Darts & Letters

Darts & Letters

episodes

Darts and Letters is about ‘arts and letters,’ but for the kind of people who might hack a dart. We cover public intellectualism and the politics of academia from a left populist perspective. Put simply: we love ideas, but hate snob culture. Each week, we interview thinkers about key debates that are relevant to the left. We discuss politics, arts, culture, and ideas. But the show is for everyone. That means sometimes you'll hear from the usual suspects, like that authoritative old professor; but just as often, you'll hear from the young iconoclastic scholar, the crass podcaster, the journalist, the activist--even so-called 'ordinary working people.' We're here to discover exciting intellectual life, wherever that might be.


Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Radical Imagination

October 11, 2023

Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Radical Imagination

Elif Genc, Payton McDonald, Max Haiven, and Alex Khasnabish
Hosted by Gordon Katic
Listen:

This episode of Darts and Letters examines the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing. There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy lef…

The Past and Present of Psychedelic Medicine with Erika Dyke and David Nickles

September 1, 2023

The Past and Present of Psychedelic Medicine

Erika Dyke and David Nickles
Hosted by Gordon Katic
Listen:

Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing — a tool for personal revelation…

The WEF is Actually Bad, But Not Like That

July 28, 2023

The WEF is Actually Bad, But Not Like That

Joel Bakan
Hosted by Gordon Katic
Listen:

The World Economic Forum has become the bugbear of the right-wing in Canada, and beyond. Conspiracies swirl about how this shadowy, globalist cabal wa…

The Texas Two-Step and Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder

July 26, 2023

The Texas Two-Step and Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder

Hosted by Marc Apollonio
Listen:

What’s safer than baby powder? Parents have been trusting Johnson & Johnson for over 100 years to powder their baby’s bottoms. Yet, numerous studies …

Why Do So Many Young People Think the Unabomber was Right?

June 30, 2023

Why Do So Many Young People Think the Unabomber was Right?

Darts and Letters is creating a new podcast, Academic Edgelords. This is a scholarly podcast about scholarly provocateurs. This is a leftist podcast …

Doctor Ex Machina: AI in Medicine and its Pitfalls

June 13, 2023

Doctor Ex Machina

Casey Ross and Ben Chin-Yee
Listen:

Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a techno-utopian vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, di…

Learning for Liberation: The Life and Legacy of Paulo Freire

May 29, 2023

Learning for Liberation: The Life and Legacy of Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire
Hosted by Ren Bangert

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 …

Misinformed: The Covid Lab Leak Theory and the Politics of Misinformation

May 17, 2023

Misinformed

Branko Marcetic and Nicole M. Krause
Hosted by Gordon Katic

The COVID-19 lab leak theory went from being dismissed as mere misinformation, to now a credible matter of debate amongst media, scientific, and intel…

Hearts of Men: How Should Progressives React to Masculinity Influencers like Andrew Tate?

April 12, 2023

Hearts of Men

Hosted by Gordon Katic

Online masculinity is getting weirder and weirder. We’re way past mere misogyny and sexual predation (though, that’s still certainly there). Now, we’v…

Life Extension Therapies

March 29, 2023

Life Extension Therapies

Hosted by Jay Cockburn

The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodotus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extend…

The Hippie High-Rise: Rochdale College, Toronto’s Communal Living High Rise Free Education Experiment

March 14, 2023

The Hippie High-Rise

Marc Apollonio
Hosted by Marc Apollonio

From 1968 to 1975 one high-rise was the heart of Canada’s counterculture. Rochdale College in Toronto was jammed full with leftist organizers, hippies…

The Story of American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada

February 27, 2023

The Story of American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada

Hosted by Ren Bangert

The idea of moving to Canada figures prominently in the imagination of many disaffected Americans. Most recently, it was comedian Marc Maron who said …

Discordia Revisited: The Concordia Netanyahu Riot of 2002

February 1, 2023

Discordia Revisited

Hosted by Gordon Katic

20 years ago at Concordia University in Montreal pro-Palestinian protestors clashed with police over whether Benjamin Netanyahu should be allowed to s…

"Medical Assistance in Dying" (MAID) in Canada

December 26, 2022

"Medical Assistance in Dying" (MAID)

Trudo Lemmens and Derryk Smith
Hosted by Gordon Katic

Is medical assistance in dying, or MAID letting the government off the hook from providing what they should be providing? Should we respect people's c…

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Chokepoint Capitalism is Strangling Creative Industries

December 19, 2022

Chokepoint Capitalism

Cory Doctorow
Hosted by Jay Cockburn

Many of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Gibli…

Mathematical Morality: The Ideology that Justifies Billionaires

November 30, 2022

Mathematical Morality

Émile P. Torres
Hosted by Gordon Katic

How can billionaires justify the endless accumulation of wealth? Effective altruism. An almost religious philosophical belief. Sam Bankman-Fried, the …

Science Against the People: Anti-Capitalist Science

November 16, 2022

Science Against the People

Sigrid Schmaltzer
Hosted by Gordon Katic

It’s difficult to criticise science from the left. Right-wingers attack science and liberals defend it. Science for the People is a radical movement…

Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture

October 31, 2022

Darts Transit Commission

Paris Marx
Hosted by Gordon Katic

Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thi…

Technocracy Now! Part 3: Technocracy in the Private Sector

October 19, 2022

Technocracy Now! Part 3

Hosted by Gordon Katic

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake societ…

Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics

October 10, 2022

Technocracy Now! Part 2

Joy Rohde
Hosted by Gordon Katic

On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies. First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political sc…