Everyday Orientalism Podcast

Girish Daswani
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The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The podcast is hosted by anthropologist Dr. Girish Daswani and features a stellar line-up of academics and thinkers from across the globe. Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of Everyday Orientalism, a public platform through which students, academics, and citizens reflect on how history and power shape the ways in which human societies define themselves. The platform foregrounds the histories and political struggles that those in power often seek to erase.  ______________________________________ Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

Season 1

  1. Episode 1

    Orientalism and the Media

    In this episode we are joined by Samira Mohyeddin to discuss the many ways in which contemporary news outlets are complicit in the orientalizing of Palestine and Iran. She shares with us the harms of legacy media, the power of informed, ethical journalism, and some of the work she’s done as the founder of On the Line Media. Samira Mohyeddin is an award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She has a Master of Arts in Modern Middle Eastern History from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of Genocide Studies from the Zoryan Institute. For nearly a decade, she was a producer and host at Canada's national public broadcaster, CBC Radio and CBC Podcasts. She resigned from the CBC in November 2023 and is now the founder and managing editor of On The Line Media, focusing on critical and contextual journalism coupled with intimate conversations and informed commentary. She is also a founding member of the Canadian Journalists for Justice in Palestine. Additional Resources: Fisk, Robert. 2005. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Fourth Estate. Lukacs, Martin, Dania Majid, and Jason Toney. 2025. When Genocide Wasn’t News: How Canadian Media Covered Up the Destruction of Gaza. Montreal: Breach Books. Said, Edward. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books.   Follow Samira Mohyeddin on Instagram @smohyeddin On The Line Media Patreon On The Line Media Youtube Canadian Journalists for Justice in Palestine Study by The Breach: Lukacs, Martin, Katia Lo Innes, and Ben Cuthbert. 2023. “Palestinian deaths count for less in Canada’s newspapers. Data proves it.” The Breach. Quote from Robert Fisk: Mirgani, Suzi. 2010. “Robert Fisk on Western Journalism and the Middle East.” Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University Qatar. Unforked Podcast – “Gastronationalism” Canadian Museum of Human Rights – Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present. Exhibition opens on June 27, 2026, in Winnipeg. Samira’s coverage of the People’s Circle for Palestine Help fund Samira’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment documentary The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  2. Episode 2

    Migration as Anchorage: A Palestinian Family in London

    In this episode we are joined by Michelle Obeid to discuss her book, Migration as Anchorage: Ethnography of a Palestinian Family in London, and what it was like to write about a Palestinian family seeking anchorage while abroad in London—both before and after the escalation of the Palestinian genocide in October of 2023. She shares with us more about the Gazzawi family, the role of food in cultural studies, and what the ongoing process of recreating home looks like for Palestinians. In developing an anthropology of anchorage, Michelle focuses on “everyday practices that create a sense of holding fast in otherwise fluid times and place.” Michelle Obeid is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research explores postwar sociality, livelihoods, borders, kinship, migration, and food, with a focus on how people create home, community, and belonging amid uncertainty. She is the author of Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times (Brill 2019) and Migration as Anchorage: Ethnography of a Palestinian Family in London (Berghahn 2025). Michelle's book can be downloaded for free from Berghahn Press.  Excerpts from Girish's students used with permission.  Additional Resources: Hammad, Isabella. 2024. Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. New York: Penguin Random House. Said, Edward. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books.   Aly, Ramy. 2015. Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity. London: Pluto Press. Mahmoud Darwish quote from 1996 interview: Darwish, Mahmoud, Liana Badr, Zakariyya Muhammad, Mundher Jaber, Amira El-Zein, Carolyn Forche. 2019. “Our Present Does Not Decide Either to Begin or to End.” The Massachusetts Review 60.3: 425–438. Said, Edward. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books. El-Haddad, Laila, and Maggie Schmitt. 2021. The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey. New York: Just World Books. Laila El-Haddad on Unforked: “Gastronationalism” The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  3. Episode 3

    The Corporate University

    In this episode we are joined by Muhannad Ayyash, Heidi Matthews, and Nathan Kalman-Lamb to discuss the corporatization of North American universities and their crisis of legitimacy in the wake of the pro-Palestinian encampments that protested the ongoing genocide of October 7th, 2023. Warning us against false hope, they share with us the challenges and potentialities for academics working from within Canadian universities complicit in genocide and war in Palestine, Iran, and beyond. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel (Columbia University Press, 2025) and A Hermeneutics of Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Heidi Matthews is Assistant Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. She researches and teaches in the areas of international criminal law, the law of war, international legal history and political theory. Her work theorizes contemporary shifts in the practice and discourse of the global legal regulation of political violence, with particular attention to history and gender, as well as political, critical and aesthetic theory. Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, where he teaches on social theory and the sociology of sport. His work appears in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Toronto Star, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other venues. He is co-host of The End of Sport podcast and co-author of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024). Additional Resources: The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  4. Episode 4

    Archaeology, Apartheid, and War

    This week we are joined by Nelly Abboud and a member of the collective Archaeologists Against Apartheid, to discuss the ongoing destruction of cultural heritage in Lebanon and Palestine by Israeli forces. We dive into the colonialist and imperialist roots of archaeology as a discipline, the ways in which Zionists have mobilized archaeology to legitimize settler-colonialist agendas, the effectiveness of UNESCO World Heritage designations, and whether archaeology can become a tool of decolonial liberation.  Nelly P. Abboud is a Lebanese archaeologist and museum educator. She is founder of Museolab, an organization promoting cultural heritage preservation through experiential learning methods. Her research interests include museum education, collective memory, cultural heritage protection, illicit traffic, community engagement, and post-conflict heritage documentation in Lebanon.  Our second guest, “S”, is a member of the collective Archaeologists Against Apartheid, which is a decentralized and international organization of archaeologists and heritage professionals committed to exposing and combating the intersections of archaeology, apartheid, and genocide.  Additional Resources:  Alfred, Taiaiake. 2023. It’s All About the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. El-Haj, Nadia Abu. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  Albanese, Francesca. 2025. “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide – (A/HRC/59/23) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” See Nelly’s Everyday Orientalism post on UNESCO and the Lebanese sites added to the enhanced protections list. For more information on the Save Sebastia movement: https://www.instagram.com/savesebastia/ The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  5. Episode 5

    Capitalism, Fascism, and the University

    This week we are joined by Beverly Bain, Rinadlo Walcott, and Uahikea Maile who talk with us about the university as a key pillar of capitalism and the state. We discuss the lip service paid to decolonization efforts, the ways in which Black and indigenous scholars are co-opted and captured by university institutions, and what possibilities exist for envisioning knowledge sharing beyond the framework of the university.  Beverly Bain is a Black queer radical feminist scholar, anti-capitalist, activist, organizer abolitionist, and public intellectual. She has over forty years of experience in feminist anti-violence and anti-racism communities in Canada and globally. Bain frequently delivers national and international lectures on gender, anti-Blackness, sexuality, abolition, and liberation, and she is regularly interviewed on police violence, Black queer organizing, and defunding and abolishing police. Bain is published in numerous books, including Queerly Canadian 2nd edition (2022), We Still Demand: Redefining Resistance in Sex and Gender Struggles (2017), and journals, including Canadian Women’s Studies, Fireweed, and The Conversation. Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined. As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Walcott has published in a wide range of venues on everything from literature to film, to theatre to music to policy. His most recent books include The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom (2021) and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (2021). Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, strategist, and practitioner from Maunawili on the island of O‘ahu. He is assistant professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Maile’s forthcoming book with Duke University Press is entitled Gifts of Sovereignty: Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Politics in Hawaiʻi. They are the vice president of Red Media, research fellow with the Yellowhead Institute, and a member of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective and Hui Aloha ʻĀina o Honolulu. The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  6. Episode 6

    Water and Oil: On Environmental Orientalisms

    This week we welcome Joanne Leow and Yasmine Hafez to discuss the ways in which water in Egypt and oil in Singapore function as expressions of extractive capitalism. We talk about what hides between the fictive narratives of Singapore’s gardens, the ways in which ecocide and environmental destruction elsewhere enable tourism and growth at home, and how state battles over the control of the Nile negatively impact the lives of local peoples.  Joanne Leow grew up in Singapore and lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Her most recent publication is the hybrid memoir Exhumations: In the Body of a Petrostate, from Alchemy Press, 2026. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project, Intertidal Polyphonies: Sound, Text, Art, archiving the contemporary shorelines of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vancouver, in collaboration with artists, activists, and writers from each city. Yasmine Hafez has recently completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London, and is a Fellow at the Water Diplomacy Center at Jordan University of Science and Technology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across the Nile Basin and extensive archival research, her work examines power dynamics in water management and traces the long-term political, social, and ecological processes shaping water governance and environmental justice. She has worked closely with civil society actors and contributed to several publications on water politics and ecological struggles. Additional Resources:  Yasmine’s article, “Why You Are Not Doing Fieldwork at Home” The book connected to this project, which brings together fieldwork experiences from different researchers—currently available for pre-order and will be out soon. Amitav Ghosh on petrofictions Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing. 2016. “Paramilitary Gardening: Landscape and Authoritarianism” Kalyanee Mam’s short film, “Lost World” The “Songs on the Nile” playlist, collected by Yasmine and colleagues, and The paper connected to the “Songs on the Nile” playlist The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  7. Episode 7

    The Whiteness of Academia

    This week we are joined by Juliana Bastos Marques, Kobby Graham, and Hanan Sabea to talk about academic hegemony and the prevailing whiteness of academia. We talk about language, accent, and the dominating influence of English, subverting notions of cores and peripheries by centering the periphery, and how we might break free of the whiteness of the university by destabilizing Western institutions as dominant knowledge producers.  Hanan Sabea is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Editor-in-Chief of Cairo Papers in Social Science at the American University in Cairo. Her research examines the temporalities of land and labor on plantations in Africa, state-subject relations, and the production of histories thereof, as well as knowledge production in the social sciences with a particular focus on alternative modalities of producing knowledge beyond the confines of the University. She is the co-editor of numerous volumes, including most recently: Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation, and the Making of Archives (2018) and Academic Dependency and Professionalization in the South: Perspectives from the Periphery (2015). Juliana Bastos Marques is professor of Ancient History at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State. She works with Ancient Historiography, Theory and Reception. She wrote a chapter for Katherine Blouin and Ben Akrigg's Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory on the history of the Classical tradition in Brazil, and is currently working on a chapter on technology and the future of classics with Charlotte Tupman for a book edited by Neville Morley and Sailakshmi Ramgopal.  Kobby Ankomah Graham is an Accra-based writer, cultural researcher, DJ, and doctoral candidate. His work focuses on African musical subcultures, and he has been profiled by the BBC & Global Voices, and his byline has been featured in places like Aperture, Kinfolk, The Guardian, and The Africa Report. His ongoing doctoral research at the University of Ghana explores how artists in Accra’s alternative music scenes practice care and community. Additional Resources Alatas, Syed Farid. 2022. “The Captive Mind and Knowledge Creation in the Thought of Syed Hussein Alatas.” Philippine Sociological Review 70: 1–10. See bibliography for the works of Syed Hussein Alatas. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Pietsch, Tamson. 2013. Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Said, Edward. 1996. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books.  Clip of Ousmane Sembène: “I myself I am the sun!” The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

  8. Episode 8

    "F*ck AI": On Digital Orientalisms

    Sarah Fathallah and Christine Johnston join us this week to dig into the orientalist roots of corporate AI empires. We talk about the ways in which AI corporations ground their goals in frameworks of white supremacy and western imperialist values, how universities are throwing themselves on the AI bandwagon, and how the AI systems that have wormed their way into our everyday lives are built on the dispossession of Palestinian land and lives. Sarah Fathallah (they/any) is an abolitionist community organizer and an MSt candidate in AI Ethics and Society at the University of Cambridge, where they research the carceral impacts of surveillance tech. Sarah is also a member of Survived & Punished California, anti-surveillance coalitions against technologies like Flock and ShotSpotter, and participatory defense committees in support of activists, undocumented migrants, and criminalized survivors. Christine Johnston is an Associate Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Her archaeological research focuses on environmental and economic histories of the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and West Asia in antiquity. She also spends much of her time focused on cultural heritage, public history and pedagogy, and the digital humanities.   Additional Resources:   Organizations and Resources Algorithm Watch Data Workers Inquiry Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) NAACP – Stop Dirty Data Centers Surveillance Watch The Human Error Project Indigenous AI   Recommended Readings Aboeid, S. 2025. “Digitized Captivity: AI Surveillance and the Global Fabric of Policing.” Scalawag Magazine. October 21, 2025. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2025/10/digitized-captivity-ai-surveillance-and-the-global-fabric-of-policing/. Adams, R. 2025. The new empire of AI: The future of global inequality. Polity Press. Al-Khatib, I., A. Bishara, S. Fathallah, M. Sepahpour, and R. Natsheh. 2026. Digital Domination: AI, Surveillance, and Digital Power in Palestine and Beyond. 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. https://7amleh.org/storage/posts/pdf/af9d8f67-334d-465e-bd9d-c5bd1800bbf4.pdf. Amnesty International. 2023. Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/6701/2023/en/. Bender, E., M., T. Gebru, A. McMillan-Major, and S. Shmitchell. 2021. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 610–623). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 Bender, E. M., and A. Hanna. 2025. The AI con: How to fight big tech’s hype and create the future that we want. Harper Collins Publishers. Benjamin, R. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. Crawford, K. 2021. Atlas of AI. Yale University Press. D’Ignazio, C, and L. Klein. 2020. Data feminism. MIT Press. Eubanks, V. 2018. Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.  St. Martin’s Press. Fathallah, S. 2025. “Artificial Intelligence and the Orchestration of Palestinian Life and Death.” Tech Policy. August 12, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/artificial-intelligence-and-the-orchestration-of-palestinian-life-and-death/. Fathallah, S. 2026. “Algorithmic Death-World: Artificial Intelligence and the Case of Palestine.” Public Humanities 2: e7. https://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2025.10113 Fathallah, S., and N. Mitchell. 2026. “Occupied Assets: Israeli Neoliberalism and the Datafication of Palestinian Life.” Disjunctions Jan 2026 (1). https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/occupied-assets/.  Hao, Karen. 2025. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. New York: Penguin Books. Lewis, J.E. et al. (ed.), Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: The Initiative for Indigenous Futures and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) DOI: 10.11573/spectrum.library.concordia.ca.00986506. Loewenstein, Antony. 2023. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. New York: Verso Books.   Noble, S. U. 2018. Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. O’Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown. Sadowski, J. 2025. The mechanic and the luddite: A ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism. University of California Press. Tawil-Souri, H. 2026. “Bitification and the Gaza Genocide.” Communication, Culture and Critique 19 (1): 13–18. Wind, M. 2024. Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. New York: Verso Books.   The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism. Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

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The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” The podcast is hosted by anthropologist Dr. Girish Daswani and features a stellar line-up of academics and thinkers from across the globe. Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of Everyday Orientalism, a public platform through which students, academics, and citizens reflect on how history and power shape the ways in which human societies define themselves. The platform foregrounds the histories and political struggles that those in power often seek to erase.  ______________________________________ Host: Girish Daswani Editor and producer: Taylor Stark Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

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