PODCAST · news
Darts and Letters
by Cited Media
This is about ‘arts and letters,’ but for the kind of people who might hack a dart. We cover public intellectualism and the politics of academia from a left perspective. Each week, we interview thinkers about key debates that are relevant to the left. We discuss politics, culture, and intellectual history.
Episodes
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The Rationality Wars #2: The (ir)Rational Rainbow
The psychological establishment has long pathologized diverse forms of sexual identity. In the mid-century, a brave movement of gays and lesbians fought back and claimed: no, actually, we’re healthy. But in the process, did they define other identities unhealthy? This is episode two of Cited...
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The Rationality Wars #1: The (ir)Rational Mob
Every protest movement has been dismissed as a mere ‘mindless mob,’ caught in a psychological frenzy. Where did this idea come from, and why does it last? As we mentioned last week, we are returning as Cited Podcast with a new season called the Rationality Wars. It tells stories about the…
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Introducing: The Rational Wars (Series Trailer)
This week, we play a trailer to introduce our new series, the Rationality Wars. The Rationality Wars tells stories about the political and intellectual battles to define rationality and irrationality. Behind every definition of rationality, somebody benefits, and somebody is harmed. We ask: what...
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EP85: Mutual Aid & the Anarchist Radical Imagination (ft. Elif Genc, Payton McDonald, Max Haiven, & Alex Khasnabish)
There's a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics. However, this misses how autonomous and anarchist-inflected social movements have brought enormous energy, and enormous change. In this episode, we examine the theory and practice…
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EP84: Big Psychedelic (ft. Erika Dyke and David Nickles)
Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing -- personal revelation, cosmic oneness, spiritual enlightenment, whatever people have called it -- and make it just another commodity? We look at the deep rifts in and around...
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EP83: The WEF is Actually Bad, But Not Like That (ft. Raj Patel, Joel Bakan, and more)
The WEF is yet another example of the scrambled ideologues of our moment. Conservatives condemn the WEF, and news organizations like Rebel cover it doggedly; at the same time, left-leaning NGOs speak there, and progressive news organizations say little. On this episode, we examine the shifting...
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EP82: The Texas Two-Step and Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder
What's safer than baby powder? Parents have been using it for over 100 years to powder their baby's bottoms, and they've found one brand especially trustworthy: Johnson & Johnson. Yet, numerous studies have revealed the presence of trace amounts of asbestos in this talc-based powder. Thousands of...
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EP81: Introducing Academic Edgelords & Reading the Unabomber
We're excited to announce Academic Edgelords. This is a scholarly podcast about scholarly provocateurs. Gadflys, charlatans, and shitposters sometimes get tenure, believe it or not. This is a leftist podcast that takes a second look at their peer-reviewed work, and tries to see if there’s…
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EP80: Dr. Ex Machina (ft. Casey Ross & Ben Chin-Yee)
Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations. Yet, recent stories belie this optimism. Many of these robot doctors are rather stupid, and they seem more interesting in...
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EP79: Learning for Liberation: The Life & Legacy of Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire offers activists and academics everywhere a lesson in what it means to be a radical intellectual. He is known as the founder of critical pedagogy, which asks teachers and learners to understand and resist their own oppression. On this episode, we look at the life and legacy of Freire.
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EP78: Misinformed: The Lab Leak & the Politics of Misinformation (ft. Branko Marcetic & Nicole M. Krause)
The COVID-19 lab leak theory went from being dismissed as mere misinformation, to now a credible matter of debate. What's changed, and what does this teach us about science journalism and science communication?
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EP77: The Hearts of Men (ft. Vaush, Annie Kelly, & Nicholas Lemann)
Online masculinity is getting weirder and weirder. We’re way past mere misogyny and sexual predation (though, that’s still certainly there). Now, we’ve also got bro science, ball tanning, ball eatin,’ piss drinkin,’ and who knows what’s next. Eat your hearts out, Hugh Hefner and the old kings of...
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EP76: Do You Want to Live Forever?
The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodatus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extended the life of its bathers. Today, biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring.
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EP75: The Hippie High-Rise
For seven years, from 1968 to 1975, one eighteen story high-rise was the heart of Canada’s counterculture. Rochdale College in Toronto, ON, was jammed full with leftist organizers, hippies, draft dodgers, students, artists, and others just looking for a good time. Although, Rochdale wasn’t really…
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EP74: PlasticPills on AI & the New Crisis of Humanities Education
The Darts team is working on another big episode! In the meantime, we’re sharing this one from our friends at PlasticPills – Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast. They do a great discussion of OpenAI and its implications in academia. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more…
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EP73: Drafts & Letters — Vietnam War Resisters Come to Canada
The idea of moving to Canada figures prominently in the imagination of many disaffected Americans. Usually, they don't come. However, between the mid-60s and early-70s they really did--and in the 10s of thousands. Yet, when these Americans made their way, they did not always find the Canada they...
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EP72.1 BONUS: Kino Lefter & Darts on Discordia (2004) and Student Activism
In this special bonus, we're sharing the latest episode of Kino Lefter, the socialist film podcast! Our host Gordon and producer Marc join Kino Lefter host Evan MacDonald to discuss our latest episode, a retrospective on the 2004 documentary Discordia.
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EP72: Discordia Revisited — The Meaning of the Concordia Netanyahu Riot (ft. Yves Engler, Ben Addelman, Samir Mallal & more)
We revisit the extraordinary National Film Board documentary Discordia, directed by Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal. The film covered the 2002/03 school year at Concordia University in Montreal, QC. Pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with police, and this event came to be know as "the Concordia Riot."
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EP71: MAID in Canada (ft. Nipa Chauhan, Trudo Lemmens & Dr. Derryk Smith)
The Canadian government has recently instituted an expansive Medical Assistance in Dying regime (MAID). But many patients are seeking MAID to address poverty, not just illness. Is MAID letting the government off the hook from providing care and social services?
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EP70: Chokepoint Capitalism ft. (Cory Doctorow)
Many of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.'
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EP69: Mathematical Morality (ft. Émile P. Torres)
The collapse of the crypotcurrency exchange FTX has is forcing a reckoning in the financial world, with calls intensifying to reign in and regulate these emerging technologies. It's also forcing a philosophical reckoning about the ideas that inspired their CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF is a major...
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EP68: Science Against the People (ft. Charles Schwartz & Sigrid Schmalzer)
Today, right-wingers attack science and liberals defend it. Science good, anti-science Republicans bad–that’s the prevailing narrative, especially so during the March for Science in 2017. However, it’s not so simple. Perhaps science should be defended from reactionary attacks, but not…
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EP67: Darts Transit Commission (ft. Paris Marx)
We speak to Paris Marx of Tech Won't Save Us on the shifting politics of Silicon Valley. We'll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future…
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EP66: Technocracy Now!, pt. 3 (ft. Sam Adler-Bell & Alessandro Delfanti)
The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambitions or capacities it used to. Does…
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EP65: Technocracy Now!, pt. 2 (ft. Joy Rohde & Eden Medina)
Last episode, we looked at the technocrats of the industrial age: Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and the "industrial tinkerers," as Daniel Bell put it. But Daniel Bell went on to say we were entered a new age -- a "post-industrial age" -- where a new kind of technocrat would vie for power. We…
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EP64: Technocracy Now!, part 1 (ft. Noam Chomsky)
Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it’s an idea as old as politics itself. We begin the first of three-part series...
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Coming Soon: Technocracy Now!
Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it’s an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere —...
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EP63: Who Researches the Researchers?
Researchers with the best of intentions still get things wrong. “Who made you the expert” is a valid question that research subjects might ask… and frankly, they’re right to ask that. If you’re, say, a drug user in Vancouver’s downtown east side you probably don’t want some guy from Harvard…
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EP62: Socialize the Series of Tubes (ft. Ben Tarnoff)
Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places, all thanks to Rogers Media Inc. But why does one company get so much control over a vital service like the Internet in the first place? This is the story in the…
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EP61: Enter the Zuckerverse (ft. Sandrine Han and Ian Bogost)
The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be…
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EP60: Not Alright Alright Alright (Big Shiny Takes ft. Gordon Katic)
Canadian media is full of galaxy brain columnists. Luckily there is a show who reads their crap so that you don’t have to: Big Shiny Takes, aka Jeremy Appel, Eric Wickham and Marino Greco. We’re featuring this episode because your esteemed host and editor Gordon Katic made an appearance to…
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EP59: January 6th and the Myth of the Mob (ft. James Jasper and Joy Rohde)
The January 6th hearings continued this week, so we took it as an opportunity to revisit how academics tried to explain the events. Many likened it to a kind of psycho-social pathology; terms like deindividuation, psychosis, groupthink, and mob mentality were thrown around liberally. This is...
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EP58: The Twisted “Science” of Great Replacement Theory
The suspect in the Buffalo shooting had a manifesto, as mass shooters often do. However, this one was different. It was littered with references to peer-reviewed scientific research that, he purports, supports his white supremacist beliefs. It’s part of a broader far right subculture, with…
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EP57: Truck Nuts (ft. Matt Christman, Shane Hamilton, Chase Barber, Justin Martin, & Gabrielle Esperdy)
The pickup truck is the symbol of rural conservative masculinity. So, it often takes centre stage in the tired culture wars between reactionary neo-populists and liberal moralists. Like today, with Canada’s right crudely embracing the truck–and tweeting furiously about those ‘Laurentian elites,‘...
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EP56: Don’t Look Left (ft. David Sirota)
Why does the democratic establishment always avoid turning left, even when it might mean a political win? Gordon asks David Sirota. Sirota is behind the smash-hit Netflix movie Don’t Look Up! He is also host and co-writer of an excellent podcast series called Meltdown, which documented how…
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EP55: Mutually-Assured Dysfunction (ft. Jessica Hurley & Mark Winfield)
The war in Ukraine has brought nuclear technology to the forefront. There’s the threat of nuclear weapons, and the danger of nuclear power plants melting down under military fire. Yet, the nuclear industry also promises to deliver us from our dependency on fossil fuels. It’s an interesting…
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EP54: Dugin: Russia’s Imperial Philosopher
We look at the mind behind Russia’s imperial vision, Aleksandr Dugin. Political theorist Matt McManus walks us through this far-right thinker’s strange and often contradictory ideas, from: his geopolitical clash-of-civilizations narrative, his flirtation with left-wing postmodernism, his...
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EP53: Survival of the Leftest: Should We Embrace Behavioural Genetics?
Can genetics play a role in crafting left social policy? Or should we not touch those ideas ever again–even with a 10 foot pole? Paige Harden’s new book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” makes a forceful case for an egalitarian politics informed by DNA. However…
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EP52: The DNA of a Wrongful Imprisonment (ft. Kimani Boden, Stephen Cordner & Amade M’charek)
DNA offers us the promise of an objective forensic science. Rather than following our own racially-biased hunches, technology can deliver us the unvarnished truth. Yet, we always interpret technology through our own particular lens, and within a society that produces technology in a particular…
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EP51: This is Your Brain on Trial (ft. Andrew Scull, Tess Neal & Roland Nadler)
Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are doing just that. Can you figure out if you are a criminal by scanning your brain? On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest-host Jay Cockburn and…
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EP31: Moral Kombat (ft. Liana Kerzner, Cyril Lachel, & Henry Jenkins) [Rebroadcast]
*Programming note: This is a rebroadcast. You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we’ve always panicked about video games, from the early arcades until this very day. Whether you are a prudish Christian conservative, or a...
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EP50: Don’t hate the player (ft. Alexander Lee)
Guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn gets ready to enter the world of e-sports, with a lesson in Super Smash Bros from a top player and professional coach. Find out why he won’t make it (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have that reaction time he used to); but also, find out why he might…
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EP49: Unionversity: College Athletics and the Fight for Fair Pay (ft. Edwin Garret, Helena Worthen & Joe Berry)
College athletes are workers, and they deserve to get paid. They put their bodies and futures on the line for the profit of their schools, without seeing real compensation for their labour. However, things are changing. For instance, a 2021 Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court decision...
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EP48: Plague Robbers: Nothing Spreads Like Greed (ft. John Nichols)
Has the pandemic taught us anything? As we look forward and imagine what the future might look like, we like to think ‘next time will be different.’ But, if we don’t take a serious look back, it won’t. Not as long as the people who made this pandemic so bad face zero consequences. In this … Read...
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EP47: Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs (ft. Rob Rydell, Jade Doskow & Jennifer Slack)
Welcome to 21st century techno-utopianism. Driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy, techno-utopianism is born anew. But this thinking, while different, is not really new. As Darts and Letters...
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EP46: School Scams (ft. Derek Robertson & Gavin Moodie)
Last year was a rough one for academia – inauspicious, to say the least. The Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on students, universities lurching between open and closed, leaving students strained and uncertain about their futures, and stuck in Zoom classrooms. Meanwhile, mental health struggles...
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EP45: New Years Resolutions from, and for, the left
Happy new year! We’re a few days behind, but as we catch up after the holidays and prepare to enter the third year of the plague, we wanted to bring you a few resolutions from, and for, the left by way of the Darts and Letters team and a handful of our past guests. This … Read More Read More
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EP8.1: Bantering with Bannon [Rebroadcast]
Note: As the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol approaches, we are revisiting an episode on Steven Bannon and traditionalism with a rebroadcast of this bonus episode from late January 2021. In this bonus episode, host Gordon Katic speaks with Ben Teitelbaum,...
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EP44: Gamify Everything (ft. Sebastian Deterding, Paris Martineau & Mostafa Henaway)
Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There’s a game for that. Or, at least, a gamified system designed to nudge you in a series of pre-programmed directions in the service of the state,...
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EP43: The Dumbest Books of 2021 (ft. Luke Savage, Matt McManus, Lyta Gold, Daniel Bessner & David Moscrop)
As we prepare for a series of 2021 retrospectives looking at the highs and lows of the year, the bests and the worsts, Darts and Letters is embracing the chaos, looking to the printed word, and scouring the stacks to find the dumbest books that found their way to print. We did not have to … Read...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
This is about ‘arts and letters,’ but for the kind of people who might hack a dart. We cover public intellectualism and the politics of academia from a left perspective. Each week, we interview thinkers about key debates that are relevant to the left. We discuss politics, culture, and intellectual history.
HOSTED BY
Cited Media
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Darts and Letters have?
Darts and Letters currently has 92 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Darts and Letters about?
This is about ‘arts and letters,’ but for the kind of people who might hack a dart. We cover public intellectualism and the politics of academia from a left perspective. Each week, we interview thinkers about key debates that are relevant to the left. We discuss politics, culture, and intellectual...
How often does Darts and Letters release new episodes?
Darts and Letters has 92 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Darts and Letters?
You can listen to Darts and Letters on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Darts and Letters?
Darts and Letters is created and hosted by Cited Media.
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