Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything

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 conversation about his book and our new Oligarchy.  Also, Radiotopia is running its annual fundraiser right now, we only do thi...

Joel Whitney’s book Finks is a seminal book about American intellectuals and American security agencies,  mainly because it illuminates the real story behind the CIA’s involvement with the founding of a little magazine called The Paris Review  which hit the scene in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War. 

In Joel Whitney’s new book Flights,  he continues his historical excavations -  more stories about writers intel...

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 commercials, radio spots, movie clips – all sound from 1984 (the year, not the book). Find out what totalitarianism really sounds like. 

***...

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 history of the Punisher. It's a conversation about America's fascination with, and attraction to, a black and white vision of justice...

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 book The CIA: an Imperial History is out now.  Hugh Wilford has written numerous books about the CIA and Cold War intelligence h...

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. 

Show notes: Matthew Tynan reads Kenneth Tynan’s 1960 speech, Michael Billington wrote a 1960 Parody of Kenneth Tynan, Jeffe...

 ]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 French history and thought, Kathleen Gyssels is writing about the Moulin d’Andé. Thomas Riegler writes about the Red Hand, Made...

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 forcefully responded with a report advocating for “ an increased effort in the field of press, radio and television in the U.K. ...

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 participating because this was no ordinary mass culture conference; it was an Anti Anti-Americanism operation. Meanwhile, in Londo...

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 ambitions to create commercially and artistically successful films. We also meet two of Professor Macdonald’s former students f...

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 wrote about the 1956 Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs. Darryl Pinckney wrote on Norman Mailer and Denis Leroux wrote on Ant...

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 Guardian, Celia Brayfield wrote Rebel Writers, Clare Bucknell wrote The Treasuries Laura Bradley writes on Brecht.

Support ToE ...

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 incited a youth rebellion in communist Hungary. We investigate the covert propaganda behind Operation Free Youth Action and Operation ...

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 responsible for the CIA’s cinematic version of 1984 (Operation Big Brother) and “books that don’t smack of propaganda” aimed at Eur...

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 corresponding original sources he consulted, and the archives he visited while reporting this series. Like all great footno...

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, drug-running pilot, alleged CIA asset, and  pioneering computer programmer known as the father of data fusion.

McKenzie Funk has writ...

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 American James Bond with the help of future Watergate burglar E Howard Hunt.

Get Jefferson Morley’s amazing new book: Scorpion's Dance....