Amos and Ex: Living in the End Times

We’ve already called for the disenfranchising of the Boomers, so why not Generations X and Y as well? As Greta Thurnberg and her allies demonstrate, only the current generation of high schoolers and activist teens (e.g., Parkland, Florida’s, Emma Gonzalez) really matters. Everyone else is just in the way, yours truly included. Plus: Standing Rock, Occupy, decentralized organizing, and critiquing t...

Rough week. Jair Bolsonaro burns the Amazon to the ground and Boris Johnson suspends Parliament. The acceleration is accelerating. As A&E are almost literally speechless in terms of how to respond to these events, this be a shorter episode. Good thing Greta Thurnberg is on her way to the U.S., offering us a smidge of hope. Also, Jeremy Corbin, Bernie’s Green New Deal, and Extinction Rebellion.

Amos and Ex go all IDF-after-reading-Deleuze and spend the hour discussing the Left’s failure to weaponize its own critical/cultural/media theory. But guess who has instrumentalized this stuff since at least the 1990s? The Right. Put another way, we came up with the ideas–rhizomes, psychoanalytic criticism, the hyperreal, the propaganda model, and encoding/decoding–but News Corporation, Facebook,...

Cleansing the Temple: as it was with Jesus so it may be with Pres. Bernie. But if so, who’s this moment’s John the Baptist? Marianne, duh. And Andrew Yang is this new Church’s Peter--the Rock--right? As the second democratic debate in July demonstrated, the “theological” angle to the current crop of candidates is emerging in interesting ways, argue Amos and Ex. Plus: Toni Morrison and Abdullah Oca...

Look, we all know that this whole Area 51 takeover thing is just a trial run for an actual attempt at organizing en masse and fundamentally changing society in productive and collective ways. The Lord's Work, really. So just lean into it, okay? Also discussed: Mekons, memes-as-discourse, and how the commitment to an idea--even an unpopular or allegedly “irrational” one--can become powerful and tra...

In the face of ecological collapse, which is bound to be interpreted in messianic and otherwise theological ways, it makes sense to envision a way out through the creation of a new mythology. For as we have seen in examples such as caged children at the border, the industry-made opioid crisis, and capitalism’s commodification of human life, we’re still living in what can only be described as a pri...

Where is the leadership on climate change? And why do most of the leaders so-called of our western institutions seem incapable of actually leading anything productive and progressive at scale? After hearing a brief statement on ecology by Slavoj Zizek, Amos and Ex discuss the emergence of “leadership” as its own discipline–or perhaps historical artifact–in so many universities at a time when actua...

Admit it–you know you want to vote for Marianne Williamson. And you can! That is, unless our increasingly un-patriotic anti-society devolves into a balkanized pseudo-state first. Oh, and climate change. Amos and Ex discuss all of this–the Orb Queen, patriotism, and the Right’s increasingly insurrectionary behavior–on the eve of Independence Day 2019.

The only Genesis is Peter Gabriel’s Genesis. Everything else is garbage. And it was Peter Gabriel we needed on the democratic debate stage in Florida last week, which was a well-coordinated bore. When not sleeping through it, then, Amos and Ex provide commentary on the first of two democratic debates for the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) like to take credit for ending the Vietnam War and Nixon Administration and civilizing the United States through their work in the women’s and environmental movements in the 1970s. A more complete and historical analysis, though, tells the story of this “generation of sociopaths,” according to writer Bruce Gibney, who argues that this uniquely na...

Consider this long public record: opposition to bussing for the purpose of school desegregation, votes in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act and the Iraq War, longstanding approval of the Hyde amendment outlawing use of public funds for anything resembling abortion services, and staunch support for the financial industry that continues to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of fewer Americ...

Today, Amos and Ex chat with former North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan in a wide-ranging conversation that tackles everything from energy and health policy to Standing Rock. And disaster fiction. Beside his 2006 book on trade and outsourcing, Take This Job and Ship It, Dorgan has co-authored two remarkably apocalyptic novels with David Hagberg: Blowout (2012) and Gridlock (2013). The former takes o...

After starting with a new report on the cheaper-than-the-current-system cost of Medicare for All, Amos and Ex discuss the “inevitability” of a Bernie nomination (Joe Biden and the DNC notwithstanding), polling, and upstart oldster Mike Gravel. Also addressed are Noam Chomsky’s take on Donald Trump and the so-called “debate of the century” between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson.

Black holes. They’re everywhere. Especially Washington. Perhaps this is why so many good ideas go there never to return: universal health care, Net Neutrality, higher minimum wage, free public college, and so on. And now we have an actual picture of a black hole. Having recently lost a previous episode to the ether, Amos and Ex approach the event horizon of the future by chatting about campaign po...

Russian time travel? Mushrooms on Mars? What reality is this? Amos and Ex discuss. And speaking of fantasy, we also riff on the so-called “punk” presidential campaign of Beto O’Rourke and how his name-dropping of groups like Fugazi in the media marks a potentially dangerous move by the Democrats to “aestheticize politics” (to quote Walter Benjamin) when what we need today is to politicize art.

¿Que pasa, Calabaza? Today Amos and Ex discuss their respective experiences south of the United States–Cuba for Ex and and Argentina-Chile-Bolivia-Peru for Amos–as a way into a discussion on the future, the center, and the periphery of postmodern culture. And if it is true, as J.G. Ballard noted, the “the periphery is where the future reveals itself,” then perhaps the future is taking shape in Nor...

Beginning with a discussion of “The Simpsons” and self-hate, today Amos and Ex spend the hour discussing UFOs, aliens, and astrotheology. This branch of theology, which combines critical analyses of contemporary space science with traditional belief systems such Judeo-Christianity in an effort to construct meaningful understandings of the human condition within a cosmos that likely harbors other i...

What’s your American healthcare system horror story? We’ve all got one. Amos and Ex discuss theirs in the service of advocating for Medicare for All. Also discussed are how the existing health system cannot be described as anything but disciplinary and how both the Right and the Left seem to be exhibiting suicidal tendencies in the face of climate change and a declining social order. As such, we a...

Rep. Pramila Jayapal drops her Medicare for All bill (HR 1384) in the U.S. House with 106 co-sponsors. Amos and Ex discuss. Also bandied about at length are Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and his 2010 book Living in the End Times, which gave this podcast its title. Spoiler alert: capitalism is dying and as such the West is in the throes of the initial stages of Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s five sta...

Are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s not yet here, but Amos and Ex are talking the evolution of pop music from often radical to largely benign and the significance of Bernie Sanders's announcement of a second presidential campaign. Other topics include labor organizing in North Dakota and elsewhere, gas fracking, and the power of public opinion in American politics.

This wide-ranging discussion moves from talk of baseball in the 1990s (and how and why former Minnesota Twins player Kent Hrbek, whom we love, remains a cheater) to the much-needed "whistleblowing" of AOC and Ilhan Omar in the new Congress to corporate media consolidation and Noam Chomsky's and Ed Herman's classic text Manufacturing Consent, which was made into a now-classic film in 1992.

Amos and Ex are staunch supporters of Dave Matthews Band. Your move, haters. After spending a good deal of time talking Green New Deal and the necessity of nuclear power to help end the climate crisis, A&E spend the remainder of this episode chatting about how professional wrestling both serves as a barometer for political consciousness in America and in some ways even anticipates the future of di...

With our longtime friend Scott joining the conversation, Amos and Ex riff on the Alex Garland film Annihilation (2018) and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Also discussed are R Kelly, Jonah Hill's directorial debut Mid90s (2018), and American skate culture.

In between discussions of the Coen Brothers, D.H. Lawrence, William Gass, and political theology, Amos and Ex talk the best films of 2018. No, not the film about Freddie Mercury's band, but First Reformed, Mary Magdalene, and Come Sunday, among others. Oh, and The Death of Stalin.

The first of two discussions about your co-hosts' respective book projects. Today we discuss Ex's punk and postpunk's literary history Lusty Scripts (Indiana University Press, 2017), which connects punk music to not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, but Dostoevsky, Burroughs, Henry Miller, Kafka, Genet, and Philip K. Dick. In detailing the punk bookshelf, Ex contends that punk’s literary and intel...