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 Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. It tell…

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 political and intellectual battles to define rationality and…

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 does it mean to be rational?; what does it mean to be…

Episode Notes GFADAF EP 17 - Learning To Die Daily; Tap Dance and Bipolar Disorder Sometimes people say the most reprehensible things, but is what they say really what they mean? When it comes to conversations in text, it can be very difficult to ascertain a person's true intention. There could be a lot going on in their life, including mental illn…

Episode Notes GFADAF EP16 - The Origin(s) of Whiteness / Books From A Dying Art Form: David Roediger and the “Wages of Whiteness” Sure, we're all aware of the various harmful stereotypes placed upon non-white people, but what about white stereotypes? Where do they come from and how have they been instrumental in forming "white culture"? "Wages of W…

There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics, exemplified by the enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and others. However, this misses autonomous and anarchist-inflected (and sometimes, explicitly anarchist) social movements that have brought enormous energy, and enormous…

Programming note: As we mention in the top, we have been posting less frequently this summer. Plus, we only have one more episode in September before we take a longer break. You can find a full production update on our website. Anyways, onwards to this episode. Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn…

Episode Notes GFADAF EP 15 - Belated 4th of July Spectacular! According to many, the United States' greatest strength is that we are a proud nation of immigrants. So why do so many people demonize immigrants? Every patriot is no doubt familiar with the famous lines "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" but do…

The World Economic Forum has become the bugbear of the right-wing in Canada, and beyond. Conspiracies swirl about how this shadowy, globalist cabal that wants us to live in pods, eat bugs, and “own nothing, but be happy.” It’s tempting to dismiss these impulses as mere conspiracy theory and faux populism. Even if that’s true, there are many things …

--Episode Notes GFADAF EP 14 - Books From A Dying Art Form: "Five Points" by Tyler Anbinder Imagine living in a room no larger than a walk-in closet, sleeping shoulder to shoulder with strangers, it's pitch black, no windows, no ventilation, you might miss a stair step in the inky darkness and tumble to your doom... This would give you an idea what…

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 parents now claim that this asbestos is responsible …

GFADAF EP 13 Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed Tap Dancer Who wants an episode on the philosophy of education? Too bad, you're getting one anyways! On this episode, host Tristan Bruns dives into the philosophy of Paulo Freire, the famed Brazilian educator who taught hundreds of illiterate people in Brazil to read in only 45 days (!) an…

We’re excited to announce Academic Edgelords, a new podcast that Cited will be producing in alternating weeks with Darts and Letters. 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, …

Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a techno-utopian 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 cutting costs than providing care. We …

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. His subversive books have been banned and burned in many countries, including his native Brazil, where the mil…

That was a bit of a 180°, wasn’t it? The COVID-19 lab leak theory went from being dismissed as mere misinformation, to now a credible matter of debate amongst media, scientific, and intelligence organizations. What’s changed, and what does this teach us about science journalism and science communication? Is it time to let go of our obsession over “…

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 male revolt–in fact, these kings of this new manosphe…

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, entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring. Longevity and anti-aging research has recently blossomed, with a numb…

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 a “college.” It was something much bigger: a politic…

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, visit our about page.…

The idea of moving to Canada figures prominently in the imagination of many disaffected Americans. Most recently, it was comedian Marc Maron who said he’s on his way to Vancouver, BC. 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 n…

If you've read the book "Jazz Dance" then you may have been surprised at one part in particular, the epilogue, which begins with an argument against the emasculation of male dancers. (I know!) Most damning of all is a quote attributed to Gene Kelly, where he claims that the dance industry is "dominated by homosexuals." What did Kelly mean by that? …

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. If you liked our episode, you’ll certainly like this one. Marc, Gordon, and Evan talk much more a…

Henry Kissinger once said “the reason that university politics is so vicious is because the stakes are so small.” Was he right? We investigate. Our case study is one of the most politically-engaged campuses in Canada: Concordia University, in Montreal, QC. This marks the twentieth anniversary of their tumultuous 2002/03 year. School started with a …

Forced by the courts, the Canadian government has recently instituted an expansive Medical Assistance in Dying regime (MAID). You need not be terminal to seek MAID, and in March, 2023, you might even be able to seek MAID for mental health issues. The usual Left impulse on MAID has been to honour people’s wishes, and afford them dignity and autonomy…

Episode Notes Antisemitism is trending in 2022. I regret that it has reached tap dancers. This episode is about trying to convince this person that what they are doing is in poor taste, and extremely dangerous, and also to provide some tools for listeners to identify antisemitic and other types of propaganda when they encounter it. A well-known tap…

In the creative industries, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there’s often a ‘chokepoint’ between creators and their fans. Corporate behemoths — be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others — put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up prices. On this episode, guest host Jay Coc…

The collapse of the crypotcurrency exchange FTX has caused major shockwaves throughout the financial world. This has brought new attention to the ongoing reckoning around crypto, and urgency to the calls to reign in and regulate these emerging technologies. FTX’s collapse has also sparked a philosophical reckoning about the ideas that inspired thei…

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 uncritically defended as inherently good. That’s the message of …

We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable. We speak to Paris Marx of Tech Won’t S…

[You can access the full Technocracy Now! series now: part one, part two, part three] 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 ambition it…

Tap dance history and philosophy from across the pond! Host Tristan Bruns reviews the book "Teach Yourself Tap Dancing" (2007) by Derek Hartley and compares it to other books in the "Hidden Histories of Tap Dance Histories" series—A meta analysis of syllabus-style, at home, DIY instruction books from 1932-2018 that compares and contrasts the variou…

[You can access the full Technocracy Now! series now: part one, part two, part three] 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 techno…

[You can access the full Technocracy Now! series now: part one, part two, part three] 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…

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 — left, right, and somewhere in between. From Plato’s phi…

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 telling you what paternalistic research he’s doing on you.…

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 USA as well as Canada – our digitized lives are all be…

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 creeping into the metaverse, too. As the lines between virtu…

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 discuss the latest unfathomably smart take: Matthew McConau…

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 basically crowd theory, a line of thought developed in th…

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 ‘journal clubs’ and the like, in which research is read clo…

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,‘ and ‘Toronto columnists‘ who thumb their nose at it. …

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 Obama’s lacklustre response to the financial crisis set the…

Episode Notes Following the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, the language about how we talk about race (and tap dance) changed. In the new era of color-blind speech, one must navigate a slippery slope of semantics to uncover the racial subtext underneath. Host Tristan Bruns takes a look at the book "Tapworks" by Beverly Fletcher—th…

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 duality with nuclear: is it the end of the world, or is it …

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 Nietzschean great man-visions, his rejection of all things li…

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, geneticist Joseph Graves critiqued the book in the pages of t…

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 sort of way. In this episode, we look at how forensic D…

Episode Notes What do Kurt Vonnegut, Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump have to do with tap dance? You might be surprised... On a very special episode, host Tristan Bruns interviews Jim Siegelman, who co-authored 1977s "The Book of Tap" with tap dancer Jerry Ames. If you've read other tap dance history books, then you may be familiar with TBoT, which au…

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 our guests explore the study of the criminal mind, fro…