Podcast for Social Research, Episode 85.5: Mulholland Drive — a Brief Film Guide
The Podcast for Social Research
Release Date: 02/28/2025
(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...
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Practical Criticism, No. 70: Roy Hargrove and the RH Factor
The Podcast for Social Research
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. Practical Criticism is produced by Ryan Lentini. Learn more about upcoming courses on . Follow Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on / / /
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Faculty Spotlight: Nazism is Not the Past — Hannah Leffingwell on Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism, and Why Donald Trump is Not Camp
The Podcast for Social Research
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 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...
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 85: Assessing the Aftermath — Gaza, the Ceasefire, and Beyond
The Podcast for Social Research
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...
info_outlineIn 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?