manga-and-anime-are-irreplaceable-treasures-that-japan-boasts-to-the-world

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2025)

Other Paul Thomas Anderson films mentioned: Phantom Thread (2017), Inherent Vice (2014), The Master (2012), There Will Be Blood (2007)

Ghost of Yotei (Sucker Punch Productions, 2025)

Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions, 2020)

Way of the Samurai (Acquire, 2002)

Tenchu (Acquire/K2/FromSoftware, 1998-2009)

Samurai Champloo (2004)

Forspoken (Luminous Productions, 2023)

South of Midnight (Compulsion Games, 2025)

Infamous (Sucker Punch Productions, 2009-2014)

Blue Eye Samurai (2023)

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998)

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)

Parul Sehgal, "The Case Against the Trauma Plot" (2021): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot

Kuroneko, directed by Kaneto Shindo (1968)

Lady Snowblood, directed by Toshiya Fujita (1973)

Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, directed by Toshiya Fujita (1974)

The Samurai Trilogy, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki (1954-1956)

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR's Isi Litke and Jude Webre discuss Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1947). Loosely based on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, and conceived by Lang and Bertolt Brecht mere weeks after his death, the film follows members of the Czech resistance as they attempt to shield Heydrich's killer from Nazi authorities in occupied Prague. Conversation ranges from Lang and Brecht's fraught collaboration to Hanns Eisler's unconventional score, the film’s attempts to sell a war-averse American public on the antifascist cause, the nature of Popular Front cultural objects, and the film’s connection to the Hollywood blacklist. To what extent does Hangmen Also Die! succeed as propaganda, as procedural, and/or as epic theater? How does the film embody the tensions intrinsic to Popular Front coalitions? And what might the film teach us about antifascist politics and propaganda in our current moment?

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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In episode 18 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay spend some time with a handful of big news items at the intersection of politics and media—from the Skydance-Paramount merger (and other instances of media market concentration) and its implications for American newsmedia (and its potential new gatekeepers); to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, its aftermath, its mediations with mass cultural objects (like alleged HellDivers II bullet etchings or Nepalese protestors with One Piece flags); the culture industry’s failure to perform even its therapeutic function; and the growing exclusivity of once-accessible arts venues and performance spaces! A wide ranging discussion of summer media diets follows, beginning with Isi’s recent love affair with the Western genre. The two discuss their shared fondness for Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone’s many collaborations and the unmatched brilliance of HBO’s Deadwood. Turning to the world of gaming, Ajay considers tragic endings (Expedition 33, the Death Stranding franchise), slow gaming (Herdling), and the relationship between gaming and choreography (Split Fiction). Also under consideration: what Joe Wright’s miniseries, Mussolini: Son of the Century, gets right about the fascist imaginary; what Len Wiseman’s Ballerina gets wrong about the appeal of John Wick; and what Foundation and The Sandman suggest about the challenges of adaptation and the culture industry’s recent predilection for a 21st century spin on classical tragedy. Along the way, they return repeatedly to a longstanding PCM preoccupation with medium-specificity as well as the general bleakness seeping into the cultural reflections of this historical moment.  

(Pop) Cultural Marxism is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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Episode 92 of the Podcast for Social Research features fusion folk trio Ghost Peppers in concert at BISR Central, playing songs old and new, including selections from their newly released EP Red. After the performance (44:00), the three Ghost Peppers — tabla player Ritam Bhowmil, guitarist Kevin Meehan, and vocalist (and BISR faculty) Amrita Ghosh — sat down with BISR’s Hannah Leffingwell and scholar Sara Kazmi for a wide-ranging conversation about cultural and musical fusion, and the histories, both personal and political, that surround it. What happens when classical South Asian rhythms are “fused” to rock, reggae, or Americana song structures? What kind of sonic imaginaries does fusion music evoke or produce, both across regions and within a partitioned South Asia? How can we distinguish fusion from cultural appropriation? Amidst political (and geopolitical) inequality, can musical traditions be combined “equally”? Finally, can Tagore be sung in a bar?

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini. 

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Artwork: Bharti Kher, Algorithm for Hiding

In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark and Lauren sit down with faculty Alfred Lee and Xafsa Ciise, colleagues whose shared concerns—with race, bias, politics, human consciousness, and the history of science—have cultivated a fascinating and fruitful cross-disciplinary conversation. Xafsa, a social psychologist by training, kicks off the conversation with description of how she found her way into a historical investigation of trauma and its discourses, after which Alfred, a physicist by training and data scientist in practice, details the social and political questions that animate his concern with digital innovation and data applications. Along the way, their conversation touches on the surprising origins of trauma in mesmerism and animal magnetism; the experimenter’s effect; simulation and deception in both trauma studies and AI discourse; scientism’s bracketing of politics, and politics’ return by way of history; conflicting concepts of “intelligence”; contextuality and relationality versus the conceit of universality; Freud, Fanon, and how psychoanalysis thinks about Blackness; the return of eugenics and race IQ discourses; longtermism and what a view to the far-distant future implies about the present; and the dangerously autarkic character of big tech. 

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini. 

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Episode 90 of the Podcast for Social Research—TRANSgressions: Rights Wrongs, and Liberal Pieties—was recorded (mostly) live at BISR Central, as we celebrated Pride Month by asking: What happens when trans people in the public eye commit real or perceived wrongs? By what criteria—or liberal pieties or social justice aims—are these so-called wrongs evaluated? And what kind of trans experience even gets a public airing at all—why and in service of what? We submitted these questions to BISR faculty Sophie Lewis, Hannah Leffingwell, and Ruth Averbach, each of whom approached it in a way apropos of their own scholarly and activist priorities. The first voice you’ll hear is Sophie’s, speaking from Philadelphia about a very specific form of Enemy Transfeminism: Trans Zionism. Ruth picks up from there to track the ideologically bewildering reception of a counterrevolutionary trans writer in 19th century Russia. After which we hear from Hannah on how trans life has historically interacted with the clinic and been represented in film. In conversation with one another and with a live BISR audience, Ruth and Hannah then embark on a freewheeling conversation that touches on, among other persons and things, Representative Sarah McBride, attorney Chase Strangio, the recent Supreme Court decision on trans-affirming healthcare, and much else besides. 

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini. 

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In episode 72 of Practical Criticism, Ajay takes the somber occasion of Brian Wilson's recent death to play, for Rebecca, the Beach Boys's immortal track "God Only Knows"—a song Paul McCartney called the "greatest ever written." Is Sir Paul, for once, correct? Ajay and Rebecca ask after the song's technical perfection, noting its intermix of pop, jazz, and even Bach-esque baroque, while dwelling as well on its emotional ambiguity, barbershop polyphony, and inimitable quality of being at once light and airy yet incredibly substantial. Is "God Only Knows" the platonic ideal of pop? How can we think about "genius"—and its complicated avatar, Brian Wilson? 

In episode 17 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi once again find themselves in the regrettable position of praising the Walt Disney Company. After chatting about recent cultural highlights (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a 40th anniversary screening of Kurosawa’s Ran, and a Criterion retrospective on Johnnie To), they consider the popular and critical success of Andor’s second season, and ask what it means to describe a pop cultural text as “politically timely.” Their conversation turns to extratextual ecosystems (press junkets, interviews), Gilroy’s deep engagement with cinematic depictions of fascism and rebellion (Army of Shadows, The Conformist), architecture and costume design, season 2 high points (the Ghorman Massacre, Mon Mothma’s Senate speech), the politics of revolutionary alliances, and imperial bureaucracy. Finally, they consider how the show makes the transition—narratively, visually, musically—into the lore-dense timeline of Rogue One and A New Hope, and ponder its uncharacteristically fascistic final scene.

(Pop) Cultural Marxism is produced by Ryan Lentini. 

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Shownotes:

In episode 89 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR faculty Danielle Drori, Jude Webre, and Lauren K. Wolfe sat down following a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s controversial final film, Eyes Wide Shut, to discuss its long thirty years in the making, its source material in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and its vision of bourgeois marriage and sexual morality in turn-of-the-millennium New York. Kicking off with behind-the-scenes Hollywood details, Jude adumbrates an argument for the film as an auteur’s personal reverie, tracing resonances between it and the enigmatic story of Kubrick’s own (second) married life in postwar New York City; Lauren then lets us in on the lurid sexual obsessions of Arthur Schnitzler, on whose 1926 novella Dream Story the film is based, with the interpretive aid of W.G. Sebald; while Danielle guides us through a collective Freudian analysis of the dreams that run through and construct the film’s emotional core. With insightful and witty participation from the audience, the talk touches on masculinity within marriage; nudity and nakedness; coitus interruptus; Freud’s stages of sexual development; dream as unconscious communication; sex and death; fucking down and marrying up; Nicole Kidman as gay icon; and whether anything of substance appears to have changed in bourgeois sexual morality between circa 1900 and 1999.

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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In episode 16 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay discuss the return of Tony Gilroy’s Andor. Before departing for a galaxy far, far away, they stop by the world of gaming to chat about Hazelight Studio’s latest co-op title, Split Fiction, and the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the rollout of Nintendo’s Switch 2. Turning to the first three episodes of Andor’s second season, Isi and Ajay discuss the show’s improbable presence in the Disney universe, the promises and perils of thinking with all-too-timely cultural objects, and formal and technical differences between seasons one and two. They then evaluate Gilroy’s attempt to balance the tone and feel of the original trilogy with a plausible account of fascist and imperial rule–one that explores the minutiae of bureaucratic hierarchy, financial audits, counterinsurgency tactics, fascist youth culture, the exploitation of undocumented workers, communication blackouts, and the fragility of political resistance. Along the way, they discuss Gilroy’s historical and filmic references, and the show’s resonances with long-time PCM favorite, Franz Neumann’s Behemoth.

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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For episode 88 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte welcomed special guests—translator Katrina Dodson and songwriter and vocalist Lacy Rose—for an evening of reading, musical performance, and conversation honoring the enduring legacy of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Occasioned by the release of Rose’s concept album Lispector, featuring the Starling Quartet, and Dodson’s Covert Joy, a selection of her translations of Lispector’s short stories, the three intersperse between reading and performance a discussion of Lispector’s work and the passionate attachments it inspires. What makes Lispector such a touchstone? What are the challenges of adapting her work to another language and another medium? What does it mean to find one’s own idiom through the work of another?

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

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In episode 71 of the Podcast for Social Research's Practical Criticism series, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays Neko Case's "Curse of the I-5 Corridor" (off the 2018 album Hell-On) for Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Their conversation ranges from convention to the sound of disillusionment to lyrical density, meta-musical gesture, vocal quality, and how you can tell if and when something is beyond saving. 

In episode 15 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and Joseph explore vampires in media, across genre and time! Welcoming back Joseph after a few episodes away, the episode kicks off with a games roundtable on Monster Hunter: Wilds (Capcom, 2025) and Pentiment (Obsidian, 2022), among other things. Then the group quickly dives into all things vampire. From Capital to Castelvania, the conversation analyzes the psychosexual, political economic, Orientalist, literary, genre, social, and even epidemiological metaphors, allegories, and tropes that haunt vampire stories and have made the figure of the vampire of such perennial—if shifting—fascination. How have vampire stories changed over time? Why do vampire stories shift and blur genre and valence? Why is the vampire such a perennial stand-in, across so many fields, often at the same time? Objects in consideration include: Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872), Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), Interview with the Vampire (novel: Anne Rice, 1976; TV adaptation: Rolin Jones, 2022-present; film: Neil Jordan, 1994), The Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches (Anne Rice), Nosferatu (F.W. Munrau, 1922), Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997-2003), Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami, 1997), Castlevania (anime, Warren Ellis, 1997-2021), Castlevania: Nocturne (anime, Clive Bradley, 2023-present), True Blood (TV series, Alan Ball, 2008-2014), The Twilight Saga (films 2008-2012, based on the novels by Stephanie Meyer), Midnight Mass, What We Do In The Shadows, and many more! Discover how the erotic, the economic, the exotic and even the epidemic all collide in the tragedies, comedies, horrors, nightmares, and fantasies that prove the vampire is a potent if changing symbol for fears, desires, and delirium.

In episode 86 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR Central, BISR’s Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Danya Glabau sat down with fellow faculty Nafis Hasan to celebrate the launch of his new book, Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care. Nafis kicks off the discussion with a briefing on the successful cultivation of cancer cures for mice, but not humans, fundamental failures at the clinical level, the rise of cancer as a household name, and the blockbuster drug moving for $500,000 a shot. The three then discuss the primacy placed, among researchers, on genetic mutations above environmental causes, the notion of “financial toxicity,” and what it means to critique medical research at a moment of widespread cuts to public health institutions. Key questions arise along the way: why—despite the allocation of so many resources—are we not winning the war on cancer? Why has an entire political economy developed around genetic mutations, at the expense of public health campaigns—a more proven mitigator of cancer-related deaths? Why is capitalism so embedded in efforts to defeat cancer, and is there any alternative?

Note: The Novartis drug with a half-million dollar price tag mentioned at the top of the podcast is Kymriah, not Keytruda.

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, and Isi Litke discuss David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). Conversation ranges over what it means for a thing to be "Lynchian," what it means for a thing to be surreal, why Mulholland Drive isn't easily reducible to pat explanation—and why that's a good thing, and the inextricability, modeled in the film, of dream life and ordinary reality. How, in film and life, do fantasy and reality merge? Why is Lynch particularly interested in Hollywood, that great dream factory? How does Lynchian melodrama, rubbing shoulders with Lynchian menace, give viewers the permission to feel things we otherwise deny ourselves in ordinary, waking life? What makes Lynch the premier poet of broken promises and shattered dreams?

In episode no. 70 of Practical Criticism, Ajay surprises Rebecca with Roy Hargrove and the RH Factor’s "Out of Town," off the 2003 record Hard Groove. The discussion includes a dive deep into jazz-hip-hop experiments, varieties and suspicions of musical fusion, caesuras and polyharmonies, the dissonant and the antiphonal, "open-eared moonlighting," and hybridity without history.

What does sexual morality have to do with genocidal politics? In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Hannah Leffingwell—historian, queer theorist, musician, and novelist—to discuss the work of Dagmar Herzog, historian of sexuality whose celebrated book Sex After Fascism undid the myth that all Nazis were closeted homosexuals by exposing how it arose in the first place, and that long after the war had ended. Along the way, the three hash out: the uses and pitfalls of theory in the study of history, strategic misprisions of the past for political needs in the present, what sort of lens the history of sexuality can be for understanding mass political phenomena, and whether and how to invoke 20th-century fascisms to explain conservative reaction in the 21st. Tune in to discover why Nazism is not the past, how fascism was never anti-sex, why anti-queer and anti-trans animus have never been peripheral, why Trump can never be camp, and positive panegyrics for Chappell Roan and A Complete Unknown.

Faculty Spotlight is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Notes:

Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Dagmar Herzog, The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Dagmar Herzog, Sex in Crisis (Basic Books, 2008)

Sabrina Carpenter performing “Espresso” at the 2025 Grammys

Chappell Roan performing “Pink Pony Club” at the 2025 Grammys

Lesser Known Women (Hannah’s band) on Spotify and Bandcamp

Lesser Known Women performing at Sunset Stoop on March 8th!

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In episode 85 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live on Facebook, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Barnaby Raine, Abdaljawad Omar, and K. Soraya Batmanghelichi place the Gaza War ceasefire in the context of the conflict’s broader development. Ajay kicks off the discussion with a recap of the events leading up to the ceasefire, after which each of the panelists brings their expertise to bear—Abdaljawad analyzing the dialectic of futility and resistance in Palestine, Soraya grappling with Iran’s evolving geopolitical intentions, and Barnaby addressing the antisemitism panic in the Global North. The four then discuss: political developments within Israel and Palestine since October 7th, wider geopolitical reverberations, and Israel as a model for Trumpism and the global far right. An audience member’s question brings the conversation to an urgent point of reflection: how can we, in the Global North, sustain attention towards Palestinian resistance in the era of social media and truncated news cycles?

0:26 - Ajay Singh Chaudhary introduction and context  

11:35 - Abdaljawad Omar on futility and resistance in Palestine 

33:05 - K. Soraya Batmanghelichi on the geopolitical consequences for Iran 

46:23 - Barnaby Raine on the weaponization of antisemitism 

1:05:12 - Trump and the protection of Western Civilization 

1:11:20 - Developments within Israeli and Palestinian societies since October 7th 

1:42:12 - Global paradigm shifts and geopolitical maneuvering 

2:06:53 - Zionism, Trumpism, and the global far right 

2:29:34 - Audience question and concluding remarks - how to sustain attention towards Palestine

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Check out the video version of this podcast on the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research YouTube Channel.

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Isi and Ajay kick off episode 14 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism by paying tribute to the late, great American auteur David Lynch. They discuss the pleasures of Lynch's oneiric style, his keen eye for American mass culture (and the horrors it conceals), and recent re-watches of Twin Peaks and Dune. The two then reprise episode 13's review of 2024 pop culture. Along the way, they discuss year-end film releases (Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, Ridley Scott's Gladiator II, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, Gints Zilbalodis' Flow), HBO's The Penguin, and recent gaming highlights (Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess) and lowlights (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle). Closing out the episode are pre-2024 cultural revisits, including Barry Lyndon, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, The Case of the Golden Idol, Inside Man, and Koyaanisqatsi. 

The podcast is produced by Ryan Lentini.

In episode 13 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi ruminate on a largely dismal year in pop culture. Kicking off with a discussion of unexpected developments in the world of health insurance, the conversation turns to a number of broad trends that characterized culture this year: AI, long production cycles, platforms—rather than cultural works—as objects of cathexis, IP art, and the use of IP as trans-media anchors. Along the way, they discuss social bandits, collective effervescence, Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, the Criterion Closet truck, Sony’s push into the television space, Jon Chu’s Wicked, and 2024’s revealing box office numbers. In the second half of the episode, Ajay and Isi discuss the year’s highlights (Metaphor: ReFantazio [GoTY], Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Lies of P, Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, a performance of book 1 of The Odyssey by Joseph Medeiros, Edward Berger’s Conclave, Todd Phillip’s divisive Joker: Folie à Deux, the second season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, and True Detective: Night Country) and lowlights (Denis Villeneuve's Dune 2, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, and a whole lot of "just okay" television)—with more to come in a follow-up episode after the holidays! 

In episode 84 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR faculty Rebecca Ariel Porte and special guests Alla Della Subin and Katie Kadue sat down with fellow faculty Orlando Reade for a sweeping conversation to parallel the breadth of the study that occasioned it: Orlando’s acclaimed new book What In Me Is Dark, an exploration of the revolutionary political and poetic potential of Milton’s Paradise Lost by way of its most prominent and most various readers—from Thomas Jefferson to Malcolm X to 21st century students in a New Jersey prison. Topics touched on include: selective and disobedient reading (and the uses of each); divinity, abjection, and the poet’s body; creation and subjugation; paradise and self-determination; letting the bad ideas rip—in the 17th century and on Twitter—in order to strengthen the good ones; domesticating Milton; unresolved contradictions; the profane joy of bending a text to one’s present needs; and much else besides.

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

In this episode we discussed our end-of-year Spotify Wrapped lists and what algorithmic listening means for us as subjects and social beings, mass culture's current expression in shared forms of circulation rather than in objects of attention held in common, the limits of poptimism, the sound of melancholy, experimental hip-hop, jazz, vocaloid(ish) bands, music as cinematic form, Sampa the Great, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, HoneyWorks, Weyes Blood, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Arooj Aftab.

Episode 83 of the Podcast for Social Research features a live performance, at BISR Central, by chamber-pop outfit Big Bend, who played selections from their acclaimed third album Last Circle in a Showdown. After the performance, Big Bend vocalist, pianist, and songwriter Nathan Phillips sat down with BISR's Mark DeLucas for a conversation about musical origins and inspirations; Nathan's unique, communal approach to songwriting; musical improvisation vs. premeditation; whether albums still "matter"; making music with, or against, genre; and much else besides.

The performance begins at 00:32, and the conversation at 38:22.

In episode 12 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi tackle Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024). Kicking off with a review of a few recent pop-cultural engagements—including an assemblage of classic vampire films (Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among them), Mubi’s restoration of The Fall (2006), Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, and a pair of streaming series about professional wrestling—the conversation turns to Coppola’s reactionary would-be summa about an architect attempting to construct a techno-futuristic utopia on a plot of land in “New Rome,” an alternate-world New York City as played against Roman and early American history. Along the way, Ajay and Isi discuss Neri Oxman’s faux-ecological contributions to the film’s central animating macguffin, the mysterious “megalon;” the film’s antipathy for the marginalized masses; its protagonist as synthesis of Caesar, Robert Moses, Walter Gropius, and The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark; accidentally timely narratives of the “good guy” billionaire pitted against the “bad-guy” billionaire; and the ecofascist inclination to marry the romanticization of nature with authoritarian techno-optimism. Among the topics at hand are Coppola’s disturbing, “secretly autobiographical” efforts to reaffirm himself as auteur, his baffling postmodern pastiche, the classic right-wing themes of patriarchy as a sign of order and non-normative sexual expression as a sign of decline and decadence, the film’s shocking ugliness, and how Megalopolis’s strange incorporation of current events betrays “a baby boomer [having read] a bunch of airport history books.”

In episode 82 of the Podcast for Social Research, Patrick Blanchfield and Ajay Singh Chaudhary take up the dismal U.S. election results, what brought us here, what comes next, and more. With the excellent Nara Roberta Silva and Isi Litke unfortunately both out sick but present in spirit and mind Patrick and Ajay reflect on how themes of depletion, exhaustion, and illness offer a perfect point of departure for processing the general morass of our moment’s florid pathologies and generally grim vibes. Their conversation proceeds by unpacking psychoanalytic theories of libidinal economy in terms of trauma response, repression, and “pathic projection” alongside a materialist interrogation of the structural, political-economic conditions of misery in a crumbling and violently flailing U.S. empire. How did the two campaigns appeal to the anxieties and antipathies of voters by ratifying or disavowing their feelings, and by offering them competing accounts of whom to blame? What is or isn't negotiable for the U.S. imperial project abroad and for social reproduction at home, and how does that relate to what is or isn't sayable, or even thinkable, in domestic US discourse? How should we understand “Trumpism” in relation not just to terminological debates over fascism, but in the context of global political trends? How does Trump’s brand of nativism, theocratic Christianity, and patriarchy mesh with longstanding features of the American project, where does it depart from them, and how does it resonate with other nationalisms abroad? And how do the Biden presidency, the Harris campaign, and initial responses from media and political figures demonstrate the increasing hegemony of such positions among elites? Against a backdrop of genocidal violence, mounting climate crisis, and ever-shrill chauvinism, this episode is the first in a series of confrontations with the starkly bleak conditions of current American politics. 

In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Jude Webre, cultural historian and practicing musician, to discuss the life and legacy of Dawn Powell, the urbane, acerbic, and woefully undercelebrated “lady wit” of Greenwich Village in its mid-century heyday. Attracted, as many of her generation were, by the allure of bohemia, its promise of liberation and self-realization, Powell exchanged her native midwest environs for an artist’s life in the city. Known, if not unremittingly beloved, by nearly all the literary lights of 1940s New York City—Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Diana Trilling, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, e.e. Cummings, and Jean Stafford to name just a few—it is hard to reconcile Powell’s social acumen, bracing wit, and the vitality of her literary output with the obscurity into which her life’s work has fallen in the six decades since her burial in a pauper’s grave. What were the manners, mores, and moods of mid-20th-century American bohemia? And how did Powell both share in and depart from them, both capture and censure them? What is it to follow a moral judgment and an aesthetic conviction, be they ever so slightly out of step with prevailing tastes? And what, finally, accounts for lasting literary fame? 

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte, Isi Litke, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary discuss Baz Luhrmann’s sensational 1996 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (or, in this case, Romeo + Juliet). Beginning with a brief literary and theatrical history of the play, Rebecca provides the conversation’s opening gambit: Shakespeare has never not been pop. The trio then, with a keen eye for detail, observes the many ways in which Luhrmann translates Shakespeare’s own pop-cultural tendencies into a medium and a style apropos of Venice Beach at the close of the millennium. Topics touched on include passions that threaten the social order, textual instability as adaptive possibility, intertextuality as production design strategy, teen drama as genre, teen-age as a time of emotional freedom, My So-Called Life, The O.C., Euphoria, spaghetti Westerns, police procedurals, Fredric Jameson on blank parody and endless pastiche, and much else besides. 

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Episode 81 of the Podcast for Social Research is a discussion Haskell Wexler's 1969 classic of cinéma verité Medium Cool, a film whose exploration of violence, spectacle, and the politics and power of media render it as fresh and powerful today as it was on its controversial release. BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte, Andy Battle, and Mark DeLucas and journalist Natasha Lennard dissect the film's context, formal innovations, and themes, from its integration of narrative and documentary to its treatment of the ethics of journalism in the face of social and political upheaval, violence, and repression. How did Medium Cool emerge out of the specific context of the "New Hollywood"? What exactly was Wexler, cinematographer and first-time director, trying to do? And how does Medium Cool push us to think about media objectivity, and the substance, value, and intentions of "news"? Is media ever genuinely critical, or is it always a kind of "soft power"? How do we tell stories that don't exploit, but instead explain? 

What does literary realism look like in the 21st century—and what can it do? In episode 80 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Liz’s Book Bar in Brooklyn, BISR faculty Paige Sweet sat down with fellow faculty and debut novelist Joseph Earl Thomas plus special guests, writers Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Vinson Cunningham, to talk about what it means, what it takes, and what it feels like to represent social reality in contemporary fiction. In novels that test the boundaries of realism, traditionally conceived—borrowing techniques from autofiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, satire, and academic non-fiction—Thomas (God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer), Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars), and Cunningham (Great Expectations) get beneath the detailed depiction of everyday life to discuss, among other things, the world-building that happens in every act of writing; how fiction can serve as a testing ground for theoretical commitments; the carceral nature of our social institutions and their ripple effects through our intimate lives; the violence that goes on under the guise of pleasure; and how to feel and depict life as precious in even the most devastating and dehumanizing conditions. Persons and things touched upon include: the US Constitution, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Henry James, Solmaz Sharif, Saidiya Hartman, Goodreads, love, looking, “boundaries,” and beauty. 

This episode was produced by Ryan Lentini.

In episode nine of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Lauren K. Wolfe and Mark DeLucas sit down with Jenny Logan, Associate faculty (legal studies) and plaintiff's attorney, at the District Court level, in the case of Johnson v. Grant's Pass, on which the Supreme Court recently ruled. Speaking from London, Jenny discusses the origins of the case—in which a class of unhoused people sued the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, for imposing criminal penalties on people sleeping in public parks—and explains the reasoning behind the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling upholding the constitutionality of Grants Pass's anti-homeless statutes. What were the stakes of Johnson v. Grant's Pass; and why, as critics argue, does the Court's ruling effectively enable the criminalization of homelessness? Why have cities responded to homelessness with largely punitive measures? And how can the case of Grant's Pass, whose only shelter is a religious mission, be situated within the wider history of the evangelical-neoliberal alliance to undermine the New Deal social contract and welfare state? What is the future of "poverty governance" in the United States? 

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte and Isi Litke discuss Stephen Frears's 1985 classic of queer cinema, My Beautiful Laundrette. Conversation ranges over the film's Thatcherite backdrop; its depiction of queer, and cross-racial, love; and its inimitable mix of gritty social realism and dreamlike sensuality. What's unique, in the queer cinematic canon, about a film made just before the AIDS crisis emerged in British public consciousness—that is, just prior to the inceasing identification of queerness with disease? How does it weave elements of the fairy tale into its story of cross-class, cross-racial love? And how does the film, with its "qualified utopian hope," contrast with later, more pessimistic classics of the New Queer Cinema? Why, in a film set in a laundromat, is it a source of optimism that some things don't stay clean? 

Practical Criticism is back with its first episode of 2024—on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. In it, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays the opening track of the album, “American Requiem,” for Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who, as usual, doesn’t know what the object will be. Their conversation then commences with a question: Beyoncé is far from the first to undertake the ambitious task of deconstructing country music’s many musical debts—but does she actually succeed in doing so? Along the way, they discuss the history of Black country music (and listen to Linda Martell), the convergence of aesthetic and commodity forms (is the album so slick as to slide over into parody?), conflictual aspirations to iconicity and iconoclasm, and the courage of conviction it takes to betray an older version of one’s own aesthetic commitments.

In episode 11 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi examine Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024). Kicking off with a handful of pop culture news items—including the Met Gala, the death of Steve Albini, A24’s Stop Making Sense tribute album, and Apple's alarming iPad Pro commercial—the conversation turns to Garland’s provocative and uneven drama about a group of photojournalists traveling through a war-torn United States. Ajay and Isi discuss the perils of directors commenting on their own works, the film’s inadvertent critique of combat photographers, “Portland Maoists,” Garland’s allusions to significant 20th century photojournalists (Robert Capa, Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, the Bang Bang Club), reactionary aesthetics, and the vernacular of American violence. Central to the conversation are perennial questions about the mediation of war through film and photography; the circulation and reception of images of violence; and how to make a film about war that neither glamorizes nor sentimentalizes it.

Have 21st century technologies—from smartphones to medical devices to the commonplace use of artificial intelligence—made cyborgs of us all? In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR faculty Rebecca Ariel Porte sits down with fellow faculty Danya Glabau and co-author Laura Forlano to parse what the latter, in their recent book Cyborg (MIT Press), have termed “critical cyborg literacy”: a lens through which to critically examine the constitutive role technology plays in the ways we think, behave, know, and interact. Glabau and Forlano begin with a synthetic overview of the history and affordances of thinking with the figure of the cyborg, after which the three discuss, among other things, the hidden human labor behind apparently automated systems, failure and the glitch, feminist scholarship as collaborative process, and the cyborg as, beyond its technicity, a social, political, and aesthetic project.

In episode 78 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR's Jude Webre (who also teaches at Columbia University and NYU), Sami Al-Daghistani (Columbia and the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society), and Robyn Marasco and Anthony Alessandrini (CUNY) offer faculty perspectives on the Gaza Solidarity Encampments that have arisen on college campuses nationwide and globally. What happened and what is happening on the ground in NYC and internationally? How do faculty understand their position relative to protesting students, on the one hand, and mega-institutions like Columbia University and City University of New York, on the other? What are the discussions that are happening among faculty—including faculty with different levels of employment precarity and security? How can we understand the Gaza Solidarity Encampments and the faculty response within the context of the wider crisis in academia? Can the student protests inaugurate, in turn, a new movement for faculty empowerment? What is the meaning of solidarity?

In episode eight of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Danielle Drori, Associate faculty member (in literature and Judaic studies), Director of Development, and psychoanalyst-in-training. Recently returned from a long-delayed trip to her native Tel-Aviv, Drori discusses the state of Israeli society in the shadow of the war in Gaza, her own vexed relation to her country of birth (including, how it shaped her scholarly interests), and the unexpected resonances of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis in a time of mass destruction. What's humane in Auerbach's historicist method? Is Auerbach's documentation of "civilization" also a lamentation? What sorts of perspectives are afforded by exile?

In episode 77 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Goethe-Institut Chicago, BISR faculty and Chicago Coordinator Audrey Nicolaïdes sat down with special guest, art historian Annie Bourneuf, to discuss revolution and counterrevolution, in text and dialectical image. Annie begins with a reexamination of Walter Benjamin’s aesthetic and philosophical project in light of a surprising discovery: Paul Klee’s famous Angelus Novus—a print in Benjamin’s own collection—is in fact a piece of collage; Klee’s image is glued atop a sixteenth-century engraving of a portrait of Martin Luther. What did such an image mean to Klee, in the context of counterrevolutionary Munich in the 1920s? And how does this citation bear on Benjamin’s attachment to the image and the inspiration he drew from it? Then, Audrey walks us through the schisms that put socialist movements in pre- and interwar Europe on their back foot—and the world-historical consequences these schisms entailed. What were the fundamental assumptions—fundamentally in error—about the progressive nature of historical processes that Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is an attempt to redress? Along the way, the two touch on the centrality of concepts like ephemerality and contemporaneity in Benjamin’s work, parody and citation, the revolutionary potential of “hatred for the oppressor,” and more.

This episode of the podcast was produced by Ryan Lentini.

What does it mean to claim translation as an artform unto itself? In episode 76 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central while a wicked Nor’easter raged outside, BISR welcomed Ugly Duckling Presse, Barricade journal, and the Leipzig/Vienna-based collective TRANSLETTING for an evening of presentations and panel discussion addressed to the ethics, politics, and embodied practice of literary translation in the 21^st century.

With Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” (1923) and Sawako Nakayasu’s Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) as historical and theoretical bookends, the cast—including BISR’s Lauren K. Wolfe, Ugly Duckling Presse Manager Marine Cornuet, and the TRANSLETTING collective (check out their bios below)—talked its way through Nakayasu’s playful politico-poetical wager (say translation is unfaithful, is performance, repetition, failure, process, collaboration, feminism, polyphony, conversation, deviance, decolonial, punk, and improvisation) and, from there, explored the word as a contingent unit of meaning and value by way of Ilse Aichinger's Bad Words, in a translation by poets Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey.

The ensuing conversation touched upon all manner of things—from good words to wrong ones; the pleasures of infidelity; how power is borne in the space between an original and its translations; the meaning-bearing unit of language (a word, a comma, a syllable, syntax, a poem, a book, alternative structures of literature?); markets and reading publics; a translator’s responsibility—to whom? to what?; identity and its vicissitudes; and much else besides.

The TRANSLETTING collective includes: Konstantin Schmidtbauer, writer and translator; Mücahit Türk, writer; Jonë Zhitia, writer, translator, and editor; Nadja Etinski, writer, historian, and editor; Leonie Pürmayr, writer and editor; and Anile Tmava, writer, editor, and anthropologist.

In this edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live before of a screening of Michael Haneke’s 2001 The Piano Teacher, BISR faculty Lauren K. Wolfe, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Paige Sweet take up impinging mothers, absent fathers, and the variable affordances of literary and cinematic media, as they compare and interpret Haneke’s film and the eponymous novel by Elfriede Jelinek from which it was adapted. Topics touched on include: the reactionary milieu of 1980s Austria; ways of reading psychological depth from cinematic surface; recognition and misrecognition (by way of Aristotle and Lauren Berlant); pedagogy and its incidental lessons; musical Romanticism and sexual pathology; dissonance and the (dashed hope for) a return to tonic; Freud and polymorphous perversity; Schubert’s Winterreise, Schubert as seduction strategy, Adorno on Schubert, and much else besides.

What does culture look like in a “sustainable” world? In episode of 10 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and guest Rebecca Ariel Porte examine the problems with “green” technology and consumption—which, it turns out, do little, nothing, or less than nothing to sustain the environment—and talk about the kinds of cultural forms, from literature to architecture to games, that are not only sustainable in terms of ecology and society but also aesthetically compelling and beautiful. How does genuine ecological sustainability depend on social sustainability for artists and engineers and other creative workers, and promote far richer aesthetic expressions? Why is so much “Green”-branded work—in everything from the built world to fine art—anything but? What forms of aesthetic creation not usually thought of as ecological, are actually sustainable in every dimension? How does our current unsustainable social and ecological society constrict imagination and creative effloresce? And how would even a modestly more sustainable world, actually enable and support such creative flourishing? Looking to both current and historical examples, Isi, Rebecca, and Ajay review art installations like Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room and the MOMA’s Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism; architecture from the “PR-architecture” of projects like “Oceanix” to the actual sustainability found in works like Võ Tr?ng Ngh?a’s “Farming Kindergarten”; unexhausted forms in music (from Bach to Stravinsky, pop music to the vast world of jazz) and in verse, such as the ghazals of poet Anthony Madrid; film, tv, and even videogames, whether low-powered and low-tech (as with recent critical and commercial successes like Hades (Supergiant) or Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape)) or high-powered and high-tech (and highly popular), like Zelda, Elden Ring, and more. How is production—from emissions to mineral inputs, exploitative assembly and “crunch”—key to understanding aesthetic exhaustions? How does unsustainable ecological design and an ever accelerating model of production stifle creativity and promote ever narrower, more costly, and less interesting work? How does a model like streaming—and other modes of supposedly “dematerialized” distribution—actually obscure ecological damage while simultaneously making aesthetic production more difficult for artists and aesthetic consumption less compelling for everyone? What is the “trickle up misery” of “defensive architecture”? In the face of a capitalist ethos that always insists on creativity as bound to a logic of “bigger, faster, better, more,” the conversation explores the ways in which working, creating, designing, and engineering within limits has produced some of the most exciting aesthetic forms and experiences, and how the necessity of ecological and social limits can act as the “enabling constraints” of a far more compelling aesthetic life than the all-too-real dystopia of today.

In episode 74 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary sits down with writer and artist Molly Crabapple to discuss his new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater). Live-recorded at P&T Knitwear in New York City, the conversation encompasses, among other things: the ubiquity of exhaustion (and how feelings of exhaustion might form the basis for new international solidarities); right-wing approaches to climate mitigation (and why, in the realm of climate policy, the Right has a "leg up"); "growth," "degrowth," and how the status quo actually thwarts abundance; the limits (or, illusions) of climate technocracy (and the kinds of climate technologies that can work); and international social movement responses climate catastrophe—and the lessons they might provide for U.S. activists.

In episode 73 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live following a screening of Daniel Goldhaber’s cinematic adaptation of Andreas Malm’s polemic against pacifism How to Blow Up a Pipeline, BISR faculty Isi Litke, RH Lossin, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary explore the aesthetic, historical, and thorny practical terrain of violence as activist strategy and political tool in the face of climate crisis. With Goldhaber’s film as a jumping off point, they ask—and answer—questions like: how can cinema represent the complex harms wrought by climate devastation, in all their manifold temporalities, from freak accidents to slow disease to historical expropriations? How are solidarities built across ideological divides? What unites anti-colonial movements across the Global South with the struggles of subaltern groups in the Global North? And what underpins the belief in non-violence as the righteous mechanism for political change—and why is this wrong? Along the way, they touch on everything from the heist film (wherein the question is not whether one ought but whether one can pull it off), how comrades are not friends, workplace violence, radical flanks, Fanon’s “stretched Marxism,” and much else besides. Plus a sneak preview from Ajay’s new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, out this February from Repeater Books!

In episode 72 of the Podcast for Social Research, Nara Roberta Silva, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Lauren K. Wolfe, Mark DeLucas, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary look back at their 2023 in cultural objects, or their 2023 experiences of objects washed up on present shores from other times, observing as they do how year-end compendia reveal surprising throughlines. A tally, in brief, of their preoccupations include: the itinerant dance party Laylit celebrating Arab/SWANA music, Argentina, 1985 (and why historical contingency is such a problem for theory), paper architecture, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost and global Shakespeares, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger and demonic doubles, Ruth Beckermann’s Mutzenbacher (and cis-male hetero-sexuality as at once the most and least visible), Anita Brookner’s novels of mid-life resignation (a revival for aging millennials?), the origins of Fauvism, actually interesting YouTube trends, vinyl records and deliberate listening, and what there is to look forward to in 2024.

In the final episode for 2023, Isi, Ajay, and Joseph address the vexing nature of End-of-Year lists—and then go through the vexing process of assembling our own! Isi leads us through our year in cinema; Ajay, the year in games; and Joseph, the year in television, culminating in three top picks (and some honorable mentions) for the year in each category. Discussions range from the surprising success of cinematic restorations to films which shape, subvert, and show the optical unconscious; games of visceral pleasure, systemic fascination, and astonishing simplicity; and the politics (and possibilities) in contemporary anime and the anxious and wonderfully character-driven year in television. Proceeding in part through negative examples (Oppenheimer and Final Fantasy XVI receive perhaps the harshest treatments), the cast ultimately records in the world of film: 1. Stop Making Sense (2023, remaster); 2. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023); and 3. May December (2023), with honorable mentions for How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023) and The Boy and the Heron (2023). In the world of games: 1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023); 2. Armored Core 6 (2023); 3. Super Mario Brothers Wonder (2023) / Pikmin 4 (2023), with honorable mentions for Star Ocean: The Second Story R and a whole slate of tiny games for Panic's "Playdate" lo-fi handheld: Questy Chess, Omaze, Zipper, Casual Birder, among others. In the world of television: 1. Rap Shit (2023); 2. Beef (2023); 3. Attack on Titan (2013-2023), with honorable mentions for the live-action adaptation of One Piece (2023) and our collective 2022 hangover shows: Peaky Blinders (2013-2022) and Ozark (2017-2022). Stay tuned in for talk of the unbearable “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, what makes old action movies so good, unsustainable labor practices in the world of commercial game production, and making a “Breaking Bad” that is actually good. Wishing you all a critically reflective holiday season from PCM!

In episode 67 of Practical Criticism, Rebecca and Ajay surprise each other with songs and compositions drawn exclusively from their respective algorithmically-generated Spotify "Wrapped" playlists! Pieces include Erza Furman's "Can I Sleep in Your Brain"; Linked Horizon's "Guren No Yumiya" (from the Attack on Titan soundtrack); Lucy Dacus's "Night Shift"; The Smashing Pumpkins's "Mayonaise"; Monteverdi's "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria"; Phish's "Cavern" (from Atlantic City, 10/30/2010); CeeLo Green's cover of "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses; and Nirvana's "All Apologies." Along the way, the conversation turns to overcoming the All-Roads-Lead-to-Coldplay-Problem of automatic curation, the subtle and the transformative, time changes and genre conventions, unadorned pop and unromanticized classics, the dialectic of sincerity and absurdity, cute aggression and martial pop, fascist aesthetics, narcissistic injury and pathic projection, epics of the ordinary, the strange proliferation of 2-part pop songs, soft edged vs. soft with edges, unleashed elegance, what the machine wants you to listen to, coolness and anomie, the many modalities of anger, musical artifacts and ur-forms, ariosos vs. arias and the nascent opera of the early 17th century, brilliant failures, and, above all, writing soundtracks. Listen to what rises out to shine from the digital (and other) mucks of 2023.

Is a recipe a text? What happens when it’s translated, via cooking, into food? In episode 71 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR Central, author Rebecca May Johnson joins BISR faculty Sophie Lewis and Rebecca Ariel Porte and Dilettante Army's Sara Clugage to read from her autotheoretical "epic in the kitchen" Small Fires and discuss the ways cooking relates to language, the body, knowledge, politics, power, and thinking. What's creative about cooking from a recipe? What kinds of bonds and connections do recipes create—between both intimates and strangers? Why is Donald Winnicott wrong about sausages (and, can we ever be recipe-less)? Why cook a recipe 1,000 times? When is cooking labor; and when, if ever, is it not? What would it mean to abolish the kitchen?

In this very special crossover episode, the compound cast—Isi, Rebecca, and Ajay—are back together after hiatuses of various lengths to discuss the Talking Heads and A24's recent re-release of Jonathan Demme’s much-celebrated 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense. Kicking off with some reunion talk (to wit: research rabbit holes, early modern gardens, avant-garde architecture, automata, and, naturally, more Zelda), the trio then sets out to explore what it is that makes this film such a brilliant exemplar of the genre—joyful, affirmative, but nevertheless critical in sensibility. Along the way, they discuss: first encounters with the film, soundtrack versus album versions (controversial!), David Byrne’s pas de deux with a lamp, fashion and theatrical influences (kabuki, noh, Brecht), laying bare the device, the more integrated musical scenes of the 1980s, satire, collective composition, Tina Weymouth as secret sauce, and so much more. What kind of story does this film tell about music? How did the restored version come to be? And what does it restore?

In episode seven of Faculty Spotlight, Mark and Lauren sit down to chat with two BISR faculty whose interests, scholarly and otherwise, dovetail in fascinating ways—Sophie Lewis, writer, critic, and leading scholar of family abolition and the politics of reproduction; and Paige Sweet, writer, practicing psychoanalyst, and founder of the experimental writing project Infinite Text Collective. Following Sophie’s personal reflections on her early experiences of the injustices in-built into middle-class heteropatriarchal institutions like the family and formal schooling (“nothing is apolitical”), the four of them discuss: what previously overlooked insights one might still unearth from so-called second wave feminists like Silvia Federici (is the witch a figure of incipient queerness?); how fecund and fungible was the time of transition from feudalism to capitalism, not least for thinking with gender; the “unruly undertows” of popular and “low” entertainment (Chicken Run as exemplary Marxist-feminist cinema!); autotheory, autofiction, autoanalysis, and the affordances of writing from the self; why children’s liberation is to everyone’s benefit; and the erstwhile pin-up career of Barnacle the cat—with much else in between and besides. 

In episode six of Faculty Spotlight, Mark and Lauren sit down with R.H. Lossin, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Warren Center of Studies in American History and a leading scholar of the theory and practice of sabotage. The three discuss: what led R.H. to the study of sabotage; why sabotage is more ordinary than you think; R.H.’s beef with the “universal library”—i.e., the total digitization of books; how readers have become producers; why Luddites have a bad rap; the meaning of “capitalist sabotage”; and the violent origins of all private property—among other scintillating subjects.

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte, Paige Sweet, and special guest Sonia Werner take an in-depth look back at Jamie Babbit’s 1999 queer cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader—a campy send-up of gay conversion therapy and compulsory heterosexuality. What are the “roots” of sexual desire? Rebecca, Paige, and Sonia parse the film’s playful mockery of the very notion—spoiler alert!—that sexuality (of any stripe) has anything so neatly grounded about it. Topics touched on include: sexuality’s intersubjective structure, plastic flowers and monochrome palettes, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, comedy as coping mechanism, femme queerness, butch visibility, camp as a celebration of surfaces, Foucault, discipline, straight pedagogy, and more! 

You can download the episode by right-clicking here and selecting “save as.” Or, look us up on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Elliot Yokum. If you like what you’ve heard, consider subscribing to Brooklyn Institute’s Patreon Page, where you can enjoy access to all past and future episodes of the podcast.

Episode 70 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of the concluding panel of BISR’s July symposium Frankfurt School and the Now: Critical Theory in the 21st Century. To what extent, 100 years later, can critical theory help us make sense of the particular conditions, crises, and prospective futures of the contemporary twenty first-century moment? Panelists Isi Litke, Barnaby Raine, Samantha Hill, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Moira Weigel, and Jodi Dean consider big data and social media, György Lukács, Black Marxism, climate and class struggle, hyper-individualism, optimism versus pessimism, and the objectification of everything. Is interactive media a democratic alternative to a top-down culture industry, or does it actually exacerbate authoritarian dynamics? How can we think about politics and political subjects under conditions of climate change? In what ways does the twenty-first century echo the twentieth? How do we think with critical theory without fetishizing it? What are the political uses of failure? Is there an imperative to hope?

In episode 69 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded (like episodes 67 and 68) at BISR’s recent symposium Frankfurt School and the Now, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Isi Litke, and Nathan Shields and guests Adam Shatz and Kate Wagner ask about the uses of critical theory for thinking about contemporary culture and cultural production, from Twitter to architecture to media mega-conglomerates like Disney. How does social media structure and even produce certain kinds of discourse (for example, YIMBY vs. NIMBY)? How can Theodor Adorno help us navigate the poles of poptimism and elitism? Why do we feel driven to “stick up” for major movie studios and franchises, and why does doing so feel and code as “progressive”? How can we think about and conduct cultural criticism today? Why are culture and cultural analysis vital to the formation of political consciousness? Can we imagine a culture that’s expressive and productive of freedom, rather than domination?

In episode 68 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR’s recent symposium The Frankfurt School and the Now, panelists William Paris, Nathan Duford, Eduardo Mendieta, and Paul North tackle the question: What use does Frankfurt School critical theory, a thought movement composed largely of mid-20th-century white men, have for contemporary thinking about race, sex and gender? The conversation touches on, among other things, the Frankfurt School’s amalgam of Marx and Freud; the patriarch as racketeer (the threatening figure who protects the woman from himself); the pitfalls of moralism and the fetishization of suffering; Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical understanding of the “tradition of the oppressed”; and Frantz Fanon’s notion of race as a pathology of time (that is, the denial of our capacity to live, in the future, in a different sort of world). How can we understand the seemingly inextricable relationship between gender panic and normativity and authoritarianism? What will race come to mean in the context of a warming planet (which most threatens black and brown people in the global south)? Who are the thinkers who have taken up Frankfurt School critical theory and pushed it in feminist directions?

In episode 67 of the Podcast for Social Research, a live recording of the opening panel of two-day symposium Frankfurt School and the Now, BISR’s Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Rebecca Ariel Porte and guests Seyla Benhabib and Aaron Benanav answer the perennial question, What is Critical Theory? As they trace a line from Kant to Marx to the classic and latter-day Frankfurt School critical theorists, they grapple with a wide range of attending questions: How can we understand the concept of critique itself? How does philosophy relate to social theory? What are we to make of critical theory's fraught history as a practice of negativity (the source of many of its most piercing insights and also of its perceived troubles for praxis)? Must criticism provide a solution? Or is the critique of “progress” as urgent as ever? In the 21st century, what remains of critical theory—and what doesn’t?

After a brief hiatus, Ajay and Isi are back with another episode of (Pop) Cultural Marxism! In episode 7, they sojourn amidst the splendid ruins of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the much celebrated 2023 game from Nintendo’s EPD development group, directed and produced by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma. Before delving into the series’ past and present iterations, the two spend some time catching up on what’s new at the movies—including the expected summer blockbusters, relative degrees of quackery, and other matters. Then it’s on to Nintendo and its quasi-mercantilist business model, the awe-inspiring complexity of the latest entry in the Zelda franchise, leading to excurses on Situationist psychogeography, flânerie, combinatorial aesthetics, architectural reasoning and silent film techniques. Taking up Tears of the Kingdom as a kind of Trauerspiel in the Benjaminian sense, they explore the dialectical tension between humor and mourning, diegetic and critical knowledge formation, comparative religion, and the beauty of works that are incomparably more than the sum (or multiplication) of their parts. Stay tuned for answers to burning listener questions on the game’s environmental (or extractivist) dimensions—with reference to Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke—and the (fairly incomprehensible) class structure of Hyrule.

In episode 66 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, Daniel M. Lavery, erstwhile “Prudence” of Slate’s popular advice column, dropped by to discuss his latest book—a collection of “greatest hits” from his tenure as “Prudie,” interspersed with reflections on the uses and affordances of the advice column, the role and persona of the advice-giver, and the varieties of human experience, from the sacred to the profane, that the advice column offers up to view. Danny sat down with BISR’s Kali Handelman, Abby Kluchin, and Rebecca Ariel Porte for a truly wide-ranging discussion of the history, ethics, and gnarly practicalities of advice-giving—from Greek oracles to the micro-targeting of micro-identities in the internet age, from Aristotelian “practical wisdom” to the psychoanalytic scene of transference, from “agony aunties” to Miss Lonelyhearts. What is it we're actually asking for, or about, when we ask for advice? Stay tuned as the podcast wraps with the panel providing extemporaneous advice in real time to thorny questions from the audience!

In episode 65 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, songwriter, improviser, and ecumenical instrumentalist Wendy Eisenberg took to the “stage” for an intimate solo performance of new acoustic work. They then sat down with BISR faculty Jude Webre for a wide-ranging discussion of their musical formation, theoretical inspirations, and promiscuous reading habits. Topics touched on include being the “type of guy” who’s inspired by Tom Verlaine; implicating others in your own embarrassments; the jazz training to noise pipeline (“codified at Bard”); “hardcore” as a blurry signifier; the brilliance of Brazilian music; Astrud Gilberto, voice leading, and musical power from below; the 4-track as time machine; how to change a line without touching it (as per William Gaddis); and sexy books for summer reading when all the trees are plump.

In episode five of Faculty Spotlight, Lauren and Mark sit down with Joseph Earl Thomas, BISR faculty and author the acclaimed memoir Sink. The three discuss: memoir-writing and the art of "un-knowing" writing; literary realism in the 21st century; having, or faking, a "world picture"; how, with Sylvia Wynter, we can think trans-culturally; Gayl Jones and the art of literary maximalism (and why it's not just for "white boys"); why "resignification" can't change the material world; and what it's like to live, work, and think in Philadelphia.

Episode 64 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live-recording of mezzo-soprano Lucy Dhegrae's sound lecture, Music and Trauma, recently delivered at BISR Central. Between performances of selections from her acclaimed Processing Series, including the frenetic "Dithyramb" and the ethereal "No," Dhegrae talks to BISR faculty Paige Sweet and Danielle Drori about the interrelationship—the push-pull—between trauma, body, psyche, and sound—particularly in the wake of traumatic experience. What does it mean to sublimate trauma, and how is it "felt" and processed in the body? How, moreover, is trauma expressible (and what does Julia Kristeva have to say about it)? How can we understand the difference between language and music, words and sounds? And how can we think about the interrelationship of the voice and the body, of "vibration against bone"?

In episode 63 of the Podcast for Social Research, a live-recording of our Wednesday, May 3rd event Cop City: Police, Protest, and Social Control, BISR faculty Nara Roberta Silva, Patrick Blanchfield, Geo Maher, and guests Natasha Lennard and Kamau Franklin examine and contextualize the planned construction of "Cop City"—the Atlantan “state-of-the-art public safety training academy” that features classrooms, firing ranges, and a “mock city” in which police trainees can practice the methods of tactical urban warfare. Who and what is driving the creation of Cop City—and why is it a phenomenon of national significance?  How can we understand the "boomerang" effect that has brought imperial counterinsurgency "back," as it were, to U.S. shores? What is the nature of the opposition to Cop City? How, here and elsewhere, have authorities wielded statutory law to intimidate protesters and effectively prohibit protest? What are the politics on the ground, in Atlanta, a majority black city with a majority black political leadership? Finally, for a society unwilling to address extreme racial and material stratification, is Cop City its inevitable future? 

In this episode of the podcast, recorded live at BISR Central as part of our Occasional Evenings series, writer and critic Lucy Ives joins BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte, Lauren K. Wolfe, and special guest Sonia Werner for a reading and discussion of Lucy’s latest novel Life Is Everywhere (Graywolf Press, 2022)—an enormously capacious and, perhaps counterintuitively, characteristically “weak” novel. Starting with the question, implicit in Life Is Everywhere, as to what the novel can possibly contain (bodies and feelings? institutions and systems? historical events? speculative counterfactuals? emails and utility bills?), their conversation touches on genre—is it an organizing principle or an awkward limit?—how certain failures in writing are inadvertent strengths, the pleasures of “difficult” novels, unpromising premises, “strong” versus “weak” theory, thinking versus feeling protagonists, the disruptive power of affect, the kinds of knowledge that novels produce, the strangeness of the nearest things, Mrs. Dalloway, Henri Lefebvre, time travel, Aristotle’s poetics as high comedy, and much more.

In episode six of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay consider the cultural imperative du jour, "Let People Enjoy Things"—and offer an alternative: not letting people enjoy things. What underlies the collective impulse to not criticize? What is the purpose of criticism? And how does the injunction to not criticize misunderstand the relationship between the self and representation? Are critics cheerless? Why are we anxious for our art (are blockbuster movies so fragile)? Why, in this moment, are we seemingly so driven to seek out cultural experiences that console? Isn't critical engagement in itself a pleasure? As Isi and Ajay explore the anti-critical impulse (with a detour into the present and future of the Oscars), they take up objects ranging from Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once (and the—rather ardent—discourse surrounding it) to Florian Sigl's The Magic Flute, Kate Wagner's Baffler essay "Don't Let People Enjoy Things," Franz Kafka's retranslated diaries, the video game Like a Dragon: Ishin!, A.O. Scott's New York Times exit interview, aesthetic debates reaching back to Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukács, and much else besides.

In episode four of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark and Lauren interview Andy Battle, BISR faculty and urban historian. The three discuss: why cities are so radicalizing--and alienating; the deep connection between capitalism and urbanization; how "private welfare states" drive up the cost up the cost (sometimes prohibitively) of building infrastructure; what Henri Lefebvre means by the "Right to the City"; Eric Adams (and his parallels with Trump); dance culture (and "dis-alienation"); and Cop City, the "outside agitator," and why "policing is what's left when you can't or won't...address the problems" that fundamentally beset us.

In this shortcast, recorded live before a screening of Chantal Akerman's "love film for my mother," BISR's William Clark, Paige Sweet, and Isi Litke offer a sweeping overview of the film’s technical innovations, thematic stakes, and its film-historical context. Their talk touches on Akerman’s deft hybrid of experimental and narrative traditions, formal techniques as narrative strategies, the domestic terrain of diminished sovereignty, the uncanny activation of everyday objects, ten static minutes of making meatloaf, haunted houses, whether unleashed aggression might result in repose, and what sort of genre conventions this endurance test of a film may be partaking in after all. 

In episode 61 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR faculty Joseph Earl Thomas and Paige Sweet sit down for an intimate conversation about the peculiar and often unsparing perceptions children have of adult worlds and the writerly innovations at play in the endeavor of representing their experience of it. Their wide-ranging talk touches on everything from strategies of self-narration to means of soliciting a reader’s agency, how to tell a life-story out of order, whether animals can understand us, flat versus hyperbolic language (and their differential effects when narrating Black life in particular), comprehending things in bits (as opposed to the epiphanic moment), whether the norms to which adults acquiescence are in fact inevitable, plus an extremely capacious (materially and emotionally) kitchen sink. Before the discussion, Joseph reads an excerpt from his aptly and provocatively titled coming-of-age memoir Sink, a much-lauded and vividly told story of need, desire, imagination, and the manifold objects of adolescent attachment. 

In episode 5 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay dive deep into the spectacle of James Cameron’s latest blockbuster Avatar: The Way of Water, touching on questions of cinematic language, the ironic celebration of nature through its destructions, papyrus fonts, visual and narrative incoherence, Final Fantasy (and being unfair to it), Ridley Scott, Moby Dick, Heidegger’s question concerning technology, Prehistoric Planet, windmills, colonialism, György Lukács, Eiji Otsuka, Sontag's “Fascinating Fascism,” dubs vs. subs, 64-bit water, underwater motion capture, the shock doctrine, the movie's mildly eugenic obsession with sexualized (yet sexless) bodily perfection, James Cameron's legacy in crafting so much of the style of contemporary "cinematic universe" form, even the bizarre Manhattan mall where Isi and Ajay watched the movie. And, of course, lots and lots of water. 

In episode 60 of the podcast, recorded live at Goethe-Institut New York, BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary joins translator Tess Lewis, political theorist Corey Robin, and novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens for a wide-ranging discussion of Ernst Jünger’s 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs, now out from NYRB in a new translation by Lewis. Prompted by the question, “Why read Jünger today?,” their talk explores the various “tangled” scenes of Jünger reception—from his contemporaries (excoriated by Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin) to his apologists (defended for his denunciation of the Nazis—if only for their vulgarity) to patent aesthetic and thematic parallels in contemporary anime and manga. Is it possible, or worthwhile, to read Jünger in the context of the contemporary right and its concern with its own worldview losing traction in a changing world? Is Jünger literary aristocracy—or, rather, a kind of literary adolescent? And, what is it like to translate something that you feel at odds with? 

In episode 59 of the podcast, on the occasion of Valentine's Day, we are celebrating the many friendships that BISR has fostered over the years. You’ll hear the stories of four friendships – and one marriage – all of which began at a BISR class or event. First, Paige Sweet and Joseph Earl Thomas, fellow faculty who met at a student meetup, share their intellectual and creative affinities. After that, student Sasha Kruger and faculty Amrita Ghosh describe the after-class chat that sparked an enduring, transcontinental friendship. Next, faculty members Rebecca Ariel Porte and Danya Glabau will discuss an intellectual friendship that dates back to BISR’s early days. Faculty Lygia Sabbag Fares and student Susie Hoeller follow, talking about friendship even in the midst of political non-alignment. And lastly, faculty Audrey Nicolaides and the brains behind BISR’s website Josh Johnson (both former students) tell the story of their first encounter at an early BISR course back in 2012, the several inauspicious dates that followed, and, eventually, their wedding, officiated by BISR's executive director, Ajay Singh Chaudhary.

In episode three of Faculty Spotlight, Lauren K. Wolfe and Mark DeLucas interview BISR classicist Bruce King. The three discuss: what brought Bruce to the classics; the charisma of his teachers (and the poverty of their ideas); queering the canon; the trouble with the Odyssey; coming to love Latin (and why he's keeping Horace to himself); learning Sanskrit with friends; BISR's new Language Learning and Critique program; and Bruce's favorite non-ancient things—from Henry James to Claude Lévi-Strauss to La Monte Young's "Pythagorean" Dream House.

In episode four of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and Joseph review the year 2022 in pop culture via the prism of five topics and trends: "open world" (and cinematic universe) fatigue (for example, Assassin's Creed: Vahalla, Sonic Frontiers, Legend of Zelda); the plague of remakes and cultural nostalgia (Top Gun Maverick, Wednesday, Interview with the Vampire); cultural paranoia (true crime TV and paraphernalia, including the "In Case I Go Missing Binder," Nextdoor, Tár); liberal fan fiction (Handmaid's Tale, Bridgerton); and the substitution of moralism and forensic analysis for actual aesthetic judgment (explainers, the backlash to critique, and "explains it all" prequels like Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power). Do open worlds lend gravitas to video games—or do they just create sameness? What are the pastoral impulses behind farming games? Is the mania for remakes confirmation of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History"? Is Tár a product of cancel cultural panic? What is "plastic representation"; and how does representational fantasy like Bridgerton erase the very historical knowledge that makes social critique possible? And finally, what explains the urge to explain it all? How does ambiguity provide potency to art? The podcast closes with a discussion of Ajay's, Isi's, and Joseph's favorite 2022 things (whether actually released in 2022 or just personally discovered): Elden Ring, Yellowjackets, Hades, Azor, The Banshees of Inisherin, Station 11, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

In episode 57 of the Podcast for Social Research, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Danielle Drori, Mark DeLucas, Lauren K. Wolfe, and Michael Stevenson look back at their 2022 in cultural experiences, from high-brow to middle- to low-: visiting NYC landmarks (for the first time), the New York Philharmonic (and David Geffen Hall's questionable acoustics), the Upanishads, diary-keeping (and destroying), Sybille Bedford (vs. Henry James), Lucy Ives's Life is Everywhere, the Xenoblade Chronicles (an allegory for communism?), Pink Floyd, "low-powered" cultural objects, Station 11, Bernadette Mayer, Stockholm's Vasa Museum (a museum dedicated to failure), Chester the dog,  Annie Ernaux, and autofiction—again, and again, and again. 

In episode three of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi welcome fellow faculty and videogame connoisseur Joseph Earl Thomas to talk about Elden Ring, the acclaimed 2022 RPG videogame, directed and created by Hidetaka Miyazaki and Japan's FromSoftware studio (alongside some "worldbuilding" by Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin.) After a few preliminaries (a revisit to Andor and discussions of the recent Sight and Sound "best movies" poll, Pokemon, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 as communist allegory, and more), the talk turns to Elden Ring's "endless purgatorio," its "nihilistic" setting, its "open-world" structure (just how "open" are open worlds?), the meaning and limits of agency in videogame play, taking pleasure in difficulty, "affective difficulty," why videogame playing might be like dancing (with reference to BISR's late Jeffrey Escoffier), affect theory (and feeling bad about killing), gender, playing dress-up, and much more besides.

In episode 65 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, the game has changed. For a special live recording of the final episode of 2022, everyone knew in advance that the sonic object would be Pink Floyd's landmark concept album—and favorite laser light show accompaniment—Dark Side of the Moon. A gathering of dedicated listeners joined Rebecca and Ajay "in studio" for an immersive collective listening experience to this classic of prog rock on vintage vinyl. And the surprises spun out from there, beginning with a musicological breakdown of borrowed sounds, followed by a detour through Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle (with insights from Adorno on poetry and escape), thoughts about the concepts at work in concept albums, plagal cadences and passacaglia, receptiveness to the sounds of ordinary life, the reverb of history, the history of lasers, and much more. 

This podcast includes the whole of the approximately 45-minute album, so if you’re short on time, hop off at minute 5:56 and tune back in for the conversation that picks up again at minute 49:05. If you’re in it for the complete experience, this is one to listen to with headphones on!

For the second installment of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with faculty Paige Sweet—writer, writing consultant, literary theorist, and practicing psychoanalyst—for a wide-ranging conversation about the many eclectic aspects of her work, including the unconventional classroom and how it transforms pedagogical practice; what constitutes literary “theft” (from Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote to everyone’s Emily Dickinson); the self in autotheory and what it means to theorize “from the skin”; the risky business of writing; how politics enter the psychoanalytic clinic; and thinking with queer-of-color performance theorist José Muñoz. If you enjoyed the podcast, keep an eye out for Paige’s upcoming BISR course on Autofiction in February.

In the second episode of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay take up the latest addition to the Star Wars universe, Tony Gilroy’s television series Andor. Their talk touches on topics large and small, from animatronic garbage droids, ordinary social life in the Star Wars universe, and the petty middle managerialism of empire, to labor militancy, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, early Hollywood genre conventions, and more.

Shownotes:

• Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room, scored by Philip Glass
• Kyle McCarthy for Lux Magazine, on ballet and feminism
• Bayonetta 3 controversy
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
• Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp
• Mark Fisher's blog post on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
• Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
• Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth
• Arash Abizadeh on Hobbes' state of nature
• John Locke, Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina
• Films mentioned: Brian de Palma, Carrie; Ridley Scott, Alien; John Carpenter, The Thing; Bernardo Bertolucci, The Conformist; Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning; Robert J. Flaherty, Nanook of the North; Jacques Tati, Playtime; Terry Gilliam, Brazil; Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows; Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Samouraï

In episode 56 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Joseph Osmundson joins Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Nafis Hasan for a discussion of his new, highly acclaimed book Virology. Issues at hand include: the structure and mechanics of viruses; how they're perceived, and differentiated, socially and politically; and their power to affect not only individual health, but also our economy, society, and the very ways we speak and think. Joe, Ajay, and Nafis also survey our apparently ever-lasting Pandemic Times, asking: what's happened, why, and where do we go from here? 

In the inaugural episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Lauren K. Wolfe and Mark DeLucas sit down with faculty Türkan Pilavci, art historian and field archaeologist, for a wide-ranging conversation about her work, including her archaeological field work in Turkey, the problems with art museums, the meaning and periodization of "Ancient Egypt"; how modern states draw on—and discard—ancient history (for example, the mummy parade!); archaeology in pop culture (Indiana Jones: archaeologist—or adventurer?), and what it's like to be a woman at the dig. If you enjoyed the podcast, please check out Türkan's upcoming BISR course: Ancient Egypt: Art, Archaeology, and Empire.

Introducing Episode 1 of the new Podcast for Social Research subseries (Pop) Cultural Marxism, in which Ajay and Isi (and special guests!) will be exploring the "fantastic form" of pop-cultural commodities—from film and television to toys and games to objects of every conceivable consumer variety. In the premier episode, they turn their attention to the genre of fantasy, and in particular to the recent prequels to The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Listen in as they discuss, among other things, Amazon aesthetics, "the liberal imagination," beautiful failures, faux and real political realism, gif-able moments, Tolkien for neofascists, mimetic regression, billion-dollar budgets, and potential affinities between fantasy and socialist thought.

In this Podcast for Social Research Shortcast, BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Isabella Likte consider the genre of teen comedy—or, in this case, a macabre critique of the genre. Sitting down for a short discussion in advance of our People's Choice Back-to-School screening of Michael Lehmann's 1989 film Heathers at BISR Central, Ajay and Isi probe (late) Gen-X social utopias and the dark side of Reagan's "morning in America." This Shortcast is a sneak preview of Ajay and Isi's new podcast subseries Pop-Cultural Marxism, which debuts next week, so stay tuned!

In episode 55 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Isabella Katrina Litke sit down after our Occasional Evening screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 masterpiece The Last Emperor to discuss the film’s making, themes, and fascinating approach to the grand sweep of 20th-century Chinese history. What can The Last Emperor, in its depiction of the Pu Yi’s fall from emperor to re-educated common gardener, teach us about the interplay of aesthetics, politics, and history? How does the film manage, where so many period pieces fail, to aestheticize history while also eschewing nostalgia? And what does it mean, cinematically, to democratize the past?

Episode 54 of the Podcast for Social Research, a companion piece to Episode 53, is a live recording of Suzanne Schneider’s 11pm lecture at the 2022 Night of Ideas. In answer to the evening’s prompt “Where are We Going?” Schneider delves into the realm of risk, which has come to structure ever-increasing portions of individual, social and political life. And as risk has become “privatized,” its management has become a site for profit-making, with industries ranging from health care to firearms selling “safety” products pitched to privileged, middle- and upper-middle class subjects. How can we distinguish risk, fear, and paranoia? In what sense is risk a commercial concept? And what are the effects—individual and societal—of assuming an actuarial mindset when navigating social and political interactions? Does the culture of constant vigilance, of security hoarding as a lifestyle, in fact make us less safe?

Episode 53 of the Podcast for Social Research is part one of two episodes recorded live at the 2022 Night of Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, co-sponsored by Villa Albertine. The theme of the evening was "Where are We Going?" Ajay Singh Chaudhary's response, "Against Resilience: Exhaustion, Ecology, and Emancipation" traces the genealogies and uses of the concept of resilience and its limitation in social and political theory. The foundation for "left-wing climate realism," Ajay argues, are to be found in rejecting the atomizing and internalizing imperatives of "resilience" in favor of the externalization of "exhaustion" into a real politics of power and conflict, citing anti-colonial and even Civil War precedents. Why is the ubiquitous concept of resilience so vague and yet so deleterious? How should we understand ecological and social exhaustion today? And what are the discomfiting implications of a political theory entirely structured by this ecological moment?

In episode 52 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Nara Roberta Silva, Sophie Lewis, Jenny Logan, Abby Kluchin, and Alyssa Battistoni discuss Samuel Alito's Dobbs draft opinion, recently leaked, and the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade. Questions considered include: Alito’s reasoning, its implications for other rights, the validity of the “rights-based” approach itself (grounded in what’s implicitly a masculine (while also dis-embodied) liberal subject), abortion discourse (and the tendency to euphemize), the violence of enforced gestation, political strategy, the need for a truly mass feminism—and beyond.

In episode 60 of the Podcast for Social Research's Practical Criticism Series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Lingua Ignota for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual doesn't know what the object of the week will be. They discuss commitment, committing to the bit, metal and its iconographies, ritual, decadence, Hildegard von Bingen, Audre Lorde, catharsis, exorcism, and choosing an enemy.

In Episode 63 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism Series," Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda," as covered by The Pogues, for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual, doesn't know what the sonic object of the week will be. Their conversations covers resonances between World War I and our own historical moment, uses and abuses of nationalism, internationalism, periphery and metropole, proxy wars, balladry, pastiche, trauma, missed opportunities, disillusionment, and propaganda.

In episode 59 of the Podcast for Social Research, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Lygia Sabbag Fares, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Suzy Schneider, and Michael Stevenson look back at their 2021 in cultural experiences: painting of the Italian Renaissance, language lessons, television, film, poetry, theater, translations, music, games, high-brow, the low-brow, and the middle-. Common threads include exhaustion, recycling (for better and worse), recuperation, the kitsch of "art experiences," and making a liveable life right now, wherever we happen to find ourselves.

In episode 57 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, the first of a new season, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays Nala Sinephro and Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points for Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who, as usual, doesn't know what the object of the week will be. Their conversation ranges over promises, promissory structures, broken promises, avant-jazz and minimalism, Coltrane's "sheets of sound," phasing, convalescence, composition and the medicinal, conversations and echoes, and the sound of nothing to prove.

In episode 47 of the Podcast for Social Research’s “Practical Criticism” series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Nirvana for Rebecca Ariel Porte. They talk pop avant-gardes, Kurt Cobain’s voice, exhausted croons, experiments in sound, experiments in masculinity, depression and melancholy, Burton’s anatomy of melancholy, developing variation, word play, disillusion and disaffection, and Nirvana's Gen X musical legacy in the sonic avant-garde and depressive realism of the (largely feminine and queer) singer-songer writers of today. Songs include: "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; "The Priest They Called Him" by Kurt Cobian and William S. Burroughs; "Pennyroyal Tea"; "All Apologies" and Mitski's "Your Best American Girl."

P.S. Our (Millennial) editor Cora would like to note that Mitski is indeed a proper Millennial, not Gen Z as indicated in the episode.
PPS.  Omitted further thoughts on the class nature of Nirvana hopefully forthcoming. You can read Ajay on generational and class politics in "OK, OK, Boomer: The Critical Theory of Contemporary Angst."

In episode 48 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays Björk for Ajay Singh Chaudhary. They converse about pop avant-gardes, Bruegel's *Land of Cockaigne,* utopian fantasies of Iceland, islands and the insular, the state of emergency, music designed to be remixed, protean pop personae, female friendship, nascent solidarities, music as muse, and why Björk is more like Taylor Swift than you'd think.

In the 48th episode of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty (and co-founder) Christine Smallwood joins Abby Kluchin, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Michael Stevenson, and Suzanne Schneider for a wide-ranging discussion of her acclaimed debut novel The Life of the Mind. In a two-part conversation, Christine sits down first with Abby to discuss the novel's characters, themes, and influences (George Eliot, Thomas Mann, Melanie Klein, and, perhaps unconsciously, Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin), before joining Rebecca, Ajay, Michael, and Suzy to ponder what it means today, with the academy in crisis, to live a "life of the mind." Questions considered include: What is depressive realism? How does the central character Dorothy relate to both professional and bodily failure? Why, in a book titled The Life of the Mind, does much of the writing concern the body? What distinguishes “overthinking” from critique? Can reading and thinking make us better people? And if not, how can we understand the “necessary luxury” of living, at least partly, a life of the mind?

In episode 41 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Locash for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who has no idea what the object of the week will be. They discuss pop country, meta-country, bro country, bubblegum country, crossover appeal, national imaginaries, projections of unity and masculinity, David Allan Coe, Lady A, the culture industry, Nashville songwriting, clean and dirty production, cliché, and dorito engineering.

In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research’s “Practical Criticism” series, Ajay plays Debussy’s “Jardins sous la pluie” for Rebecca, to whom the object of the week is, as usual, a surprise. Their conversation ranges over virtuosity, empty and full, tone painting, modern music, play, omission, peopling the world of your solitude, Shakespeare’s Richard II, Adorno, and Proust.

n.b. This episode indirectly cites the excellent pandemic playlist that Jacob Gordon is in the process of compiling. 

Who needs a world view? Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Michael Stevenson, and Rebecca Ariel Porte welcome world-renowned philosopher Raymond Geuss for a wide-ranging discussion of Geuss’s most recent book. They explore Geuss’s understanding of what a world view is; the history and habit of the worldview in Western philosophical, political, and aesthetic thought, the problems and pathologies of certain kinds of systemic thinking; and alternative conceptions for thinking and philosophizing. Conversation also ranges over Geuss's engagement with Critical Theory, and the thought and legacy of the late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser, teacher to Geuss and spiritual godfather, of a sort, to BISR.