In 2020 the NCAA canceled its basketball tournaments for the year. Over the next several months, mitigation measures became more widespread and strict. In some places more quickly than others, we all eventually “returned to normal.” Did we though? In some ways, normalcy seems to be an irresistible pull. But is “normalcy” not the same as the status quo? And shouldn’t we be critical of both? We can look at other contexts in which we either have found a normalcy or feel the need to get back to normal: Climate change (who is doing anything about it?), anti-democratic presidents (well, that’s just the new normal!), xenophobia is now a baseline in the U.S., the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, the list can go on and on.

It is the “new” normal? And what do we do about the intransigence of normality?

In this episode, we discuss the following things, places, people, ideas, and texts:

• Woody’s Bar, St. Petersburg, Florida
• The film Landscape with Invisible Hand
• The MTV reality show The Challenge
• The Great Resignation
• Quiet Quitting
• Italians singing from balconies during quarantine
• Former President Donald Trump seeming to take a page out of Mein Kampf and then insisting he never read it
• Slate’s podcast, the Amicus Brief and its episode on the Supreme Court’s powers
• Donald Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone”
• The normalcy of “extreme weather events”
• The demand of businesses to get back to the office
• Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, ch. 28, on labor treating its demands as self-evident, natural laws.
• What students really think about online learning
• Poor indoor air quality
• Jim Gaffigan’s Twitter feed
• V.I. Lenin’s concept of conjuncture
• Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant
• Giorgio Agamben on the pandemic and mitigation policies
• Our episode on the Political Philosophy of Mind with John Protevi
• Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between bare life and life in Homo Sacer
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of abandonment
• The world’s first trillionaire is coming within a decade

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