https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-22f5u-1b33830

Matt and Michael dive into Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, following Janie Crawford through three very different marriages, from an arranged match built on safety over love, to a mayor’s wife silenced into a gilded cage, to a late-in-life partnership that finally gives her something like equality. Along the way they get into Hurston’s own roots in early American anthropology under Franz Boas, gossip as a form of community accountability and social surveillance, the economics behind arranged marriage across cultures and time periods, and why the novel’s real subject is internal liberation rather than external rescue.

Topics covered:

• Zora Neale Hurston’s life and place in both the Harlem Renaissance and the founding generation of American anthropology
• Janie’s three marriages and what each one costs or grants her
• The “mule of the world” speech and generational trauma around safety versus freedom
• Gossip as social surveillance and community accountability, and how it curdles into tabloid voyeurism at scale
• Arranged marriage, economics, and love as a historical privilege
• Toxic masculinity, male isolation, and Bell hooks’ The Will to Change
• Why the book’s real theme is liberation from within

New to the show: check out our Patreon for Resistance Reels (a subscriber-only series on power and resistance in film) and our upcoming nonfiction book club.

Next episode: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-5a6x3-1b263d0

Welcome to Resistance Reels, the new companion show to Resistance Reads where hosts Michael Kilman and Matt Wellstrom turn their lens on film and television. This free teaser episode kicks off the show with a deep dive into Andor Season 1, focusing on the Narkina 5 prison arc, one of the most politically dense stretches of television Star Wars has ever produced.

Michael and Matt break down how the Empire maintains control through spectacle, psychological manipulation, and manufactured competition, drawing on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Erving Goffman’s concept of the total institution, and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. They trace the mechanics of authoritarian control from the electrified prison floors of Narkina 5 to Luthen Rael’s devastating “what do I sacrifice” monologue, and close with Nemik’s manifesto on the nature of freedom and resistance.

If you’ve ever wanted a genuinely rigorous political and philosophical read on Andor, one that treats it as seriously as the show treats itself, this is it.

⚠️ Contains heavy spoilers for Andor Season 1.

This episode is free to everyone. Future episodes of Resistance Reels, including our next one on Andor Season 2 and the Ghorman Massacre, along with our subscriber-only nonfiction book club on science, philosophy, and social theory, are available to Patreon members.

Join us: https://www.patreon.com/ResistanceReadsPodcast

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-pny8w-1b190c3

TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea follows Linus Baker, a lonely caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, sent to investigate a remote island orphanage housing six extraordinary children, one of whom is the literal Antichrist.

In this episode of Resistance Reads, Michael Kilman and Matt Wellstrom step away from heavier material for a warmer, more whimsical read that still has real teeth. They dig into institutional bureaucracy and rules versus compassion, the history of forced removal and boarding schools for Indigenous children, why nonprofit and social work burnout happens and why it isn’t malicious, the ethics of travel and cultural respect, and why children might be the most powerful resistors among us.

They also announce their new Patreon, launching this week, and Resistance Reels, a new segment dissecting film and television starting with Andor.

New episodes every three weeks. Next episode is Their Eyes Were Watching God on August 10th 2026

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-98j2w-1b01dfb

Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light is one of the strangest and most ambitious science fiction novels ever written, a 1967 Hugo Award winner about a crew of colonists who have seized the identities of Hindu gods to maintain technological control over future generations, and the one man who takes on the role of the Buddha to fight back.

In this episode of Resistance Reads, Michael Kilman and Matt Wellstrom dig into why this book reads like a portrait of Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley existed, what accelerationism actually means when the people hoarding technology are literal gods, and why the idea of liberty cannot be killed no matter how much power you throw at it. Along the way they cover the New Wave science fiction movement, Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and why it doesn’t actually work, the curse of the Buddha, what it means to separate a leader’s ideas from their character, and why a sixty year old novel still hits this hard.

If you’ve ever wanted anthropology and science fiction in the same place, you’re in the right spot. Next Episode, House on the Cerulean Sea.