21 July 2019
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Jul 17, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Milton Lawson
- Why Dan and Milton love Stranger Things
- How does the new season measure up?
- Is “the Upside Down” a coherent idea?
- Is Generation X about to have its moment in pop culture?
- Dan fears wokeness is ruining pop culture
- The risks of a fourth Stranger Things season
- Pop culture in an era of massive corporate control
- Speculating on HBO’s mysterious Watchmen adaptation
Jul 16, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Jamie Lauren Keiles
- Jamie’s NYT Magazine piece, “How ASMR Became a Sensation”
- Searching for the science behind ASMR
- Why are ASMR creators disproprotionately female?
- The strange life of Gibi, one of the top “ASMRtists”
- A temporary salve for Internet-era loneliness
- Will ASMR go corporate?
- Jamie researches the history of the Jewish American Princess
- Daddy’s money, girl power, and Juicy Couture
- Are there Jewish American Princes?
Jul 15, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Common misconceptions about meditation retreats
- Hitting the bliss button
- Scheduled vs. unscheduled retreats
- How austere does it have to be to be effective?
- Process vs. outcomes
- Bob’s mini-epiphany about his dripping sink
- Is meditation “for” something?
- Pitfalls after leaving a retreat
- Tips for first-timers
Jul 11, 2019 —
John Horgan & Bernardo Kastrup
- Why Bernardo thinks the mind-body problem is not as hard as it seems
- Bernardo’s spiritual, intellectual, and psychedelic history
- God, metacognition, and the Universe
- The consolations of Bernardo’s philosophy
- Bernardo: The Universe has multiple personality disorder
- The narcissism of a human-centered Universe
- Why John thinks we’ll never solve the mind-body problem
Jul 10, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Serene Jones
- Serene’s new book, Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World
- Serene’s theological upbringing and early encounters with Calvin’s writings
- What a romantic tragedy early in life taught Serene about God’s grace
- A revelatory brush with death in rural India
- Timothy McVeigh and the challenge of forgiveness
- How Serene’s father met an epic challenge to his faith and his charity
Jul 8, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Jane Jones
- Where have all the feminists gone?
- The feminist tradition in philosophy
- How does second-wave feminism distinguish sex from gender?
- Jane: Patriarchy hurts men, too
- On the present controversy around gender non-conformity and identity
- Was Prince genderqueer?
- Gender, feminism, and the classical liberal tradition
Jul 3, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Lee McIntyre
- Lee’s new book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience
- Why scientific theories are never “proved”
- Karl Popper’s principle of falsification explained
- Why the philosophy of science hasn’t been useful to scientists
- Why philosophers of science need a new way to talk about evidence
- Can philosophy of science help refute science deniers?
- Flat Earthers, science denial, and the scientific attitude
- Cognitive bias, ideology, and the social sciences
- Lee: There is no consensus about the epistemological status of science
- The hubris of “naive realism”
Jun 29, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Nathan Eckstrand
- Nathan’s recent essay, “Is it Time for the Humanities to Strike?”
- The attack on the humanities goes international
- Are non-college graduates deficient voters?
- Why the educated elite aren’t the most ethical people
- Could a strike re-engage the public with the humanities?
- How to win over those who most thoroughly reject the humanities
Jun 22, 2019 —
John Horgan & Jeffrey Kripal
- Jeff’s new book, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge
- How John and Jeff make sense of Freud
- Jeff redefines the “paranormal”
- What belief in levitation or clairvoyance reveals about human nature
- Are hardcore atheists/materialists doing religious fundamentalism a favor?
- The death and rebirth of good old human narcissism
- Jeff on humanity’s future and the nature of optimism
Jun 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Gideon Rosen
- A brief primer on the free will vs. determinism debate
- Are moral responsibility and determinism compatible?
- Is punishment a tragic necessity or a moral good?
- Gideon tries to convince Bob that compatibilism is coherent
- Gideon’s distinctive take on compatibilism
- A thought experiment about the moral culpability of an ancient slaveholder
- Free will and the mind-body problem
- Buddhist ideas about punishment
Jun 19, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Rachel Vorona-Cote
- Rachel’s essay on her mother’s death, “The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning”
- Aryeh recalls mourning his father in the pre–social media era
- A moment when language fails
- Is it possible to talk about death with sincerity on Twitter?
- The many (often gendered) Victorian rituals of mourning
- Rachel’s forthcoming book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
- Do you want to be memorialized for eternity on Facebook?
Jun 18, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Robert Gressis
- Is the “Morality Everywhere Problem” really a problem?
- Why Robert finds the moral question difficult to dispel
- Peter Singer’s “drowning child” thought experiment
- Is weakness of will keeping Robert from volunteering at the soup kitchen?
- Dan: “Embrace the normal”
- What do those living in dire poverty want first-worlders to do?
- Why Rob is repulsed by utilitarianism
- Dan: The end goal of charity is human flourishing
- Were people less sensitive in the past?
Jun 11, 2019 —
Josh Summers & Matthew Remski
- Matthew’s new book, Practice and All Is Coming
- Justifications for sexual abuse in the early Ashtanga yoga community
- Matthew: “Sacred” leaders like Pattabhi Jois have been absolved of personal responsibility
- Just how ancient are modern yoga practices?
- Matthew responds to accusations from the Ashtanga community
- How much agency do victims of sexual abuse really have?
- Reforming yoga communities with histories of abuse
Jun 1, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Sarah Marshall
- Remembering the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s
- How the McMartin case launched the panic
- Sarah: Recovered memory therapy created the idea of Satanic ritual abuse
- Why hasn’t there been a large-scale reckoning with the panic?
- Contemporary resonances: witch hunts and moral panics
- Sarah visits Disney World and thinks about desire
- Why are there so many absent mothers in the Disney canon?
May 30, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Robert Gressis
- Robert: Is it permissible to remain a philosophy professor?
- Why Dan opposes the “morality everywhere” approach to life
- Can professors really leave a lasting impact on students?
- “First world problems” and moral obligation in the classroom
- What is the “White Paper” of philosophy, and does it have any authority?
- Rethinking the role of the academy in society
- Dan: Philosophy as a life guide is, well, misguided
May 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & David Sloan Wilson
- David’s new book, This View of Life
- In what sense, if any, could evolution be conscious?
- The need to complete the Darwinian revolution
- An evolutionary psychology discussion makes Bob tape his mouth shut
- How successful groups avert the tragedy of the commons
- Convergent cultural evolution
- David: Evolution shows that neither laissez faire nor centralized planning works
- A preview of the coming Bob vs. David showdown over group selection
May 14, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Leah Finnegan
- How Leah realized that she should not “be herself”
- The mental health benefits of getting a dog
- Leah: We must bring back Kierkegaardian irony
- Leah on the scourge of “urgent earnestness”
- Is it ethical to not read the news?
- Leah’s reflections on being “a year Twitter sober”
- Lessons from the great “horseface” controversy of 2018
Apr 26, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Paul Bloom
- How the new media landscape exacerbates tribalism
- Can science and reason help combat tribalism?
- Why tribal behavior comes naturally to humans
- Want to succeed on social media? Try ridicule and moral condemnation!
- Why virtual reality may not help you understand the plight of others
- Trump’s masterful exploitation of empathy
- If a magic therapy “cured” Harvey Weinstein, would punishment still be necessary?
- Why social science is, and will stay, liberal
Apr 23, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Richard Wrangham
- Richard’s new book, The Goodness Paradox
- Why Jane Goodall’s view of chimpanzees took a turn for the darker
- Proactive violence (a human specialty) vs. reactive violence
- Richard’s “execution hypothesis” for how early humans dealt with violent males
- Bob offers an alternative explanation for the domestication of our species
- How our cousins the bonobos became nicer than our cousins the chimps
- Richard’s explanation for the evolution of moral sense
- Is war a part of human nature?
Apr 19, 2019 —
Robert Wright & John Thatamanil
- Alfred North Whitehead and his “process philosophy”
- “Process theology,” which features a changing, non-omnipotent God
- A God of persuasion, not coercion
- Whitehead’s conception of divinity
- Whitehead’s God and Christian theology
- Waiting, or not waiting, for God
- Beauty and the divine
- How Whitehead’s God solves the problem of evil
Apr 16, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Geoffrey Miller
- What is polyamory?
- The evolutionary origins of romantic jealousy
- How polyamorous couples manage jealousy, insecurity, and time
- Bob extols the benefits of long-term monogamy
- Geoffrey’s advice for young men who can’t find romantic partners
- Do smaller polyamorous communities get a little, well, incestuous?
- Why are fewer young men having sex regularly?
- Geoffrey: The ethics of polyamory set it apart from casual dating
Apr 12, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & B. D. McClay
- B. D.’s essay on mononucleosis and gnosticism
- What the ancient gnostics believed about body and spirit
- Fingernail clippings and other problems with bodily resurrection
- Pros and cons of living in a body
- Did George H.W. Bush get to walk out of his wheelchair at the gates of Heaven?
- B. D. explains the Children’s Crusade of 1212
- The Children’s Crusade’s contemporary resonances
- Queer Eye, the reality show that makes you feel good about humanity
Apr 10, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- What explains the sharp divide between analytic and continental philosophy?
- Continental philosophy’s association with romanticism and fascism
- How Richard Rorty, Crispin’s dissertation advisor, bridged the gap between the two schools
- Heidegger’s skepticism of science
- Crispin articulates the divide in terms of substance and style
- How continental philosophy challenges the primacy of argument
Apr 8, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Paul Shapiro
- Paul Shapiro’s new book, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World
- Why conventional meat production is inefficient and unsustainable (not to mention cruel)
- Recent innovations in lab-cultured protein, fat, and even leather
- Will cultured meat ever become affordable?
- How plant-based “meat” and “dairy” have gained market share in the past decade
- Paul: History won’t look kindly on our treatment of animals
- How Paul’s company is working to reduce meat consumption
Mar 15, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Tripp Fuller
- What does Christianity have in common with Pabst Blue Ribbon?
- Young Bob and young Tripp’s critical readings of the Bible
- Tripp: Human dignity doesn’t fit into a reductive materialist worldview
- Do all Christians believe in divine intervention?
- Could a deistic God have created Jesus?
- Spiritual practices for the overly judgmental (pretty much everyone)
- Tripp’s culture shock upon returning to North Carolina
- Paul Tillich and the dialogue between culture and faith
- Tripp: Oprah is the spiritual leader of the one percent
Mar 1, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Jason Pontin
- Jason’s tenure as editor of MIT’s Technology Review
- Jason says he never, ever feels offended
- Why Jason’s investment firm didn’t back a new gene editing technology
- Is current gene-editing technology a “moral and therapeutic dead end”?
- How to regulate a future designer baby business
- What makes CRISPR gene-editing technology revolutionary?
- 3D-printing and the future of gun control
- Will mind-reading technology kill romantic love?
- The theoretical limits of “thought identification” technology
Feb 12, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Crispin’s book chapter on the nature of truth
- Do different uses of the word “truth” have a family resemblance?
- The challenge of connecting truth with reality
- Where does linguistics enter the picture?
- How Crispin bucks expectations of academic philosophical writing
- Dan: Analytic philosophy misses the forest for the trees
- What’s missing from Crispin’s exploration of truth?
Feb 8, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Douglas Rushkoff
- Douglas’s new book, Team Human
- Remembering when people behaved better online than IRL
- Douglas was optimistic about the Internet. Then came capitalism.
- Imagining a better Facebook
- Douglas: “Being human is a team sport”
- Tribalism and the Internet
- The false promise of “disruption”
- How capitalism complicates Douglas’s life
Feb 5, 2019 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- What is metaphysics, and did it get derailed?
- The desire to live in a universe that “makes sense”
- How the human lifespan limits our scope of understanding
- Why we’re drawn to metaphysical questions
- Why younger generations are choosing the supernatural and spiritual over traditional religion
- Metaphysics as a means of organizing the sublime
- Is the feeling of awe older than humanity itself?
- The uncertain future of metaphysics
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