Universal Basic MKUltra with Psyop Cinema

Tablet senior writer Jacob Siegel joins me to discuss the rightward trajectory of certain insights of Frankfurt School-derived critical theory, especially in light of the history of the journal Telos and its founder and editor, Paul Piccone. We also discuss Piccone's friend Paul Gottfried, the cont…

Sam Biagetti of Historiansplaining podcast joins me to discuss what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly in David Graber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything." We begin with an appreciative account of their dismantling of deterministic accounts of human social evolution, and then tu…

Jacob Shell is Associate Professor of Geography at Temple University and the author of Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants (2019) and Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility (2015). He joins me to share his …

Essayist and poet Alice Gribbin joins me to discuss her recent essay in Tablet, "The Great Debasement," on the ideological transformation of museums and other cultural institutions into propaganda organs; the utilitarian attitude to art; the continued relevance of John Berger's "Ways…