26 April 2018
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Apr 25, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
Sophia
- Is masculinity treated as a pathology?
- Why girls are outperforming boys in class
- Disentangling gender and sex, culture and biology
- “Girl power” was a success, but at what social cost?
- Crispin’s years as a teen revolutionary
- The modern school as a totalitarian institution
- What really explains high-security schools?
- How safe can we reasonably expect to be in society?
- Is the media distorting our narratives of crime and danger?
Apr 23, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Kelly Baker
- The Ku Klux Klan’s appeal to Protestant America
- How the KKK rationalized a Jewish Jesus
- The Birth of a Nation and the symbology of the burning cross
- How to “love thy neighbor” as a Klansman (answer: very selectively)
- Kelly: The Klan declined, but its politics went mainstream
- Kelly’s search for apocalyptic rhetoric in Klan literature
Apr 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet Show: Are emotions in the brain?
- Luiz Pessoa’s argument for the feedback between lower and higher brain function
- How the regions of the brain evolved to interact
- “The content problem” in the neuroscience of emotion and cognition
- Are the common fears of snakes and spiders “hard-wired,” and how?
- What brain mapping fails to tell us about cognition
- Rami’s research on prosopagnosia (face blindness) and emotional cognition
Mar 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
The Wright Show
- Massimo’s new edited volume, Science Unlimited?: The Challenges of Scientism
- What is scientism?
- Science and the challenge of studying subjective experience
- And about those pesky fundamental questions of existence…
- How philosophical thought underpins all research methodology
- Massimo: Core concepts across science have competing interpretations
- The importance of distinguishing “is” from “ought
- What neuroscience can never explain about human consciousness
Mar 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & David Lesondak
- What is fascia and why does it matter?
- When fascia malfunctions
- What David does as a “body worker”
- How body posture could influence mental health
- Unanswered questions in fascia research
- Can mindfulness meditation reduce the perception of pain?
- The concept of “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity, in the human body
Mar 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
The Wright Show
- Bob and Josh recount their first meeting after a silent meditation retreat
- Does yoga always have a spiritual component?
- How Josh’s yoga practice prepares the body for meditation
- How yoga’s focus on breath can lead to the body
- Solutions to modern distraction
- Bob: Mindfulness practice can erode essentialist thinking
- What’s the point of Bob’s Mindful Resistance Project?
- The present and future of the Mindful Resistance Newsletter
Mar 8, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Pater Edmund Waldstein
- Why the Mortara case is still provoking argument 150 years later
- Pater Edmund offers a defense of Pope Pius IX
- Integralism and different conceptions of liberty
- What would an integralist Catholic state look like?
- How Pater Edmund became a monk (with a blog)
- The day-to-day life of a modern meditating monk
Mar 7, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet show: Why are human emotions unique?
- Does self-restraint make us human?
- Considering emotions as social constructs
- Stephen: If you have emotions, you have consciousness
- Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily defer to it its creator
- How insects are like robots
- Does culture change how the brain reads emotion in faces?
Mar 2, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Richard Prum
The Wright Show
- Darwin’s approach to explaining the peacock’s cumbersome plumage
- Could beauty have evolved, in part, for beauty’s sake?
- The sense in which traits favored via mate selection may not be ‘adaptive’
- Mate preference and aesthetics
- What can we learn from ducks’ miserable sex lives?
- How paternal investment in offspring became part of human life
- When sex isn’t for reproduction
- Richard’s misgivings about evolutionary psychology
Mar 1, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
Sophia
- Crispin’s “Why They Suck” essay series
- Why in particular does Michelangelo suck?
- The contrasts in humanism represented in Italian and Northern Renaissance art
- The “ennobling quality” of human emotion in early Renaissance art
- Why Dan is a humanist and Crispin is not
- Identifying the internal incoherence of Michelangelo’s work
- Dan: Judaism’s approach to moral agency begins in the Garden of Eden
- Crispin questions emphasizing human endeavors over all others
Feb 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Galen Strawson
The Wright Show
- Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think
- Galen explains panpsychism
- What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean?
- Is human consciousness epiphenomenal?
- Do physical laws come from somewhere?
- Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?)
- Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago
Feb 22, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Daniel Tippens
Sophia
- What does Dan K. mean by Philistinism?
- How philistines reduce the irreducible in all walks of life
- Philistinism’s creeping control in philosophy and the academy
- When we invest in arts and letters, what do we get in return?
- What good are refined senses, anyway?
- Dan T. explains how refinement can prevent us from being duped
Feb 21, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Catherine Nichols
- Why is pop culture obsessed with good guy vs. bad guy stories?
- Catherine: Modern stories don’t let the villain be fully human
- World War II and the trope of the ragtag band of misfits
- Shakespeare vs. comic book movies
- Storytelling about why we go to war
- What pop culture best represents moral complexity?
Feb 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Ann Hulbert
The Wright Show
- Ann’s new book on child prodigies, Off the Charts
- Will a child prodigy become an adult non-prodigy?
- The cautionary tale of Bobby Fischer
- The prodigy’s “adolescent crisis”
- How people misunderstood Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom”
- The insanity of the college admissions gauntlet
- Child prodigies inspire sympathy. Their parents? Not so much.
Feb 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Jeff Warren
The Wright Show
- How Jeff went from science journalist to meditation teacher
- Jeff’s new book, co-authored with Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
- How ADD and bipolar tendencies shaped Jeff’s practice
- The life-changing experience of falling out of a tree while on mushrooms
- The interaction between mindfulness, not-self, and suffering
- Jeff takes a stab at defining enlightenment
- The varieties of consciousness
- How meditation can shift your priorities
Feb 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- This week’s puppet show: How do emotions help us survive?
- Darwin’s attempts to understand the inner lives of animals
- Can we really hide our feelings? Rami doubts it
- The “seeking” drive that keeps us going
- Angst: Fear without an object
- How culture complicates finding a mate
- Is there an adaptive function to recognizing beauty?
Feb 5, 2018 —
William Black & Benjamin Park
- The Mormon Church’s new president, 93 year-old Russell M. Nelson
- The decades-long campaign to incorporate the Church into the American mainstream
- Does the Church clash with academic historical study?
- Untangling the fates of remarried Mormons’ souls
- The LDS Church as a contained society within the US
- Why did the first Mormon women choose polygamy?
Jan 29, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Michael Shermer
The Meaning of Future Life
- The time Michael thought he was being abducted by aliens
- Michael’s new book, Heavens on Earth
- Deepak Chopra’s afterlife
- Why uploading your brain to achieve immortality makes no sense
- Is radical life extension just bunk?
- The Second Coming, presented by Ray Kurzweil
- What consolation can the atheist offer to the dying?
- The spookiest thing that’s ever happened to Michael
Jan 22, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Stephen Batchelor
The Wright Show
- Striking parallels between Buddhism’s Mara and Christianity’s Satan
- How Stephen’s opera Mara came to fruition
- Bob and Stephen argue about the true meaning(s) of “enlightenment”
- How much authority should a secular Buddhist ascribe to the Buddha?
- The perils of clinging to the dharma
- Stephen’s unusual place in the Buddhist world
Jan 19, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Liz Wolfe
- Why the Aziz Ansari story blew up
- Are women like “Grace” damned if they do, damned if they don’t?
- Libertarianism and consent
- Katie Roiphe vs. the creator of the Shitty Media Men list
- Is giving the benefit of the doubt possible in the age of the Twitter mob?
- Having good politics vs. being a good person
Jan 17, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Tanya Luhrmann
- How psychosis and prayer can make invisible entities ‘real’
- Why the voices heard by American schizophrenics are especially mean
- Turning madness into vocation: the shamans of West Africa
- Why talking to one’s hallucinations is a good idea
- How evangelicals shape their God
- ‘Remembering’ past lives in Scientology and ‘satanic ritual abuse’ in therapy
Jan 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & Thomas Joiner
- Thomas describes a modern narcissism epidemic
- Does a lack of self-esteem fuel narcissism?
- Why is a focus on the “self” ubiquitous in mindfulness?
- Challenging the health claims of mindfulness meditation
- Why “self-compassion meditation” makes both Josh and Thomas uncomfortable
- The common ground between mindfulness and stoicism
Jan 10, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Stephen and Rami present: “The Evolution of Emotion” puppet show
- How ancient societies managed their earthly impulses
- The human anger displayed in Greek mythology
- Marcus Aurelius’s concept of the “wise man”
- Hafez, the drunk Sufi poet
- How does culture influence our core emotions?
- Are animals capable of feeling anger?
- Stephen on how horror plays on our most primal fears
Jan 8, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Jonathan Young
- Who was Joseph Campbell?
- Applying the idea of the monomyth to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Can we disentangle myths from culture?
- Cinderella and mental health
- How Jonathan uses mythology in psychotherapy
- Is it healthy to think of yourself as a hero on a quest?
- Religion and the experience of meaning vs. the idea of meaning
Jan 1, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Timothy O'Connor
The Wright Show
Dec 29, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Dan Harris
The Wright Show
- Dan’s new book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
- The liberation of realizing you’re crazy (and so is everyone else)
- Why Dan gave names to his inner voices
- Dan’s 10% Happier meditation app
- Dan: One minute of mindfulness meditation a day can be enough
- Applying the Buddhist metaphor of the “second arrow” to everyday life
- Meditating without losing your edge
Dec 26, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Paul Bloom
The Wright Show
- Is “dehumanization” really the root of cruelty?
- How love deludes us
- Paul: Empathy makes us morally stupid
- The weird psychology of the Trump era
- What people get wrong about Harvey Weinstein and dehumanization
- When is objectification morally acceptable?
- Keeping our worst selves in check
- Getting pleasure out of your own pain
Dec 24, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Kieran Setiya
The Wright Show
- Midlife and coming to terms with who we aren’t
- Is the midlife crisis different for men and women?
- Kieran: Disappointment is a given for the mid-career academic
- There’s more to life than minimizing suffering
- Schopenhauer (and the Buddha): Dissatisfaction is inherent in desire
- Bob suggests a familiar culprit: selfhood
Dec 19, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Cullen Murphy
The Wright Show
- Cullen’s new book about the heyday of the funny pages, Cartoon County
- What it was like to grow up as the child of a cartoonist
- Artists who were politically liberal and culturally conservative
- An idyllic white world created for a quasi-idyllic time
- No belly-buttons, no male nipples
- How Cullen took over writing Prince Valiant—and how that shaped his subsequent writing
Dec 16, 2017 —
Robert Wright & John Horgan
The Wright Show
- The pervasiveness of sexual harassment
- Human nature according to Socrates, the Google memo guy, and Bob
- Are gendered behavioral differences innate or learned?
- John: Scientists keep trying, and failing, to discern the roots of human behavior
- Can you be both enlightened—in the Buddhist sense—and immoral
- Sexual harassment in science and philosophy
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