Programming Note: Darts and Letters is off. We are producing a new season on Cited Podcast, which is called “the Rationality Wars“.

Front Scroll

  • Thumbnail for EP47: Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs (ft. Rob Rydell, Jade Doskow & Jennifer Slack)

    EP47: Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs (ft. Rob Rydell, Jade Doskow & Jennifer Slack)

    Welcome to 21st century  techno-utopianism. Driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy, techno-utopianism is born anew. But this thinking, while different, is not really new.
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  • Thumbnail for EP46: School Scams (ft. Derek Robertson & Gavin Moodie)

    EP46: School Scams (ft. Derek Robertson & Gavin Moodie)

    Last year was a rough one for academia – inauspicious, to say the least. The Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on students, universities lurching between open and closed, leaving students strained and uncertain about their futures, and stuck in Zoom classrooms. All of that is bad. But wait – there’s more! In this episode of Darts and Letters, we take two of the most frustrating aspects of the  higher education world: endless culture wars around free speech and identity, and the continued corporatization of the curriculum.
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  • Thumbnail for EP45: New Years Resolutions from, and for, the left

    EP45: New Years Resolutions from, and for, the left

    Happy new year! We’re a few days behind, but as we catch up after the holidays and prepare to enter the third year of the plague, we wanted to bring you a few resolutions from, and for, the left by way of the Darts and Letters team and a handful of our past guests.
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  • Thumbnail for EP44: Gamify Everything (ft. Sebastian Deterding, Paris Martineau & Mostafa Henaway)

    EP44: Gamify Everything (ft. Sebastian Deterding, Paris Martineau & Mostafa Henaway)

    Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There’s a game for that. Or, at least, a gamified system designed to nudge you in a series of pre-programmed directions in the service of the state, techno-capitalist overlords, or any number of other groups and entities that chart the course of our hyper-connected, cutting-edge, dystopian 21st century lives. This week on Darts and Letters, guest host Jay Cockburn and our guests take us through gamification of…everything.
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  • Thumbnail for EP43: The Dumbest Books of 2021 (ft. Luke Savage, Matt McManus, Lyta Gold, Daniel Bessner & David Moscrop)

    EP43: The Dumbest Books of 2021 (ft. Luke Savage, Matt McManus, Lyta Gold, Daniel Bessner & David Moscrop)

    As we prepare for a series of 2021 retrospectives looking at the highs and lows of the year, the bests and the worsts, Darts and Letters is embracing the chaos, looking to the printed word, and scouring the stacks to find the dumbest books that found their way to print. We did not have to look far. In fact, the hard part was choosing from a bursting cornucopia of awful. In the spirit of the new year, this week we feature a roundtable with three guests and two call-in friends, each of whom makes the case as to why their book is the dumbest of 2021.
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