Nov 22, 2024

What even is religion, when you get down to it? Why do we treat religion the way that we do? And when our modern notions of religion came up against an empire whose very legitimacy was based on a religious myth, how did those tensions play out?

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Nov 8, 2024

This week: the origins of one of the most popular pseudo-medical traditions out there. Where does reiki, the notion that one can manipulate energy in the human body using their hands to heal people, come from? And why does studying the history of practices like this matter?

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Sep 20, 2024

This week, we're continuing last week's footnote on the postwar ultraright. How did the fall of the Soviet Union affect the anti-communist focus of the extreme right? How has its rhetoric been shaped by an odd relationship with the left? And how does modern extreme rightism manifest in the ideas of men like...

Sep 13, 2024

This week's footnote: the first of two parts on the postwar extreme right. This week, we're mostly focusing on the extreme right in the first few decades of the Cold War, and in particular on the story of Akao Bin and his Aikokuto. How did a convicted socialist end up as one of Japan's foremost...