The “podcast bubble,” as it’s now being called, was a period of extraordinary productivity for Gimlet in particular, which produced forty-five different shows during its nine years of activity, including limited series like The Habitat; weekly chat shows like The Cut on Tuesdays; recurring documentary series like Crimetown; kids’ shows like Story Pirates and Chompers; scripted dramas like Homecoming and Sandra that starred big-name actors like Oscar Isaac and Kristen Wiig; and branded podcasts for companies including eBay, Tinder, and Gatorade. And with all those shows came a sudden abundance of podcast-related jobs.
The goal is to crumble popular support for public education.
An organic crisis collided with a conjunctural crisis, and only the political right had both the sense and the power to take advantage of it. Now the conspiracist structure of feeling—the recognition of one’s own relative disfranchisement, combined with a resentment toward the tremendous power and resources that a small class wields exclusively over everyone else—textures our political reality thoroughly, and not just for the right’s ideological foot soldiers.
My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?
The Temple University strike’s template for organizing the public university
The strike at Temple, therefore, was not just about material benefits for graduate workers: it was also about the long-term structural nature of what the contemporary university will be. It was about exposing the precarity of everyone—not just graduate workers but also adjuncts and even TT faculty—under academia’s current system.
Then the parents threatened a class-action lawsuit. The students occupied a university building. The full-time faculty began rumbles about a vote of no confidence against the president. They had nowhere left to go.
Repetitious and reductive appeals to the universal never satisfied him
The US working class was forged, for Davis, through its compounded historical defeat, which gave it a distinctive contradictory, battered, and lumpy form that could not be evened out through appeals to abstraction. Most importantly, the cycle of defeat and accommodation had separated the official labor movement from the Black working class, which he saw as the only possible “cutting edge” for socialist politics.
