Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared that we came this way for a brief moment. - Harlan Ellison, "Palladin of the Lost Hour." (in the 2024 collection Harlan's Ellison' Greatest Hits)
We live our lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty -- the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet (1). - Popova, Maria. The Universe in Verse: 15 portals to Wonder Through Science & Poetry. Storey Publishing, 2024.
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Burton, Vernon and Kenneth Mack. "We the People: Equal Protection." Throughline (August 15, 2024) ["The Fourteenth Amendment. Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It's shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or not: Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, plus other Supreme Court cases that legalized same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, access to birth control — they've all been built on the back of the 14th. The amendment was ratified after the Civil War, and it's packed full of lofty phrases like due process, equal protection, and liberty. But what do those words really guarantee us? Today on Throughline's We the People: How the 14th Amendment has remade America — and how America has remade the 14th."]
Cobb, Paul, et al. "The Battle for Jerusalem." Throughline (October 3, 2024) ["Today, the city of Jerusalem is seen as so important that people are willing to kill and die to control it. And that struggle goes back centuries. Nearly a thousand years ago, European Christians embarked on what became known as the First Crusade: an unprecedented, massive military campaign to take Jerusalem from Muslims and claim the holy city for themselves. They won a shocking victory – but it didn't last. A Muslim leader named Saladin raised an army to take the city back. What happened next was one of the most consequential battles of the Middle Ages: A battle that would forever change the course of relations between the Islamic and Christian worlds, Europe and The Middle East. In this episode, we travel back to the front lines of that battle to explore a simple question: What is Jerusalem worth?Guests: Paul Cobb, Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades
Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway University of London and author of The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin
Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion and Middle East Studies at Smith College and author of Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology
Tom Madden, Professor of History and Director of the Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University, and author of The Concise History of the Crusades."]
Cole, Nicki Lisa. "Cultural Hegemony." Thought Co. (August 13, 2024) ["Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldviews, and behaviors of the rest of society. Cultural hegemony functions by framing the worldview of the ruling class, and the social and economic structures that embody it, as just, legitimate, and designed for the benefit of all, even though these structures may only benefit the ruling class. This kind of power is distinct from rule by force, as in a military dictatorship, because it allows the ruling class to exercise authority using the "peaceful" means of ideology and culture."]
Dorian, M.J. "William Blake • On Vision's Wing • Part 2: Innocence & Experience." Creative Codex (September 30, 2024) ["What makes Blake's Songs of Innocence & Experience a work of genius? What is the nature of vision? What is Blake's concept of fourfold vision? Is it even graspable by the intellect? We will make the attempt. Join us for a deep dive into all of this and much more."]
Fontainelle, Earl. "Esoteric Orientalism Part I: Ancient Barbarian Sages." The Secret History of Western Orientalism #8 (October 11, 2017) ["When we talk about the origins of western thought, we are nearly always talking about the classical Greeks. But the Greeks themselves had a curious habit of attributing their own wisdom in the sciences, in philosophy, and in other arts such as magic and astrology, to their neighbors in the Near East. This episode is the first in a series of two podcasts examining the troubled relationship that the Greeks had with what they perceived as their more ancient contemporaries. Concentrating on Mesopotamia and Egypt, we also look at the Indian Brahmans and the Jews, all through the Greek lens which informs the later western esoteric traditions. Along the way, we discuss the influential theory of ‘orientalism’ propounded by Edward Said, considering some of its drawbacks and advantages, Greek chauvinism, which considered all non-Greeks to be ‘barbarians’, alongside the troubled admiration which the Greeks had for other cultures, The process by which esoteric traditions often bolster their claims by constructing an ‘authenticating apparatus’ of ancient wisdom, The ancient sages Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Moses through Greek esoteric eyes, and The concept of ‘Platonic Orientalism’ which has been coined to describe this phenomenon of appropriating ‘barbarian wisdom’ among the Platonists of late antiquity and beyond."]
Jashinsky, Emily. "MAGA Is Not as United as You Think." The Ezra Klein Show (September 27, 2024) ["I’ve been fascinated by the problem Donald Trump faces with Project 2025. Trump has been caught in an awkward position, disavowing the document itself, but unable to fully disavow the people behind it. So I wanted to do an episode not just on Trump, but on the unwieldy coalition that has formed around him — what is sometimes referred to as the “New Right.” Emily Jashinsky is the D.C. correspondent and host of “Undercurrents” for UnHerd, a co-host of “Counter Points” with Ryan Grim, and a former editor at The Federalist, one of the most influential sites among conservatives today. She’s described herself as someone with “a foot in both camps” of the “Old Right” and the “New Right.” So I thought she’d be a great guide to understanding how the conservative movement has changed. In this conversation, we discuss the key differences between the Old Right and the New Right; what the New Right wants; why New Right thinkers are so interested in the concepts of “modernity” and “virtue”; and what influence the New Right might have in a second Trump administration."]
Margulis, Lynn. "Symbiosis is Everything." Against Everyone (November 19, 2019) ["This is the most important episode of AEWCH for me. In it I talk with my friend and intellectual mentor, biologist and geoscientist Lynn Margulis. This is, I believe, the last recorded discussion with Lynn before her death from a stroke on November 22, 2011. Lynn was a profound intellect, and, I believe, the most important thinker in the last 50 years. With James Lovelock, she developed the Gaia theory - that organisms interact with the non-living aspects of the Earth to regulate Earth systems like cloud cover, oceanic salinity, atmospheric gas abundance, and more. She also proved and popularized the notion that organelles in nucleated cells are symbioses of bacterial mergers. Along with her son Dorion Sagan (from her marriage to Carl Sagan), she developed a new theory of evolution, symbiogenesis, which boldly asserts, and with ample evidence, that new species arise out of symbiotic mergers with bacteria, not through random genetic mutation-meets-natural selection. The episode is a wide-ranging exploration of Lynn's work and thought; ... I've started this episode off with my essay, As Above, So Below, which I wrote in the days after her death. The essay appears in the book Lynn Margulis: The Life And Legacy Of A Scientific Rebel. Feel free to skip past the intro if you're familiar with her work, or to listen to it as a primer afterward, to get your bearings in the dizzying array of names and scientific concepts on the episode. "]
Smith, Peter Godfrey. "Understanding Minds." Philosophy Bites (January 2, 2025) ["Peter Godfrey Smith is famous for his work on understanding the minds of other animals, particularly octopuses. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast he discusses animal minds with Nigel Warburton."]
Stanley, Jason. "Erasing History." Converging Dialogues (November 3, 2024) ["... Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Jason Stanley about the importance of preserving history. They talked about why authoritarians attempt to erase history, fascist ideas, nationalism, immigration, book burning, classical education, how to defend history, and many other topics. Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University and was also Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). He has his PhD in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and his BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seven books, which include How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them , and the newest book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future."]
West, Stephen. "Why a meritocracy is corrosive to society. (Michael Sandel)." Philosophize This! #205 (July 1, 2024) ["Today we talk about the dark side of meritocracy, the effects it has on the way people see each other, the dialectic of pride and humility, education reform, and a rethinking of the way we see government officials."]
Wilkerson, Isabel. “We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be.” On Being (March 9, 2023) ["In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson’s eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings “caste” into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but “caste is the bones.” And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that."Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.]
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