Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything
By Benjamen Walker & Radiotopia
Categories: Society & Culture, Personal Journals
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.
203 episodes indexed on PodSearch.
Recent episodes
- 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 Trump locking up Americans in camps was a bit silly… that could never happen here? But in 2024, as private prison stocks soar to new heights, things like a…
- 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 influence of four billionaires: Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Elon Musk. After the election I rang Jonathan up for a special post election…
- 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 the Cultural Marxism Industry is stronger than ever. An update for 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 of the future. For this special installment of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything we travel back in time and give this diary a soundtrack. TV…
- 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 business: a mashup of Donald Trump and the Marvel comic book character The Punisher. In this episode we talk with Kent Worcester, author of a new cultural…
- 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 of the CIA’s founding fathers were staunch anti-imperialists, but during the Cold War, the US took up the mantle of Europe’s colonial projects.Hugh Wilford's…
- 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 Black Spies in Paris, Dwight Macdonald’s Mass Cult & Mid Cult finally debuts & flops, and Kenneth Tynan discovers the limits of social and cultural protest…
- 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 Richard Wright’s life: forged letters, fake terrorist groups, fraudulent doctors and French Radio.Shownotes: Françoise Vergès writes about decolonialism, and…
- 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 to use diplomacy to resolve the crisis over divided Germany. In 1959 England also fretted over a new American export: the Beatnik. The British foreign office…
- 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 intellectuals gathered in the Poconos to defend Kitsch. Dwight Macdonald, whose theory of mass culture translated too easily into Anti-Americanism, was barred from…
- 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 engaged art and the politics of apolitical culture on live TV. At the same moment New Yorker writer Dwight Macdonald went West to report on “New” Hollywood's…
- 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 the event for Encounter, the CIA’s propaganda magazine. We take a close listen to the original recordings. Shownotes: Merve Fejzula and Cedric Tolliver both…
- 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 screen and in literature. We take a close look at the operators and opportunists behind England’s Angry Young Men. Shownotes: Michael Billington wrote for the…
- 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 arrived in London just as British Influencers turned a young Existentialist named Colin Wilson into England's answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. Meanwhile, the CIA…
- 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 Tynan, and Dwight Macdonald) who got caught up in this battle both as collaborators and targets between the years of 1956 - 1960. We also meet a propagandist…
- 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 All Propaganda is Art gets its own corresponding episode of Propaganda Notes & Sources. Your host goes through the script for each episode and cites all the…
- 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 book, and the hidden human worker nestled in our technological revolution. I can’t recommend Wrong Way enough!
- 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 provides us with a totally unique origin story of our world: A guy named Hank Asher. We talk with McKenzie Funk about the former Florida conto painter…
- 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 novel after she was fired during the McCarthy purges. And author Jefferson Morley tells us about the time CIA director Richard Helms tried to create an…
- 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 Hungary. The revolution was crushed and thousands of Hungarians fled. Will history repeat itself? We talk with Réka Pigniczky about her memory project, a…
- Outsider Studies: Connie Converse
The life of musician Connie Converse easily reduces down to one of those Hemingway length sad stories: Before Dylan there was Connie Converse and then she disappeared. In his new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse” Howard Fishman gives us the complete…
- How to look at America
We hear from two photographers who are masters at showing us what is hard to see, and always has been hard to see, in America.
- Venice (Ukraine redux)
The war/invasion/fighting is still going. We revisit our program on NFTs, art and war. Your host visits the 59th International Art Biennale in Venice, the world’s most important art fair and the first since the global pandemic. Plus Digital Ukranians, Sound Art, and NFTs.
- Reality is that which, when you stop laughing at it, doesn't go away (false alarm Elon Musk 4202023 remix)
One of the episodes in my False Alarm! Series from 2018 imagined a future where Elon Musk stepped up to help with the News. That Algorithmic Oligarchic joke is no longer funny. On 4.20.2023 Elon Musk followed through on his threat and brought Twitter to heel. From 2018: A handful of tech barons…
- False Alarm! (Stormy Daniels 2023 Appreciation remix)
Back in 2018 your host met Stormy Daniels as part of his 15 part investigation into America’s disinformation complex. You can find that series here. On this historic day, as we learn that no American floats above the law, we turn back to this historic TOE moment, a remix of False Alarm, featuring…
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