In Bed With The Right

• Episode 62: AI Slop and the New Fascist Aesthetic with Roland Meyer

  Why have our new right-wing overlords taken such a shine to chintzy, shiny AI slop? What is persuasive about these phony, artless, slightly desperate images? How do they originate, and how do they circulate? For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Roland Meyer, who is a professor of digital cultures and arts at the University of Zurich and the University of the Arts in Zurich, Switzerland. If you're trying to picture the kinds of image they're discussing, it might be helpful to check out Roland's huge thread on Bluesky. And if you're trying to follow along with our discussion of specific images, we have collected a bunch of the examples we discuss in the episode here.

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• Episode 60: Emergency Episode: The German Elections

  Germany voted for a new parliament last Sunday, and if you weren't ready for the words "far right" "Germany" and "20% of the vote" to pop up on your doom bingo, well, then you don't know 2025. Journalist Annika Brockschmidt stops by the pod to talk Adrian and Moira through Germany's political system, how the election results will impact it, and what the results suggest about Germany's future.

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• Episode 58: The Pelicot Trial with Manon Garcia

  TW: This episode is almost entirely about a horrifying case of sustained and organized rape. On December 19, 2024 a court in Avignon, France convicted Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men of rape. It was the conclusion to a spectacular case and trial that galvanized (parts of) France. The victim, Gisèle Pelicot, chose to allow the trial to be public, flipping the script on the way France had thus far metabolized #MeToo: "shame", as Gisèle Pelicot put it, "has changed sides." Philosopher Manon Garcia attended the proceedings in Avignon, and now speaks with Moira and Adrian about what the case says about patriarchy, misogyny, masculinity and collective memory.

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• Episode 57: Mark Zuckerberg

  Moira and Adrian delve into the career and political trajectory of Mark Zuckerberg. From Facemash to The Facebook to the Metaverse to putting on an absurd amount of sunscreen, they trace Mark Zuckerberg's (and Silicon Valley's) complicated relationship to gender. They explore how data, platforms, innovation and disruption, and guiding Silicon Valley figures like the genius and the drop-out are gendered, and how Zuckerberg's trajectory both reflects this gendered hierarchy and its breakdown. [You can find Adrian's book What Tech Calls Thinking here.]

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• Episode 55: Emergency Episode: Mark Joseph Stern on Executive Action

  Donald Trump is issuing executive orders faster than people seem to be able to metabolize what's happening. And many of them have to do with gender, sexuality and wokeness! So Moira and Adrian turn to an expert -- Slate.com's intrepid legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern -- to make sense of at least some of the ones we know about in this special emergency episode. Check out Mark's article on the bizarre (and since possibly rescinded) "spending freeze" at Slate here, Adrian's run-down of the EO on gender affirming care here, and Moira's more hopeful note on the opposition all this will run into here.

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