• 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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  • 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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  • EP42: The Road From Roe (ft. Becca Andrews, Chelsea Ebin & Laurie Bertram Roberts)

    For years, abortion rights advocates have worried about the United States drifting towards abolishing Roe vs. Wade. Could this be the moment? On this episode of Darts and Letters, we look at the road from Roe: years of court cases and anti-choice activism that have led to the current showdown that threatens the right to choose.
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  • EP41: Canada’s Dumbest Public Intellectuals (ft. Kate Jacobson, Hilary Agro, Big Shiny Takes & Andre Goulet)

    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? We invite our new friends from the Harbinger Media Network to help scour the national intellectual wasteland to find Canada’s dumbest public intellectual.
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  • EP24: Darts and Lasers (ft. Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, & Batya Weinbaum) [Rebroadcast]

    It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. This week we enter the world 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 we set our phasers to fun and go where no podcast has gone before.
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