Conversation #42: Reading and Watching (May 13, 2018)

This week we catch up on some books and movies that we’ve taken in recently:

• Two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The First Duty” and “Cause and Effect, both from Season 5.

• The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump by Bandy X. Lee et al.

• Unspeakable by Chris Hedges with David Talbot

• Ant-Man (the 2015 Marvel movie)

Then we discuss the article “Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years with Nearly Nothing Going Wrong,” from The Atlantic magazine, by Gillian B. White. The article is a review of The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin.

How to Listen

You can find the MP3 file here.

The Podcast feed is here.

The Podcast channel on YouTube is here.

Links

The episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation we’re watching are taking from this guide, “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours” by Max Temkin. (I’m not saying we will only ever watch those episodes, because the worst can be at least as entertaining as the best, but for now we are very slowly working our way through that list).

Paul mentioned “Heaven Sent,” one of the best modern episodes of Doctor Who, which has a time-loop plot with similarities to the plot of “Cause and Effect,” and James Tiptree Jr.’s novel Brightness Falls from the Air, which also contains a fascinating and strange time loop subplot. Tiptree published only two novels; the other was Up the Walls of the World.

The web site for the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee et al. can be found here.

The web site for Unspeakable by Chris Hedges with David Talbot can be found here.

Paul mentioned Hedges’ article on the importance of maintaining non-violence in protests. He also mentioned Heges’ commencement address at Rockford College, with the full text available here, and his speech at Moravian College, with the full text available here.

There are many editions of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, but the one Grace and I are reading is this one, and we want to give a particular shout-out to the wonderful cover art by Thomas Ott.

The Ant-Man movie web site is here.

Gillian B. White’s review of MIT economist Peter Temin’s book The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy can be found here.

The book’s web site can be found here.

This Week’s Music

The music is is a little clip Paul put together in Apple Logic using some of the included royalty-free samples.