Darts & Letters

We’ll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode, originally published last fall, is about the sophisticated psychological tactics they use to hunt and capture their prey. Free to play mobile games as glorified slot machines, in-game purchases even for triple-A titles, game design that keep gamers hooked to...

You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we’ve always panicked about video games, from the early arcades until this very day. Whether you are a prudish Christian conservative, or a concerned liberal-minded paternalist, demonizing video games has long been good politics. On this episode: guest host and lead producer Jay Cockbur...

We are exposed to thousands of toxic chemicals daily. This is no accident; it is by design. They are everywhere – coating our consumer products, in our food packaging, being dumped into our lakes and sewers, and in countless other places. However, for the most part, regulators say that we need not worry. That assessment is based on a simple 500-year-old adage, “the dose makes the poison.” The logi...

Expo 1967 was the centrepiece of Canada’s 100th birthday. Amid the crowds and the pageantry, one building stood out: The Indians of Canada Pavilion. This was more than a tall glass tipi. It revealed (at least partly) Canada's sordid colonial history, and it challenged the myth of Canada being a peace-loving and tolerant society. We tell the surprising story of the historical experts who put this t...

Canada’s intellectual culture is now like a barren soil that struggles to give life to even the simplest flora. They’re just not that smart. We make too many right wing cranks, self-help charlatans, blood-thirsty reactionaries, insipid centrists, and third-rate Hayekians. But which are our worst? In this episode, originally broadcast in November 2021, we invite our new from the Harbinger Media Net...

Has the pandemic taught us anything? As we look forward and imagine what the future might look like, we like to think ‘next time will be different.’ But, if we don’t take a serious look back, it won’t. Not as long as the people who made this pandemic so bad face zero consequences. In this episode of Darts and Letters, John Nichols says it’s time for a COVID reckoning. His new book is Coronavirus C...

Why does the democratic establishment always avoid turning left, even when it might mean a political win? Gordon asks David Sirota. Sirota is behind the smash-hit Netflix movie Don’t Look Up! Even if you weren’t a fan of that movie this is worth a listen, because David is more than just a screenwriter. He’s a journalist who doesn’t limit his journalism to one kind of storytelling. David has writte...

This is part 2 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. For the final episode of our “Activism & Academia”-themed week of programming, we’re returning to Cited’s series on genetically modified corn, Indigenous rights, and environmental law in Mexico. Return with us to our story on how the discovery of genetically modified corn in the Mexican highlands resulted in a rev...

This is part 1 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. When genetically modified corn was found in the highlands of Mexico, Indigenous campesino groups took to the streets to protect their cultural heritage, setting off a 20-year legal saga. The battle brought Indigenous rights, scientific methods, academic freedom, and law and trade into the mix. It’s a fascinating a...

Scholars want to decolonize everything, and universities say they are doing the hard work of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. But is anything really being done, or is it all for show? In this episode, we approach these questions through three words that are common inside and outside of academia: decolonize, reconciliation, and colonialism. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can suppor...

Today’s episode originally aired in May of 2021, while violence was erupting all along the Gaza Strip. Israeli airstrikes had left over 200 Palestinians and a dozen Israelis dead. It was (and is) a continuation of a story of violent settler colonialism. And yet media and academic censorship has consistently silenced or punished those who speak out in support of Palestinians. In the face of that, m...

This week, we’re showcasing some of our favourite past episodes of Darts and Letters themed around “Activism & Academia”. Today’s episode originally aired a little earlier this summer. In the US, the January 6th hearings were continuing - and discourse about the factors that led to the insurrection was rampant. You might notice that when these kinds of events take place, similar descriptors are us...

Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. In our last episode, you heard about the nuclear plant's largely-forgotten history--how it poisoned the people living downwind. On our season finale: a nuclear safety auditor tries to get it shut down, the downwinders struggle for justice, and we take you into the plant itself. This is part two, if you haven’t heard part one yet go check out yesterday...

In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer. Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up almost overnight in the desert of southeastern Washington. Its employer is the federal government, and its product is plutonium. The Hanford nuclear site was one of the Manhattan Project sites, and it made the plutonium for the bomb that devastated N...

It was billed as “the biggest event in the history of the terminally online.” A debate: socialism vs. capitalism. On your left side, the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff. On your right, a StarCraft player-turned-online intellectual: Steven Bonnel II, better known as Destiny. But this debate didn’t take place on TV, or in a university debate club… it was on Twitch.tv. The online streaming p...

Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places. So why does one company get so much control over a vital service… the internet? This is the story in the USA as well as Canada, so at Darts and Letters we wanted to look for a different way. We also don’t necessarily believe the market is the solution… so what is?...

Techno-utopianism is everywhere. It’s driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy. But this thinking is not new, and World’s Fairs are a perfect example. One of our ongoing series within Darts and Letters is techno utopias, and we do mean that with all the skepticism it’s due. Silicon Valley is tr...

Welcome to the final day of our weeklong deep dive into the politics of education. Today, we’ve got another episode of Cited for you. If you haven’t heard a Cited episode before, it’s the documentary show that came before Darts and Letters and it specialised in immersive storytelling. This piece takes us on a journey through a little-known, long-past set of debates on the nature of science in demo...

If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!) Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration w...

Why is so much right-wing money being funnelled at such a furious pace into universities across the US? Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. The money shows us that the right spends it because they care about education, for their own ideological reasons - and universities are al...

Our society is dominated by grifters. Cheats, cons, frauds: people who don’t really believe what they tell you. They’re just what they need to do to get ahead or to sell you something. Isn’t that that really what capitalism is about? The grift! We’re new here on the network, so we’re introducing Darts and Letters with some highlights of our past episodes. Each week over the summer has a different...

Welcome to week two of our Darts and Letters summer showcase! Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas. We’re celebrating joining the New Books Network by bringing you some of our favourite past episodes of the show. Each week, we’re following a different theme. Last week’s was “ideas in strange places” - and today, we’re kicking off a week of episodes about the politics of educatio...

Before Darts and Letters there was a documentary series called Cited. This is one of those documentaries. This episode is about the lives of sex offenders in the USA. The researcher in this story, Chris Drum actually went and lived with sex offenders, so it’s a fascinating insight into life with some of the most reviled people in the country. This is the last of our “ideas in strange places” theme...

I can point you to mountains of research about prisons. I can also recommend at least a dozen Netflix documentaries, and highlight a handful of radical activists and scholars. There’s a lot of intellectual work done about prison. But what about intellectual work done in prison? As part of this week’s “ideas in strange places” theme, we want to play you this episode from right near when we started...

It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. For this episode, as part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places” we boldly go into the strange new worlds of science fiction, revealing how it’s long been a vehicle for radical thought. We dig into post-scarcity, Afrofuturism, and feminist speculative fiction as w...