In this episode, Sam is joined by friend of the pod Anika Jade Levy, author of Flat Earth and founding editor of Forever Magazine, for a sprawling investigation into the paranoid spirit of the United States of America. Beginning with the America’s founding fantasy of paradise, Anika and Sam trace how the country’s utopian dream soured into a national aesthetic of suspicion: from Puritan invisible enemies and the feminized conspiracy of the Salem Witch Trials, to the pastoral terror of data centers humming in the American wilderness, to cyberpunk stealthwear, urban camouflage, hollow earths, Atlantis, visions of a lost world, and much, much more. Drawing from Leo Marx, Richard Hofstadter, Adam Curtis, Cotton Mather, Anette Kolodny, Silvia Federici, and Anika’s own novel, the girls move through history, politics, media, and fashion to uncover what conspiracy reveals about American self-invention.
Links:
The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx
The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter
The Lay of the Land by Annette Kolodny
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici
The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Fredrick Jackson Turner
Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather
The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders
The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis
MAGA as Fan Fiction by Gideon Jacobs
Player One and Main Character by Gideon Jacobs
New Models: The Online Marketplace of Ideas with Joshua Citarella
