Episode summary: Why We Need Small Talk from The Art of Small Talk

Seriously? I listened to this because it popped up in the middle of a walk and wasn’t too long and so I didn’t bother cleaning up, but oh my. That’s one audiobook I will not be listening to in full.

I’m at a bit of a loss what to make of Jonathan Lethem’s latest. It’s definitely very clever. Maybe it does also capture growing up in Brooklyn during the earliest days of regeneration and eventual escape. Or not. I certainly enjoyed it one little chapter at a time. Overall, though, it just did not add up to anything notable, for me.

Perhaps you had to be there.

Episode summary: Episodio 42: Capitalismo carnivoro con Francesca Grazioli (Stagione 3)

Very disappointed that after mustering all the usual anti-industrial-meat arguments both the guest and the hosts had nothing useful to say about cultivated meat except, more or less, bring it on. No thoughtfuln...

Just finished this, a moment ago, on a blisteringly hot day, the kind of day that forces you into a darkened room, windows shut, blinds down, ceiling fan on. Any breeze from outside would only heat things up, and any attempt to sleep is fraught with a hot, icky pillow. It seemed appropriate, though doubtless I would have said the same had I finished it during an icy blizzard or drizzling greyness. Anything but temperate normalcy.

Episode summary: Native Americans once owned these lands, and they still treat the Columbia Basin as their sacred home. We’ve all benefited from that taken land, but now corporations are the West’s new settlers. Meanwhile, Cody faces a federal judge and his tight-knit rural community. His sons start...

Episode summary: SoS 64 The problematic history of lactase persistence research with Dr. Alice Yao — Sausage of Science — Overcast

Followed up the comment by Miranda Brown on ETP to this podcast (which I had to Huffduff, because) and very glad I did. I was (old white guy warning) completely unawar...

It isn’t a good idea to complain that someone else hasn’t treated some topic in the way you would have treated it. Nevertheless, I want to put down a marker. I listened to two podcasts this week each of which, in my opinion, left a big question unasked.

If I were a character in this terrific novel, I would remember exactly who had recommended it to me, under what circumstances, and everything else about them. Alas, I am not, nor do I really wish I were, but as a story it has that kind of appeal, of making me think, what would I have done. The plot covers a dozen or so years, from Bulgaria in the early 1930s to America in 1946, and it concerns a group of NKVD recruits whose allegiance to one another is stronger than their allegiance to the NKVD. Or is it?

Episode summary: If moral philosophy is a train to crazy town, at what stop should we disembark?

I don’t think I heard an answer to this provocative question, but I did hear some things that I could not grasp. All this talk of “what if we’re living in a simulation” smacks to me of late nights in t...

Episode summary: Sunday, June 26, 2022; May I suggest listening to yesterday's podcast. It's full of timely stories, and reason to hope that now we will do what we've been putting off since the end of the Civil War. In the podcast I reference Bruce Sterling's talk in Copenhagen in 2009 and Elie Myst...