Influencers (second time as Tragedy)
During the first Trump presidency I produced a radio drama with Jonathan Mitchell at The Truth Podcast about camp MAGA. In 2017 the idea of...
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Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything
Personally connecting the dots. All of them. Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.
Episodes
20 of 203 episodes
Reality Check!
Earlier this year I read a book called The End of Reality by the writer Jonathan Taplin. The book is a meditation on the outsize power and i...
Cultural Marxism Industry (2024 Hard Core version)
A few years ago I put together a story about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory with the writer and historian Martin Jay, today in 2024...
1984 (the year not the book) 40th Anniversary edition
Forty years ago in 1984 your host was twelve years old and like George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, he kept a diary, for the citizens...
America & The Punisher
We now have many ways to tell the story of America's tilt towards authoritarianism, but for your host one image sums up the whole sordid bus...
The Imperial History of the CIA with Hugh Wilford
Intelligence scholar Hugh Wilford's excellent new book grapples with the paradox at the heart of America’s covert intelligence agency. Many...
Not All Propaganda is Art 9: Freedom or Death
ToE's Cultural Cold War miniseries concludes with three stories about containment and death. Richard Wright delivers his final lecture on Bl...
Not All Propaganda is Art 8: Signature Acoustique
]Richard Wright died from a mysterious illness on November 28th, 1960. Or was he murdered? Tune in for a new listen to the final chapter of...
Not All Propaganda is Art 7: Manufacturing Dissent
In 1959, Anti-Americanism surged in the UK. England seethed over America’s treatment of its Prime Minister who was smacked down for daring t...
Not All Propaganda is Art 6: The Kitsch Debate
In the summer of 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev argued over a washing machine in a backstage kitchen in Moscow, while American Cold War intellec...
Not All Propaganda is Art 5: The Play's the Thing
In the fall of 1958, Kenneth Tynan moved from London to New York and upon arrival, clashed with Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn over socially...
Not All Propaganda is Art 4: Propagande Noire
In 1956, Richard Wright spoke of islands of free men at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. James Baldwin critiqued th...
Not All Propaganda is Art 3: The Man Who Was Thursday's Children
In 1956 London Theater critic Kenneth Tynan helped launch a youth movement committed to exposing social and political issues on stage, on sc...
Not All Propaganda is Art 2: Outsider Influence
In 1956, New Yorker writer Dwight Macdonald joined Encounter , a magazine secretly backed by American and British security agencies. He arri...
Not All Propaganda is Art 1: Operation Younger Brother
In the 1950s the CIA weaponized culture to capture hearts and minds in Europe and Africa. We meet three writers (Richard Wright, Kenneth Tyn...
Not All Propaganda is Art BONUS CONTENT TRAILER: Propaganda Notes and Sources
The new ToE series Propaganda is Art has a companion podcast called Propaganda Notes & Sources, think audio footnotes ! Each episode in Not...
Wrong Way with Joanne McNeil
One of my favorite technology critics has just published a novel about Self Driving Cars (or fake Self Driving Cars). We talk about her new...
The Hank Show (when computers are right)
Today we live inside data systems that contain, surveil, and judge us. In his new book, the Hank Show , author and journalist McKenzie Funk...
Too good to be true remix
Two very different tales about making stuff up about the CIA. Your host shares the story of Sylvia Press, who in the 1950s, wrote a revenge...
Second time as forced (500daysplus)
Citizens armed only with Molotov cocktails battle with Russian tanks on the streets of… Budapest. In November of 1956 Russian troops invaded...