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.

Learn more about upcoming courses on our website.

Follow Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Bluesky