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...

There’s more ➢

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...

There’s more ➢

Robert MacFarlane’s previous book, The Old Ways, I read in partial preparation for a long walk on one of the old ways, which has yet to materialise. Underland, on the other hand, informs me of journeys I will never make. Extreme cold, cramped passageways, far-off places — all of which become, in...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: The United States had a pandemic plan. But when a pandemic came, we hesitated to follow it. The country was hobbled by argument and doubt. Much of that doubt came from experts who proposed that Covid might not be as lethal as scientists feared. Michael Lewis returns to the subject o...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Old MacDonald had a farm—and on that farm he had rich terrain for an episode of Getting Curious. Join Professor Gabe Rosenberg and Jonathan as they explore what agricultural history has to do with our modern understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. They cover the concept of “an...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices tend to prioritize the lighter end of that range.

So interesting to listen to this immedately after seeing The Harder They Fall on Netflix last...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Part 1 of our series on the climate emergency. How did we drive ourselves into the ecological ditch? And, crucially, who is this ‘we’? Our story starts with … Genesis. By host and producer John Biewen, with co-host Amy Westervelt. Interviews with David Pecusa, Bina Nir, and Kate Rig...

There’s more ➢

Looking back, I cannot remember which particular recommendation engine thought I might like to read this. I asked a couple, telling them how much I had enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. After I had ploughed through a couple of things for work and John Le Carré’s Sing...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: As the Trump years finally come to an end, your host contemplates collective guilt and shame.

Extremely well done, and very salutary. I don’t know that I would have had the balls to play a sound bed under archive audio of Thomas Mann addressing the Library of Congress, but that’s...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Roman Mars joins Jesse Thorne on Bullseye this week to talk about life before podcasting, and what decades in radio has taught him. Roman has worked in podcasts and radio for decades at this point, but his career didn’t start out in audio. He was originally getting a PhD in genetics...

There’s more ➢