The Syllabus

This episode is part of this week's edition of the Best of Technology: buff.ly/0LEgiLh

Data center backlash! Podcast Episode · Today, Explained · 01/12/2025 · 26m

This dialogue explores how anti-center activism, cutting across political lines, is reshaping local elections and sparking a bipartisan reckoning. As AI advances, towns resist becoming collateral damage in the race to dominate the digital economy.

With Sean Rameswaram & Noel King

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Although often considered the quintessential “painter of nature,” Van Gogh was intensely concerned with 19th-century industrialization. Our video of the week reframes the artist's oeuvre as a visual archive of extraction.

Feat. @mlobelart.bsky.social

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What Brazil’s Pix Reveals About WTO Rules for the Platform Economy - ProMarket In the second of two articles, Jeff Alvares analyzes the competing arguments around Pix under World Trade Organization rules—a debate involving broader questions about how international trade rules…

Brazil’s public payment system, Pix, has revolutionized financial inclusion. While this has unlocked access for millions, this piece suggests it raises questions about trade law and the tension between public benefits and market rivalry.

By Jeff Alvares in @promarket.bsky.social

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The English Premier League epitomizes how finance capital has colonized even the most storied corners of British public life. Our podcast of the week explores how clubs have become speculative assets, embedded in the logic of global accumulation.

With @james7jackson.bsky.social

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Who owns knowledge in a world structured by empire? Putting science and technology at the heart of global inequality, our Spanish pick of the week details how Northern monopolies over critical industries undermine the Global South.

By Juan E. Santarcángelo

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Tracing a line from Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” to AI-generated waifus, our essay of the week traces how the mass-produced slop that populates our world not only fragments but hollows out the very category of truth.

By @harikunzru.bsky.social in @artforum.com

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The U.S.-China AI rivalry is less a faceoff between democracy and autocracy than a multi-scalar tug-of-war. In practice, as our hidden gem of the week reveals, the real drama unfolds among actors at the central, local, and industry levels.

By Jason Jia-Xi Wu at @hls.harvard.edu

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Beneath Singapore’s hypermodern, financialized surface lies a city haunted by its own engines of accumulation. Our book of the week maps a “ghost economy” where ritual and geomancy shape the flows of finance and real estate.

By Joshua Comaroff on @uminnpress.bsky.social

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Why Language Models Hallucinate - Adam Kalai Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I 11:00am|Simonyi Hall 101 and Remote Access Topic: Why Language Models Hallucinate Speaker: Adam Kalai Affiliation: Open AI Date: November 24,…

Generative AI tools like language models frequently make up false information—a behavior termed "hallucination." This talk argues that this stems from training focused on predicting plausible language rather than factual accuracy.

Feat. Adam Kalai

Cool Enchantment - Public Books The ad is seductive but transparent. We don’t believe the copy but appreciate its innocence.

Hamm’s glowing “Scene-O-Rama” light box, with its revolving waterfalls and pastoral fantasies, offers more than kitsch nostalgia, argues this essay. Instead, it’s a glimpse into midcentury America’s advertising dreams of escape.

By M. P. Kennedy in @publicbooks.bsky.social

Morrowind Against the Market For more than twenty years, dedicated volunteers have continued developing the Elder Scrolls game Morrowind — building a vast, handcrafted alternative to the corporate, profit-driven world of gaming.

Voluntary and community-driven, Tamriel Rebuilt balances an ethos of creative freedom with rigorous quality control, which, as this piece suggests, stands in quiet defiance of today’s profit-driven gaming industry.

By Charlie Winstanley in @tribunemagazine.bsky.social

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The Political Economy of Global Shipping with Laleh Khalili by Return to Bandung In this episode, I’m joined by Laleh Khalili, Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso,…

From wage theft on container ships to geopolitical strife, global shipping props up inequality worldwide. Yet, in the face of it all, this dialogue argues that dockworkers hold immense, untapped power to disrupt this machinery and rewrite the rules.

With @lalehkhalili.bsky.social

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This episode is part of this week's edition of the Best of Podcasts: buff.ly/zfpEnhe

American Prestige “American Prestige” takes a comprehensive look at U.S. foreign policy and int'l affairs, providing listeners with everything they need to know about what's going on in the world.

Tracking China’s turbulent path from the May Fourth Movement to Mao’s 1949 revolution, this conversation argues that the Communist and Nationalist Parties—often cast as bitter opposites—shared institutional DNA.

With @woodpeckerowl.bsky.social on @amprestigepod.bsky.social

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Human Attention as a Philosophical Problem: The Question, and the Nature of Questions Human attention has become a touchstone of widespread concern across the humanities, sciences, and broader culture in much of the world. The emergence of a new, heavily capitalized, and…

The age of algorithmic capitalism has turned attention into a fiercely contested commodity, with digital platforms engineering extractive ways to monetize our cognitive lives. Our article of the week dissects the philosophical and economic capture of attention.

By D. Graham Burnett

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Podcast: Lewis Goodall, Dan Hind and James Butler · On Politics: The Bust-up at the BBC London Review of Books

A broken BBC reflects a broken Britain. To rebuild trust, this dialogue argues that the BBC must shed its defensiveness, resist fear-driven conformity, and recommit to bold, unflinching public journalism.

With @lewisgoodall.com & @dannyhinduk.bsky.social on @lrb.co.uk

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Fringe is not an aberration, but the inevitable byproduct and shadow of scientific prestige, boundary-making, and social organization. Our video of the week explores the border between science and pseudoscience.

Feat. Michael D. Gordin at
@wolfhumanities.bsky.social

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How the Police Uphold Capitalism - WORT-FM 89.9 Allen Ruff speaks with brian bean whose new book is a timely argument for getting rid of the institution of police.

This conversation roots modern policing in the violence of capital accumulation—tracing its evolution through imperial conquest, anti-Black enslavement, and the suppression of working-class dissent.

With Brian Bean on @apublicaffair.bsky.social

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Tracing capitalism’s reliance on nature and reproductive labor as unvalued input, our podcast of the week maps how capital’s drive to commodify everything confronts frictions in biological processes, from farming to childbirth.

With @alybatt.bsky.social

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Through the insidious spread of its language, AI is colonizing social and political life. Our French pick of the week builds a “critical vocabulary” to trace how AI’s expansion installs a ruling logic and remakes judgment itself.

By Thierry Ménissier on @editionshermann.bsky.social

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A new breed of digital masculinity is taking up residence in Marbella. Our essay of the week details how the Spanish resort town has become a hub for the manosphere—a reactionary online fraternity championing wealth and misogyny.

By @pbachlakova.bsky.social et al. at @occrp.org

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The AI-fueled data center boom looks less like a harbinger of innovation than a precarious speculative bubble. Our hidden gem of the week exposes how circular financing and mountains of private debt mask endemic cash flow deficits.

By Advait Arun at @publicenterprise.bsky.social

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The emergence of electronic instruments in 1960s America destabilized agency, subjectivity, and freedom in music. Our book of the week traces how Cold War technoscience underwrote radical new visions of what it means to be a composer.

By Theodore Gordon on @ucpress.bsky.social

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American Football's Long, Violent History / Michael Oriard Professor Emeritus and pro footballer Michael Oriard joins us to discuss his new book from University of North Carolina Press, "Sanctioned Savagery: A History of Violence in American Football." "The M

Tackling the bloody roots of American football, this interview traces its evolution as a sport that glorifies violence while reflecting broader societal norms of aggression, showing how power, commodification, and brutality have shaped its identity.

With Michael Oriard

How right-wing superstar Riley Gaines built an anti-trans empire The swimmer tied a trans woman for fifth. The MAGA industrial complex took care of the rest.

Riley Gaines has turned into a leading figure of the anti-trans movement. Though widespread bans on trans athletes now exist, this piece shows how Gaines’ sights go further—eroding trans rights under the guise of “protection.”

By @msjpauly.bsky.social in @motherjones.com