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 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?

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 our website.

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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 Dagmar Herzog, historian of sexuality 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 sort of lens the history of sexuality can be for understanding mass political phenomena, and whether and how to invoke 20th-century fascisms to explain conservative reaction in the 21st. Tune in to discover why Nazism is not the past, how fascism was never anti-sex, why anti-queer and anti-trans animus have never been peripheral, why Trump can never be camp, and positive panegyrics for Chappell Roan and A Complete Unknown.

Faculty Spotlight is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Notes:

Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Dagmar Herzog, The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Dagmar Herzog, Sex in Crisis (Basic Books, 2008)

Sabrina Carpenter performing “Espresso” at the 2025 Grammys

Chappell Roan performing “Pink Pony Club” at the 2025 Grammys

Lesser Known Women (Hannah’s band) on Spotify and Bandcamp

Lesser Known Women performing at Sunset Stoop on March 8th!

Learn more about upcoming courses on our website.

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

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 the Global North. The four then discuss: political developments within Israel and Palestine since October 7th, wider geopolitical reverberations, and Israel as a model for Trumpism and the global far right. An audience member’s question brings the conversation to an urgent point of reflection: how can we, in the Global North, sustain attention towards Palestinian resistance in the era of social media and truncated news cycles?

0:26 - Ajay Singh Chaudhary introduction and context  

11:35 - Abdaljawad Omar on futility and resistance in Palestine 

33:05 - K. Soraya Batmanghelichi on the geopolitical consequences for Iran 

46:23 - Barnaby Raine on the weaponization of antisemitism 

1:05:12 - Trump and the protection of Western Civilization 

1:11:20 - Developments within Israeli and Palestinian societies since October 7th 

1:42:12 - Global paradigm shifts and geopolitical maneuvering 

2:06:53 - Zionism, Trumpism, and the global far right 

2:29:34 - Audience question and concluding remarks - how to sustain attention towards Palestine

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Check out the video version of this podcast on the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research YouTube Channel.

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

Learn more about our upcoming courses on our website.

Isi and Ajay kick off episode 14 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism by paying tribute to the late, great American auteur David Lynch. They discuss the pleasures of Lynch's oneiric style, his keen eye for American mass culture (and the horrors it conceals), and recent re-watches of Twin Peaks and Dune. The two then reprise episode 13's review of 2024 pop culture. Along the way, they discuss year-end film releases (Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, Ridley Scott's Gladiator II, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, Gints Zilbalodis' Flow), HBO's The Penguin, and recent gaming highlights (Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess) and lowlights (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle). Closing out the episode are pre-2024 cultural revisits, including Barry Lyndon, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, The Case of the Golden Idol, Inside Man, and Koyaanisqatsi. 

The podcast is produced by Ryan Lentini.

In episode 13 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi ruminate on a largely dismal year in pop culture. Kicking off with a discussion of unexpected developments in the world of health insurance, the conversation turns to a number of broad trends that characterized culture this year: AI, long production cycles, platforms—rather than cultural works—as objects of cathexis, IP art, and the use of IP as trans-media anchors. Along the way, they discuss social bandits, collective effervescence, Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, the Criterion Closet truck, Sony’s push into the television space, Jon Chu’s Wicked, and 2024’s revealing box office numbers. In the second half of the episode, Ajay and Isi discuss the year’s highlights (Metaphor: ReFantazio [GoTY], Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Lies of P, Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, a performance of book 1 of The Odyssey by Joseph Medeiros, Edward Berger’s Conclave, Todd Phillip’s divisive Joker: Folie à Deux, the second season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, and True Detective: Night Country) and lowlights (Denis Villeneuve's Dune 2, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, and a whole lot of "just okay" television)—with more to come in a follow-up episode after the holidays! 

In 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.

In this episode we discussed our end-of-year Spotify Wrapped lists and what algorithmic listening means for us as subjects and social beings, mass culture's current expression in shared forms of circulation rather than in objects of attention held in common, the limits of poptimism, the sound of melancholy, experimental hip-hop, jazz, vocaloid(ish) bands, music as cinematic form, Sampa the Great, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, HoneyWorks, Weyes Blood, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Arooj Aftab.

Episode 83 of the Podcast for Social Research features a live performance, at BISR Central, by chamber-pop outfit Big Bend, who played selections from their acclaimed third album Last Circle in a Showdown. After the performance, Big Bend vocalist, pianist, and songwriter Nathan Phillips sat down with BISR's Mark DeLucas for a conversation about musical origins and inspirations; Nathan's unique, communal approach to songwriting; musical improvisation vs. premeditation; whether albums still "matter"; making music with, or against, genre; and much else besides.

The performance begins at 00:32, and the conversation at 38:22.

In episode 12 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi tackle Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024). Kicking off with a review of a few recent pop-cultural engagements—including an assemblage of classic vampire films (Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among them), Mubi’s restoration of The Fall (2006), Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, and a pair of streaming series about professional wrestling—the conversation turns to Coppola’s reactionary would-be summa about an architect attempting to construct a techno-futuristic utopia on a plot of land in “New Rome,” an alternate-world New York City as played against Roman and early American history. Along the way, Ajay and Isi discuss Neri Oxman’s faux-ecological contributions to the film’s central animating macguffin, the mysterious “megalon;” the film’s antipathy for the marginalized masses; its protagonist as synthesis of Caesar, Robert Moses, Walter Gropius, and The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark; accidentally timely narratives of the “good guy” billionaire pitted against the “bad-guy” billionaire; and the ecofascist inclination to marry the romanticization of nature with authoritarian techno-optimism. Among the topics at hand are Coppola’s disturbing, “secretly autobiographical” efforts to reaffirm himself as auteur, his baffling postmodern pastiche, the classic right-wing themes of patriarchy as a sign of order and non-normative sexual expression as a sign of decline and decadence, the film’s shocking ugliness, and how Megalopolis’s strange incorporation of current events betrays “a baby boomer [having read] a bunch of airport history books.”