Podcast for Social Research, Episode 84: Paradise Lost and Its Revolutionary Afterlives — Orlando Reade in Conversation
The Podcast for Social Research
Release Date: 12/27/2024
Practical Criticism No. 72: Brian Wilson (God Only Knows What We'll do Without You...)
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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(Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 17: I Have Friends Everywhere
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 89: Eyes Wide Shut — a Film Guide
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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(Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 16: Shine Bright Like a TIE Fighter
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 88: The Sound of Lispector
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 87: Deviant Matter
The Podcast for Social Research
In episode 87 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR’s Rebecca Ariel Porte and Dilettante Army Editor-in-Chief Sara Clugage sat down with Kyla Wazana Tompkins to discuss her latest book, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. The conversation touches on, among other things: food and the early history of the War on Drugs, the racialization of sugar, jelly and cocaine, food as a means for diagnosing entrenched political problems, and how plantation capitalism—and later, industrial capitalism—altered the sensory quality of everyday life. Along...
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Practical Criticism No. 71: Neko Case
The Podcast for Social Research
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.
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(Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 15: Vampires!
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 86: The Cancer-Industrial Complex: a Book Launch and Conversation with Nafis Hasan
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 85.5: Mulholland Drive — a Brief Film Guide
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
info_outlineIn 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.