Pretty Heady Stuff

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. Seikaly and I talk about the question of Palestine and the ongoing catastrophe. When we spoke, the central focus was famine, which for a moment felt like a moral line in the sand for even Western liberals that hadn't taken a stand. Now, Western powers are trying to shift our gaze to peace, the need for peace and to begin the reconstruction of Gaza.... By whom? We don't know. We assume Jared Kushner, since we are clearly in the worst possible universe. The attempt, now, to normalize the murder of more than 30,000 children in Gaza, the self-congratulatory desire to move past it, ignores the fact that Gaza is still being starved and bombed. Israel is violating Trump's fake "peace plan" because it never planned to pull back; the occupation was always violence without end; it was built on what Abdaljawad Omar calls the "Zionist fantasy of total domination."October 7th drove this hypermilitarized nation to unleash genocidal fury on the people of Palestine. Since that date, its been flexing its state-of-the-art capacity for industrial slaughter. In a recent speech, Netenyahu said that his country needs to become a modern "Super Sparta" -- meaning, more militaristic and aggressive in its ambitions, and also more isolated and garrisoned-off from the rest of the world. Israel is an ultranationalist ethnostate with a nuclear arsenal that is threatening to respond to the collapse of what was left of its fragile public image by stockpiling more weapons and embracing their isolation. Some might say it's normal, or at least predictable, for a country that's always at war to invest so heavily in defense and to worry about fortifying its borders.... But that is not what Netenyahu meant by making Israel a "Super Sparta." Israel is building what my guest Sherene Seikaly calls a "paradigm" of imperial power, over and against much of the Arab world. And it is doing so to maintain a system of oppression and dispossession. Everything is out in the open now: the Israeli parliament just voted to annex all of the West Bank. Omar says that there are multiple futures that could proceed from October 7th. Will this moment of insurgency against an unhinged occupying power be "the first cracks in an imperial juggernaut and its outpost, the sign of the end of their imagined permanence"? Will it mean the end of the Palestinians? he asks. Their "bodies scattered, dispersed, maimed beyond recognition." Or can it be "something else: the endurance of the unbearable, the persistence of what was meant to be erased, the resurrection of a people who refuse to vanish"?

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, an Oxford-educated political theorist, explores innovative political communication in her conversation. She argues that traditional discourse often fails to persuade and emphasizes the importance of social relationships over mere debate. Sarah critiques the spectacle of political debate and highlights the value of shared action as a catalyst for change. By addressing the isolation in political discussions, she provides insights on building solidarity and effective engagement, presenting practical ways to revitalize democracy.

Ingrid Waldron is the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, the co-founder and co-director of the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice (CCECJ), and currently a consultant for Canada's Environmental Justice Strategy.Ingrid Waldron partners with equity demanding groups because their health depends on this thing called structural competency. There is a massive body of research on the impacts of racism and other forms of discrimination on the health of communities and plenty of political and legal force behind recognizing the ongoing lethal effects of environmental racism. Back in 2020, Waldron collaborated with Elliot Page to turn her book There’s Something in the Water, a study of environmental racism in Nova Scotia, into a feature-length documentary. Her new book, From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: Tracing the Impacts of Racial Trauma in Black Communities from the Colonial Era to the Present, is what we mostly focus on here. The book traces the history of Black racial trauma in Canada, Britain, and the US, but it's also a kind of manifesto, demanding for a politics of structural transformation in biomedicine as a way of moving past the discipline’s resistance to advocating for changes at the root, structural level.Waldron is saying that because racism places obvious restrictions on the ability of human beings to thrive in their social worlds, it also places an insurmountable burden on the equal distribution of health. I think there are moments in this discussion where it feels like Dr. Waldron might even be satisfied, or maybe just reassured, with the medical community if it could just recognize and respond to racism as a factor that has a huge impact on a person's health. Demanding an anti-racist politics in academia and medical practice, she says that we need to make it standard practice to care about radical structural change, and especially where the politics of race and psychiatry collide.

This episode comes out at a time when the movement for Palestinian liberation is relentlessly holding groups accountable for supporting and whitewashing the state of Israel's annihilationist violence against Gaza's people. The shaming of companies, states and cities for their complicity and quietism on Gaza has reached a fever pitch. Here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Tennis Canada was set to play Team Israel in the Davis Cup, but the event was closed to spectators as a result of public pressure (although the reasons cited were related to "security," a refrain that Jones says should be identified as anti-Palestinian racism). Can we see professional sports are inherently political? And how do we understand the sort of political maneuvering pariah states are doing to launder their reputations through "sportswashing"? Professional sport is a symbolic activity that is clearly important for defining who we are and where our moral limits lie, but it is also, as Liew stresses, an escapist experience that's meant to inspire awe and joy at seeing the feats that people are capable of when in competition with each other. But we need to start from the position that sportswashing is an attempt to sideline the legitimate political demands of millions of people globally: demands, in this case, that Palestine be free from this tyranny. In Liew's words, "The primary objective of Israeli sporting diplomacy is that when you hear the country’s name, you won’t think of any of this. You won’t think about military checkpoints or the bombing of Gaza or the Palestinian occupation, or really Palestinians at all. Instead you’ll think about golden beaches, rooftop cocktails, Lionel Messi and Chris Froome bathed in a glorious sunset."Tennis Canada could have stood on the side of justice. The International Tennis Federation could also have aligned with countless legal experts globally in identifying what Israel is doing as abhorrent and unacceptable, worthy of boycott and having athletes barred from international events. A genocide is unfolding before our eyes.Jones ultimately comes back to this question: how, given that this is happening in a way that is visible, visceral and almost too horrific to articulate, do professional communicators, journalists, political leaders and others convince themselves to keep lying by pretending this is normal?

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, content producer and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University, where he served as founding director of Rice’s Center for Environmental Studies. Some of his recent books are Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene and Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human.The book we’re talking about here, though, No More Fossils, is a short, stunning analysis of the function of fossils during this era of human-propelled environmental destruction and development. And No More Fossils is easily one of the best books I’ve read on the history of energy. Dominic says his goal was to make a book that was teachable, and I would say that, given its length, it’s also super portable and modal in its usefulness. In this conversation, Boyer says a few times that the goal is to bring about a decisive move away from the indulgent, excessive use of energy that is currently so normalized. And I totally agree, the overwhelming accelerationist use of energy is catapulting us into an incredibly turbulent future on this planet. But how do we bring that about? Dominic’s book offers some extremely moving promises of a point after the petrostate and words of encouragement for people that are organizing to end fossil capitalism. One of the things that most resonated with me  is the idea that, one day, everyone will grasp the obviousness of the need to phase out fossil fuels. It will be self-evident that it was necessary. Even if, right now, the fossil gerontocracy, as Boyer calls it, is doing everything it can to preserve a failed way of life based on bottomless plastics and gasoline.Can we fight the future and preserve joy? Can we propel the energy transition while forging a future that addresses the colonial crimes of the past? If we are now living in epic times, can we collectively rise to the planetary challenges that we face?

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician and activist. She's been a major part of revolutionary health initiatives like the Justice Study, which looks at the links between police violence and health in Black, brown and Indigenous communities, and Seeding Sovereignty, a group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in climate action. She's also the co-author, with Raj Patel, of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease in a system of overproduction that pumps so much toxicity into our communities.In September 2024, Marya was put on leave by the University of California San Francisco in response to her criticism of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, and just weeks ago was fired for her comments. She has now filed multiple free speech complaints against UCSF. Exposing the obvious danger that fascism poses to providing care should not come at the cost of someone's career. Trying to convey the sheer magnitude of this horrific bombardment on the healthcare system in Palestine shouldn't mean this level of risk.The message from many Western institutions is that basically any expression of pro-Palestinian dissent is now going to be either crushed or completely ignored. These institutions, including many universities, are complicit in the political cowardice and settler colonial racism that lets the genocide to continue. The crackdown on dissent is ramping up everywhere. And because the Israeli propaganda machine has struggled to obscure the reality of this genocide with its lies, accusations and brinksmanship, the only strategy left is just to go after people like Rupa, either by attacking their ability to do their job or by detaining and disappearing them. Our conversation is really about the emergence of a world order that doesn't care about health. Gaza has endured 638 days of hell. Unimaginably, Israel has delighted in raining down hell on Gaza for over 15,000 straight hours. Two years of witnessing the humiliation and annihilation of the people of Gaza. What has it done to us? This event? Has it changed time the way the pandemic did? Does it make us relate differently to the things and people around us? The water? The air? The peace we get to experience? Has seeing these things and thinking about the poisonous roots of what we're seeing done anything to our sense of how we should be governed? I wonder because, in this discussion, Marya lays out exactly the kinds of sacrifices that need to be made so that health can serve as a rallying cry for ending the obscene domination of Palestine.

Kilian Jörg is an artist and philosopher who is interested in understanding how art can intervene to disrupt the ecological catastrophe we’re currently witnessing. His current research focuses on the car as a metaphor for the toxic behaviors of modernity, the psychological effects of living in a time of ecocide and what sorts of activist strategies for reclaiming land might be effective at shaking off the psychology of resignation. My conversation with Kilian Jorg was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done on writing and thinking. There’s something very refreshing about the way that Kilian thinks about the act of writing in the university. I’m not sure where it came from, but the more tactile and situated sort of theorizing he is able to do makes me want to spend more time with the texts that he looks at and really engage with the threads there. Because he’s using them to weave together different concepts of liberation, with the ultimate goal, I think, of showing how to fight the imposition of one worldview on the planet. Kilian is fighting to defend other possible methods of reasoning. It might not be a magical solution for our ecological crisis, but I found that talking to Kilian about the ideas in Ecological Reasonings opened up approaches to problems like what to do about Donald Trump or artificial intelligence or our attachment to the car as a convenience we can’t live without, regardless of what it does to us. One of the wonderful things about his book is that it is using this idea of the “resilience of Reason” to deconstruct and decompose the current technocratic world order — he’s saying that there is a continuum between Trump, the narrowing of political possibilities, and Monorationalism. What he wants is a world where we are actively “nourishing ground for many other voices to be heard.” Where we are consciously worrying about and destabilizing the relationship between the things we consider active, aggressive and ambitious, and the things we consider passive, wasteful and directionless.

Alexander Gallant is a folk singer-songwriter from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His songs are simple and direct but also singular and sardonic. He takes a lot of inspiration from the folk revival of the 1960’s, but uses a specific blend of open tuning style fingerpicking and percussive strumming, paired with funny, personal poetry. He released his debut record, Waiting Tables Blues with Tibet Street Records in November 2023. His second record, Rubber Monster Suit, is a collection of songs about living with sobriety and in the crumbling uncertainty of the modern political landscape. He also writes about love, about living without love, about getting older. It's a beautiful record that encompasses a bunch of different styles of music, from lush jazz-influenced cinematic soundscapes, to psych country, to acoustic singer songwriter warmth. Sarah Swire, who pops into the conversation a little later, is a multi-disciplinary artist with work spanning across stage, screen and television. They're perhaps best known for playing roles on the smash hit superhero series The Boys, in Anna and the Apocalypse, and on the popular Murdoch Mysteries. They'll be appearing this year in the upcoming Apple TV+ thriller ‘The Last Frontier’ and Hallmark’s new drama 'Ripple.' Swire is an awesome art-rock songwriter and storyteller who, when you see her live, will use wildly compelling monologues and spoken word, or what she calls word art, to create a dizzying spectacle that, honestly, has to be seen to be fully understood. Their debut album, Sister Swire, was produced by Joel Plaskett in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Beyond writing that album, which is so fun by the way, Sarah has toured and performed internationally and composed music for the BBC, Avalon Arts and The National Theatre of Scotland. In this conversation, we use the occasion of Gallant's new album coming out to explore what weird alchemy gives birth to a song, how writing music can "take the temperature of your brain," as Alexander puts it, and what sorts of expectations tend to be placed on artists in the context of 21st century digital capitalism. We're in a moment where so much music is consumed digitally and repurposed into a soundtrack for our own individual experiences through share culture. What does it looks like to try and leverage that digital space as a way of getting people out of their homes and into the public sphere?Gallant will be playing a show on May 25th at the beautiful Sanctuary Arts Centre in Dartmouth, alongside Sal. Both will be releasing albums that night; Sal's is called My Friend the Waitress and Gallant has called his Rubber Monster Suit. Gallant and Swire explain why they think people tend to be more inspired by direct experiences of art. I loved Sarah's point that, when we encounter someone who has committed to creativity out in the world, we're not intimidated or made to feel "feeble" in the way that we sometimes are when we encounter it in a digital space. Making time to summon the courage to have an out of body experience out in the world can be transformative. That's why I'm looking forward to the show on Sunday, and why I think you should go.#livemusic #acoustic #vocalist #songwriter #singer #music #musician #artist #newmusic #singersongwriter

Caleb Wellum is a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He’s also the editor of Energy Humanities and a member of both the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective.As an historian who studies the intersection of energy, culture and political economy in the twentieth century, he’s invested in understanding how natural resource development and especially oil extraction became a force that shapes social reality today. The book we talk about in this conversation is called Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America, and it’s an incredible analysis of the role that stories about energy crisis played in creating American neoliberalism, this deregulated, highly individualistic version of capitalism that makes consumerism synonymous with personal fulfilment and the centre of so many political considerations. What Wellum is basically saying is that we arrive at where we are today, in terms of our energy habits, the political expediency of warfare, and the expectations we have about lifestyle, comfort and the value of national identity, largely through the high stakes ideological games that were played during the 1970s, and also through some of the cinematic narratives that played out in popular culture at that time. Returning to Cold War capitalism through his book was really instructive for me as a way of trying to understand why Trumpism is this triumphalist cultural force in the US right now. We talk about that in relation to his case studies in Energizing Neoliberalism, from the energy conservation debates that happened in the 70s, to the popular car films that were dismissed by critics as appealing only to the duped masses, to the creation of oil futures trading. The conversation is an attempt to see how the power of neoliberalism as we know it didn’t have to develop the way it did. By constructing the oil crisis in certain ways, the United States secured a future of endless growth, limitless consumption and fleeting pleasures derived from fossil fuels. More specifically, neoliberal capitalists used the crisis to steer society in a more financialized, deregulated, and ecologically untenable direction. In Wellum’s words, this was a domestic energy crisis imagined in response to global instability. As we fight for a clean energy future in the present, against colonial powers launching wars for resources all over the globe, we can gain a lot of lessons from Energizing Neoliberalism’s rigorous effort to recognize petro-populism as a reactionary, violent force. #fossilfuels #fossilcapital #neoliberalism #1970s #petroleum #historyofcapitalism #financialization #finance #americanism #coldwar #ideology #petropopulism #petromasculinity #petroculture

James Rowe is a professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria and the author of a great book called Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice and how the fear of death works as a major cause of injustice globally. One of my main takeaways, so to speak, after reading and thinking about the book a lot is that there is a specific responsibility that white settlers have to rectifying the structural wrongs we are fundamentally complicit with — and that’s whether we like it or not… and there are a lot of people who believe those wrongs exist in the past, and thus don’t need to be dealt with by folks in the present, and—conveniently—feel that it’s too far back to care. Well, the past is not passed, and Rowe asks us, on a philosophical and physical level, why we carry a resistance to healing “the historical and existential trauma” we carry. One of the things that seems to interrupt the use of mindfulness to access and heal those scars is appropriation. Radical Mindfulness talks about the corporate co-optation of mindfulness in really wonderful ways, stating that while there isn’t any need for people to be Buddhist to “benefit from meditation… naming and honoring the tradition is important to avoid appropriation.” If we don’t, we risk the side-stepping of a crucial component of that tradition: which is about transforming “fear of death into a deep acceptance of earthly life, thereby reducing destructive behaviors.”I’m not going to say that I was sceptical of the idea that fear of death is the central cause of most structures of domination, most violence, most oppression, but I just couldn’t fully wrap my head around what that meant. Radical Mindfulness helped me get the ways that fear of “finitude” drives a pathological commitment to a kind of immortalism, a commitment to preserving the nation, the corporation, the self at the expense of others, or of the Earth itself. So I think accepting death as part of the “fullness of reality” is “politically vital,” as James puts it, because if we do recognize the “flow of impermanence,” or what Dominic Boyer has called the “total excessive marvelous abundance” of lifedeath (one word) on this planet, then we can possibly get to a place politically where we aren’t as overcome by the horrible resentments, vindictiveness, protectionism and oppressive impulses that make life miserable for so many people. Rowe’s book doesn’t stay at the super high level of so much new age philosophy — so, think Rainn Wilson’s podcasts “Soul Boom" and "Hey There, Human" — it is materially about the embodied experience of whiteness, of masculinity, of settler being in the world. This is why he advocates for embodied social change within social justice movements that can, themselves, occasionally be quite exclusionary. I’m more open to the idea, after thinking about Rowe’s writing, that there is a lot of potential in mindfulness not just for the dreamy promise of epiphany, but for a kind of comfort that comes from reckoning with why we fear the things we fear.