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Sex, Race, and Feminist Connection
History, Ann Stoler showed, is not just political action, disconnected from daily domestic acts. Intimate relations are worthy of serious study.
A Messy Utopia Is All We Might Get
Climate change didn’t just wreck the planet; it closed off and reshaped the future. Even utopia—if we reach it—will be a mess.
Getting Upsold by Real Estate
When prospective home buyers hire a real estate agent, they may end up getting more than they had pictured themselves bargaining for.
Four Ways to Ruin Dante—and One to Save Him
Why would Dante need help? Because if the poet’s only readers are Dante scholars, then we’ll all lose out. Dante deserves better, and so do we.
Public Thinker: Meghan O’Gieblyn on God, Machines, and Intelligence
Why Play to Regret?
Videogames that demand female protagonists commit—and receive—violence may be captivating, thoughtful, and moral. But they are not fun to play.
Episode 5: Data & Racial Capitalism
How have data-centric systems perpetuated racial capitalism, and how have different communities, particularly in the global South, resisted this datafication?
Long Live the Gay Bar
Many think the loss of discrete queer spaces is bad, even as the loss of the need for them is good. What is the nature of that loss?
Leaving Orthodoxy, Again
Losing faith in Orthodox Judaism is an old story. But today it’s often the “heretics” who rely on faith, and the “faithful” who draw on science.
The Broken Promises of “Bridgerton”
The show portrays a racially diverse society, but papers over white-supremacist interracial sexual assault and violence. Was there another way?
Petro-Ghosts and Just Transitions
Latin America shows how hard it is for states dependent on oil and gas—that is, practically the whole world—to break with fossil fuel capitalism.
Academia Trained You—but the World Needs You
Does leaving the academy mean someone failed? Or does it mean, instead, that their scholarly strengths can now be made useful to the public?
Episode 4: Data & Infrastructure
Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
What Happens When a Metaphor Becomes Real?
The humanities can reveal the truth of the world’s crises, everything from contagions like the pandemic to apocalypses like right-wing violence.
No Cure
Tech promises to cure any ailment, whether an unwelcome feeling or a global pandemic. But what if tech itself is ill? And what is a cure, anyway?
B-Sides: Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai”
Impossible to summarize, The Last Samurai is deeply political—anti-capitalist and thoroughly feminist—without ever becoming preachy or moralizing.
Episode 3: Data & Automation
What harms can result from AI and automation, and how might we address and prevent those harms?
Nobody Verzuz a Nation
Though a new phenomenon, Verzuz isn’t new. Black artistic, scholarly, athletic, and political spaces have always been made into battlegrounds.