Episode 53 of the Podcast for Social Research is part one of two episodes recorded live at the 2022 Night of Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, co-sponsored by Villa Albertine. The theme of the evening was "Where are We Going?" Ajay Singh Chaudhary's response, "Against Resilience: Exhaustion, Ecology, and Emancipation" traces the genealogies and uses of the concept of resilience and its limitation in social and political theory. The foundation for "left-wing climate realism," Ajay argues, are to be found in rejecting the atomizing and internalizing imperatives of "resilience" in favor of the externalization of "exhaustion" into a real politics of power and conflict, citing anti-colonial and even Civil War precedents. Why is the ubiquitous concept of resilience so vague and yet so deleterious? How should we understand ecological and social exhaustion today? And what are the discomfiting implications of a political theory entirely structured by this ecological moment?

In episode 52 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Nara Roberta Silva, Sophie Lewis, Jenny Logan, Abby Kluchin, and Alyssa Battistoni discuss Samuel Alito's Dobbs draft opinion, recently leaked, and the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade. Questions considered include: Alito’s reasoning, its implications for other rights, the validity of the “rights-based” approach itself (grounded in what’s implicitly a masculine (while also dis-embodied) liberal subject), abortion discourse (and the tendency to euphemize), the violence of enforced gestation, political strategy, the need for a truly mass feminism—and beyond.

In episode 60 of the Podcast for Social Research's Practical Criticism Series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Lingua Ignota for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual doesn't know what the object of the week will be. They discuss commitment, committing to the bit, metal and its iconographies, ritual, decadence, Hildegard von Bingen, Audre Lorde, catharsis, exorcism, and choosing an enemy.

In Episode 63 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism Series," Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda," as covered by The Pogues, for Rebecca Ariel Porte, who, as usual, doesn't know what the sonic object of the week will be. Their conversations covers resonances between World War I and our own historical moment, uses and abuses of nationalism, internationalism, periphery and metropole, proxy wars, balladry, pastiche, trauma, missed opportunities, disillusionment, and propaganda.

In episode 59 of the Podcast for Social Research, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Lygia Sabbag Fares, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Suzy Schneider, and Michael Stevenson look back at their 2021 in cultural experiences: painting of the Italian Renaissance, language lessons, television, film, poetry, theater, translations, music, games, high-brow, the low-brow, and the middle-. Common threads include exhaustion, recycling (for better and worse), recuperation, the kitsch of "art experiences," and making a liveable life right now, wherever we happen to find ourselves.

In episode 57 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, the first of a new season, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays Nala Sinephro and Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points for Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who, as usual, doesn't know what the object of the week will be. Their conversation ranges over promises, promissory structures, broken promises, avant-jazz and minimalism, Coltrane's "sheets of sound," phasing, convalescence, composition and the medicinal, conversations and echoes, and the sound of nothing to prove.

In episode 47 of the Podcast for Social Research’s “Practical Criticism” series, Ajay Singh Chaudhary plays Nirvana for Rebecca Ariel Porte. They talk pop avant-gardes, Kurt Cobain’s voice, exhausted croons, experiments in sound, experiments in masculinity, depression and melancholy, Burton’s anatomy of melancholy, developing variation, word play, disillusion and disaffection, and Nirvana's Gen X musical legacy in the sonic avant-garde and depressive realism of the (largely feminine and queer) singer-songer writers of today. Songs include: "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; "The Priest They Called Him" by Kurt Cobian and William S. Burroughs; "Pennyroyal Tea"; "All Apologies" and Mitski's "Your Best American Girl."

P.S. Our (Millennial) editor Cora would like to note that Mitski is indeed a proper Millennial, not Gen Z as indicated in the episode. PPS.  Omitted further thoughts on the class nature of Nirvana hopefully forthcoming. You can read Ajay on generational and class politics in "OK, OK, Boomer: The Critical Theory of Contemporary Angst."

In episode 48 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays Björk for Ajay Singh Chaudhary. They converse about pop avant-gardes, Bruegel's *Land of Cockaigne,* utopian fantasies of Iceland, islands and the insular, the state of emergency, music designed to be remixed, protean pop personae, female friendship, nascent solidarities, music as muse, and why Björk is more like Taylor Swift than you'd think.