Literary Kicks

Literary Kicks

Literary Kicks

Literary Kicks

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A band of circus musicians in a production of "Pagliacci"

Podcast: A Passage Into Singing

Marc Eliot Stein October 8, 2026 2 Comments

Being onstage is an exercise in mindfulness. Your own mindfulness is what you need to bring, and you need to bring it to every rehearsal and show, and this can be exhausting. I believe it’s an existential fact of life that we each have a limited amount of mindfulness to give to the world, or to give to the people around us. I’m using the word “mindfulness” here to mean something like what the novelist Iris Murdoch means by the word “attention”.

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What We’re Up To

Litkicks is 32 years old! It’s been a journey. Lately we’re busy doing a couple of excellent podcasts.

   

 

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Militarism and the Art of Slander

September 3, 2026 2 Comments

I seem to express myself best lately in angry podcasts for World BEYOND War, the very worthy global nonprofit where I’ve worked since 2018. Why can’t I ever just sit down and pound out a lengthy blog post in 10 minutes, like I used to do so easily whenever a literary thought flitted through my brain? I don’t know if it’s me or the world around me that has changed more, but I hope my longtime Litkicks readers who’ve stuck with me so faithfully don’t mind if I post a full transcript of a World BEYOND War podcast episode yet again.

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Haze drifts over the grassy curves of the Long Meadow at Prospect Park.

Battlefield Ghosts in Prospect Park

June 7, 2026 3 Comments

I guess every city park is a precursor to Disneyland, including Hyde Park in London, Bois de Boulogne in Paris, Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo, Parque Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo. What makes Prospect Park different is that it was built on top of a major battlefield.

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A simulated science textbook illustration juxtaposing the layers of an AI large language model transformer and a strand of DNA indicating that they are both containers of digital information.

Models of Meaning For An Exploding World

December 29, 2025 4 Comments

Understanding LLMs is a project for philosophy, psychology and arts. The discovery of neural networks and predictive transformers is rapidly changing the landscape in every field of science and humanities and philosophical inquiry: epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, religious studies, sociology, political science.

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Screenshot from Twin Peaks - skinny man standing on stage facing a crowd saying "It is happening again."

Speechless About Gaza

May 4, 2025 No Comments

Genocide is happening again in more than one region of planet earth today. We talk about this on the latest World BEYOND War podcast episode …

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Vintage personal computer showing World Beyond War podcast on screen.

A Relational Model for World Peace

January 1, 2025 1 Comment

How is the peace movement changing? How is our vision of the future changing? Online communities offer a distinctive, robust and appealing model for human coexistence that people intuitively and immediately understand.

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Three I Ching hexagrams illustrated via AI image generator for hexagrams 28 (Great Efforts), 29 (Pitfalls: Peril) and 30 (Emotional Cling)

A Taste For Change

December 14, 2024 1 Comment

I threw the I Ching for America the other day. This is a good spiritual practice when you come to a moment in your life when things are changing fast and you want to get a grip on what’s happening.

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Ed Sanders is a guest on the World Beyond War podcast hosted by Marc Eliot Stein on October 21, 2024

A Levitation With Ed Sanders (on the World Beyond War Podcast)

October 28, 2024 4 Comments

“Out demons out!” I don’t know why it’s feels so cathartic to me every time I listen to the recording on the 1968 Fugs album “Tenderness Junction” of a historic event a year before, the exorcism and attempted levitation of the Pentagon in USA’s capital city by a determined group of antiwar protestors …

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