"This is the mystery we thrust ourselves into: A single neuron is not conscious of its existence. A network of billions of unconscious single neurons is. These monads living in a world without perception become a being that perceives, thinks, and acts. Consciousness lies not in neurons, but in a sophisticated pattern of connectivity (125)." - Dr. Arnkatla Minervudottr-Chan in Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea. Picador, 2022.
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"Plate from Ernst Haeckel's visually dazzling Kunstformen der Natur, the Art Forms of Nature, published in 1904. With the assistance of Jena artist-lithographer Adolf Giltsch, Haeckel produced one hundred plates depicting the forms of animal life, mainly marine animals. With this book Haeckel wanted to create an "aesthetics of nature" and to show how the incessant struggle for existence he had learnt from Darwin was in fact producing an endless beauty and variety of forms, "Darwin and Humboldt combined together."." - Source: Public Domain Image Archive
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"What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe’. Much the same, he thought, applied to history. ‘Particular histories represent to you, what things have happen’d to such or such a People, with all their circumstances,’ he explained: ‘But to understand the whole clearly, you must know what relation every history can have to others.’ Only when such connected and wide-angled histories were available, might one hope to ‘see all the order of time’." -- Linda Colley, "Wide-Angled" (2013)
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"Sirat, a film by the Spanish film director Oliver Laxe, opens in the monumental setting of a rave in the Sahara, where a father and son are searching for a missing daughter. As the two make their way from party to party, news of a brewing World War-style conflict animates the background. (In Islamic scripture, “sirat” refers to a bridge that connects Paradise and Hell, and one gets a dose of each here.) Neither road film nor parable, Laxe’s film unfolds through encounters, sound, and landscape, denying narrative certainty and sitting instead with loss, belief, and endurance. As a work of art, Sirat becomes its own cosmology, loosening the grip of the rational world. Refusing the traditional arc of story, it is at once mystical and political, intimate and cosmic – offering a new vocabulary of being. Sirat gives permission for softness and strangeness. It makes me feel less existentially alone." — Sumayya Vally
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Bensinger, Ken, Max Lederer, and Paul Waldman. "The Pentagon is Waging War on Its Own Paper." On the Media (September 4, 2026) ["Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is demanding what he calls “more patriotic” coverage of his cabinet. On this week’s On the Media, hear how the Pentagon is cracking down on its publication, Stars and Stripes. Plus, an investigation reveals that some online content creators have taken money to endorse politicians. [01:00] Brooke Gladstone interviews Max Lederer, the publisher of Stars and Stripes, the independent, award-winning military news outlet within the Defense Department, about the Pentagon’s terminations of himself, the editor-in-chief, and the Middle East reporter, and the agency’s continued attacks on the paper’s congressionally mandated editorial independence. [13:38] Brooke speaks with Paul Waldman, writer of the Substack newsletter, The Cross Section, about how the media attention on Trump’s aide Natalie Harp, also known as “the human printer,” exploded. Plus, how she went from Fox News guest in 2019 to primary shaper of the president’s media consumption. [27:24] Micah sits down with Ken Bensinger, a New York Times media and politics reporter, to talk about his recent investigation into how hundreds of social media content creators are being paid to boost politicians ahead of elections, and not always disclosing it. Plus, Dave Jorgenson, former video producer at the Washington Post and founder of Local News International, speaks to the necessity of adopting standards around things political endorsements and AI use on social media, and how he’s using short-form videos to combat misinformation on the platforms where it flourishes."]
Blasi, Damian. "The Natural History of Linguistic Diversity." Many Minds (August 28, 2026) ["Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it’s also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind. My guest today is Dr. Damián Blasi. Damián is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Over the last decade or so, Damián’s emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He’s been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the 2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award from the Cognitive Science Society. In this conversation, Damián and I talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary. We discuss a recent paper in which Damián and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back. Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that the possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine."]
Blight, David W. "What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?" The New Republic (August 7, 2025) ["We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion."]
Carter, Alex. "The Lives of the Philosopher: Albert Camus." Past Present Future (August 26, 2026) ["In our series about how twentieth-century philosophy and biography intersect, David talks to philosopher Alex Carter about the life of Albert Camus, novelist, playwright, journalist, celebrity and public intellectual. What makes Camus a philosopher as well? How was he shaped by his Algerian background? Does it make sense to call him an absurdist? How did he try to reconcile the very different parts of his extraordinary life?"]
Chomsky, Noam. "Everyday Anarchist." Modern Success (April 14, 2013) ["The New Yorker has … termed Chomsky “one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century”, while the New York Times has him as “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But judged by the range, influence and novelty of his ideas, many argue that Chomsky is, in fact, the owner of one of the greatest minds in the history of our species. There is barely a domain of human understanding that has not been touched in some way by his thought. In the half-century since the 1960s, reverberations from his work have shaken the foundations of cognitive science, epistemology, media studies, psychobiology, computer science (to name but a few). "]Conis, Elena. "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022)." New Books in Medicine (July 13, 2022) ["The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit. In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT—only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What changed? How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022) traces the surprising history of DDT’s rapid rise, infamous fall, and controversial revival to reveal to show that we’ve been taking the wrong lesson from DDT’s cautionary tale. Historian Elena Conis uncovers new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the ban but in fact the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She makes a compelling case that the real threat was not DDT itself but the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change the ways we make decisions about new scientific discoveries and technologies, Conis argues, we’re doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people at risk—both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge or consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from pesticides to vaccines to COVID-19 to climate change, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science—as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts—in order to combat the war on facts and protect ourselves and our environment."]
Connors, Catherine. "The Pope is Officially Team Human." Team Human (September 9, 2026) ["Douglas Rushkoff is joined by storyteller and thinker Catherine Connors to explore Pope Leo XIV’s remarkable intervention into the AI debate. Together, they unpack his critique of transhumanism, technological inevitability and Silicon Valley’s vision of human progress and his radical case for the dignity, imperfection and magnificence of being human."]
Drimmer, Sonja and Christopher J. Nygren."Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education." Public Books (December 16, 2025) ["There are key differences between the 1971 protest and the growing resistance to AI today. Back then, advanced computational development was directed explicitly toward military purposes. When this research had to pass through university infrastructures, the violence of its purpose was easy to see. And this, in turn, made the potential targets of resistance clear; indeed, it was relatively easy to organize protests in front of large mainframe computers, located in very specific facilities and locations. Now, however, computation is distributed. And this makes the targets to resist so diffuse that the shape of direct action becomes difficult even to conceptualize. Another difference is who is directing the violence. Once, universities saw their computational power exploited by researchers working for the Department of Defense. Today, universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry (albeit one that receives a staggering amount of money from defense contracts) that exploits students and faculty as data mines, test subjects, and a perpetual supply depot of future users, all for their own profit. Universities have accepted the overtures from this industry in a FOMO-driven frenzy without consulting their faculty, collecting empirical data on whether generative AI is pedagogically useful, or pausing to inquire about the long-term impact of AI on the students who have been entrusted to their care. Faculty are at best being coerced—and at worst being forced—to employ generative AI in their teaching, assessment, or advising. Moreover, with the educational mission that they thought they were signing up for undermined, students have no option to resist. In other words, we have all been left on our own to jury rig workable pedagogical scaffolds while the educational edifice is being bulldozed around us. Individual responses will not suffice; collective action is necessary."]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch." Weird Studies #25 (September 12, 2018) ["JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art."]
Goldin, Hana Lee. "20 Small Acts of Media Literacy We Can Practice Every Day." Card Catalog (June 16, 2026) ["From checking the date to tracing the source: building a sharper eye for information."]
Harper, Jordan. "Manufacturing Goodness: What Administrators Really Do and Why." Public Books (September 11, 2026) ["In this essay, I want to ask what is, on the surface, a simple question: What do administrators do and why? What drove me toward this question is the sheer volume of faculty, staff, and students I talk to, informally in conversation and through formal avenues like teaching and research, in which they share wishes for administrators to do something or do something different and wonder why they don’t and won’t. This reads as an issue of consciousness and the ruse of contextual exceptionality in my estimation. Some see certain issues as tied to individuals and their lack of competence and political will. Others just believe in colleges and universities as exceptional spaces solely, or at least primarily, in the education business. ... The problem facing and debilitating the sheep owned and run by administrators is that there is a deliberate calculus that is difficult to compute, an apparatus that transcends the physical that most eyes aren’t trained to see. There is an obsession over the student outcomes of institutional higher education—escaping impoverished life circumstances and finding meaningful work—that lead most to call on administrators to improve and guard the cherished university by any means necessary, and make fashionable ideas and impulses to collaborate with administrators. “What would happen if every time people used the word ‘university,’ Harney and Moten ask, “it came out sounding like ‘factory’?” And the funny thing about factories is that its interior is often chaotic and terribly experienced, but what they produce are earmarked as good(s) always, somehow, consistently worth making and selling."]
Jones, Reece. "The Terrifying Power of the U.S. Border Patrol." Think Back (September 2, 2026) ["Reece Jones has spent his career studying borders. His 2022 book Nobody Is Protected argues that for its entire century-long existence the US Border Patrol has been writing its own rules. Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii, traces the agency’s lineage from antebellum slave patrols and the Texas Rangers through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that formally created it, showing how a little-known legal quirk puts roughly two-thirds of Americans within reach of an agency largely exempt from Fourth Amendment restrictions. In this episode of THINK BACK, Reece and I talk through the Border Patrol’s origins, the landmark Supreme Court cases that expanded the agency’s authority, and how 9/11 and the drug wars accelerated a mission creep that had been building for decades. Jones’s history is even more significant and necessary in 2026 than when it was first published. He shows that the current administration isn’t inventing new abuses of power so much as exploiting a century of legal loopholes that nobody bothered to close."]
Kemp, Ella. "Dark Side of the Loon: Coyote vs. Acme’s screenwriter Samy Burch on the journey of the Looney Tunes courtroom thriller." Letterboxd (August 21, 2026) ["As Coyote vs. Acme arrives on the big screen after a long, complicated journey, screenwriter Samy Burch tells Ella Kemp how Wile E. Coyote finally got his day in court—and theaters—with her subversive comedy-drama."]
Muncer, Mike and Chris Newton. "The Evolution of the Vampire." The Evolution of Horror (September 3, 2026) ["Chris Newton joins Mike to discuss the sexiest, broodiest, gayest monster of them all, the vampire!."]
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Defending the Elusive." Notebook (September 15, 2026) ["Although it’s seldom acknowledged, one of the supreme pleasures of movies is the confusion and uncertainty often prompted by the beginning of a story, when we’re not yet fully tuned in to what’s going on. As in our sleeping dreams, a sense of infinite possibility stretches before us. That seemingly limitless vista soon disappoints once it is foreshortened into something real and recognizable, such as a place, an environment, a mood, a character, a theme, a genre, or a plot. Yet without these comfortable anchors, something that resembles prenatal bliss envelops our ignorance, and the fact that we can imagine almost anything makes the start of a film with all of its possibilities seem peculiarly and even exclusively ours. This is another way of saying that the less we know about something, the more our imaginations and expectations can come along to fill in the gaps. So the pleasure I’m talking about is a kind of shameless narcissism, albeit one that feels healthy because of its spur to our creative impulses. It’s also seldom acknowledged that cinema is interactive, becoming a collective experience even when we’re alone thanks to our phones, social media, and other tools used to convey our impressions afterwards. But because illusions of presence and motion are generated by viewers providing continuity to still frames as they’re being projected, with ourselves as the links between a projector and a screen, this means that the “movie” exists only inside us, even if we prefer to think of it being located elsewhere. A movie is expected to explain itself on some level. We agree to be nudged along by the crafty and creative individuals who make it easier for us to follow and understand. But this process also entails our unconscious filling in all the blank spots between the projector and the screen (suggesting presence) and those between individual still images (suggesting motion). This adds up to a form of collaboration we can all accept with pleasure, a creative form of acquiescence that we simply experience as moviegoing."]
Rushing, Josh. " New Doc EXPOSES Trump Murder War Crime Boat Strikes." Breaking Points (September 9, 2026) [Description of the documentary which can be viewed here: "Since September 2025, the US military has carried out more than 60 strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing more than 220 people. In a military campaign called Operation Southern Spear, President Donald Trump's administration has claimed to wage war against “narcoterrorism”. Yet the government has released little information about who was killed, the evidence against them or how targets were selected. In Killing at Sea, Fault Lines investigates the administration's claims about Operation Southern Spear by uncovering the stories of those targeted and the evidence used to justify lethal military force. Through the stories of families left searching for answers, alongside witness accounts, physical evidence and interviews with legal experts, Fault Lines asks whether the strikes are lawful, whether they have disrupted the drug trade and what accountability exists for those killed. From fishing communities in the Caribbean to Washington, DC, Killing at Sea examines a military campaign conducted largely beyond public view—and asks who is being killed in the US’s new war at sea, and why."]
Rushton, Michael. "The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan 2023)." New Books in Critical Theory (November 25, 2023) ["Should governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, explores a variety of frameworks for thinking about this question, from liberal and egalitarian justifications, through to communitarian, conservative, and multiculturalist ideas. The book outlines the economic method for thinking about the arts, and uses this as a starting point to understand what various political philosophies might tell policymakers and the public today. A rich and deep intervention on a pressing social and governmental question, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and cultural policy. Prof Rushton blogs at both Substack and Artsjournal and you can read open access papers covering some of the key ideas in the book here and here."]
Silverman, Jacob. "The Pump and Dump Presidency." Know Your Enemy (September 8, 2026) ["Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, and it isn't close. Between his family's crypto business — designed to enable foreign oligarchs, criminals, and state actors to bribe the administration while enriching Trump and his family — his insider trading and manipulation of the stock market, a tariff regime designed to bind business interests to Trump's personal whims, and the advent of a virtual market for criminal fraudsters to purchase pardons from the president himself, Trump and his family have accrued billions of dollars while hollowing out the rule of law and corroding what's left of our democracy. It is brazen, appalling, and poisonous. To guide us through this many-circled hell, we're joined by Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, who's been covering the crypto beat and the Trump-family corruption for years. Jacob helps us wrap our heads around the immensity of this problem — and what, if anything, can be done about it."]
Skiveren, Nicolai. "Cinematic Waesthetic: Wasted Worlds, Wasted Lives and Becoming-Waste in Contemporary Science Fiction Film." Revenant #10 (March 2024) ["This article explores the aesthetic, affective, and epistemological connections that bind together science fiction (SF) as a genre of cognitive estrangement, and the varied forms of waste that have come to permeate the genre’s filmic depictions of the future. Whether it be in the shadowy alleyways of Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the shantytowns of District 9 (2009), or the ravaged environments of Idiocracy (2006), waste is always there, lurking in the background, enveloping its human and nonhuman subjects with its elusive yet distinct atmosphere. And yet, it remains unclear what purpose(s), if any, waste might serve within these film-worlds. Because despite the seemingly central place that waste occupies in our cultural imaginaries of the future, no one has yet presented a systematic reflection on its affective, symbolic, and narrative significance. This article therefore brings together writings on ecological SF (Caravan 2014) and critical waste studies (Bauman 2004; Hawkins 2005; Viney 2014) to scrutinize the waste found across the above SF films. The article proposes that waste in contemporary SF film can be seen to operate mainly within three overlapping modes: ‘Wasted worlds,’ ‘Wasted lives,’ and ‘Becoming-waste.’ Drawing especially on Adrian Ivakhiv’s tripartite model for an eco-philosophy of the cinema, this article calls attention to the often subtle ways in which waste participates in (i) cinematic world-building, (ii) representations of otherness, and (iii) depictions of radical forms of change. Taken together, these three modes represent a suggestive image of how waste forms part of contemporary SF film."]
Smalley, Gregory J. "3 Women (1977)." 366 Weird Movies (February 19, 2014) ["Tucked away on the long stretch of nowhere between Persona (1966) and Lost Highway (1997) lies 3 Women, the 1970s iteration of cinema’s recurring dream about sliding identities. This film is as dry and mysterious as a bone found in the desert. Directed by Robert Altman, the miniature scope—most of the film involves only two characters—and the way dramatic naturalism is subverted into disquieting weirdness is not what we typically think of as an “Altmanseque” epic ensemble satire. This change in tone makes this pensive movie all the more of a surprise coming from an accomplished director who (besides the experimental comedy of Brewster McCloud) was not known for his surrealist tendencies. The movie has a quiet quality that honors its Mojave desert setting; you hear the wind rustling through the spaces between Pinky and Millie."]
Webster, Jamieson. "A Library of Oceanic Feelings: A Psychoanalytic History of the Sea." Pioneer Works (September 9, 2026) ["As one of those people who only feel well by the ocean, I’ve long followed the trail of oceanic feelings—that sense of eternity or limitlessness, the connection to something larger—and been perplexed by Freud’s confession that he could find none of this in himself. Oceanic feeling was as closed to him as music. He admitted this in a letter to his friend Romain Rolland, whose reflections inspired the term and prompted the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud wrestles with the idea that an “oceanic feeling” binds people to religion through a lived sense of something immeasurably greater than themselves. He professes complete bewilderment, even as he speculates that such a feeling might preserve the earliest intimacies of infancy, a return to oneness with the maternal, or perhaps belong to that region beyond the ego where it brushes against the immensity of the id. But ultimately he remains suspicious, worrying that the experience has more to do with an infantile longing for a protective and omnipotent father. Poor Freud. The great explorer of the unconscious could find no feeling for that oceanic depth: its vortices of power, its vast and rhythmic flow, its unknown origins, nor for the other life it reveals beyond our paltry shores. Yet I never wanted to dismiss Freud as others have, explaining away his difficulty through character assassination, or asserting that he was simply too rigid, too enclosed, too fixated on fathers and laws and languages—land, territories, cultures—to open himself to that great engulfing maternal flow, no doubt more musical than sensible. Freud, they say, had a mother problem."]
West, Stephen. "Dewey and Lippman on Democracy. Philosophize This #130 (May 23, 2019) ["At the turn of the 20th century, a crucial debate emerged between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the viability of democracy in an increasingly complex world. Lippmann critiqued democracy’s reliance on public opinion, arguing that citizens construct simplified “pseudo-environments” shaped by media and stereotypes, rendering them ill-equipped to make informed decisions on vast global issues. He warned that modern democracies are driven more by emotionally charged reactions than by accurate understanding, and that media, language, and time constraints further distort reality. Dewey responded not by dismissing Lippmann’s concerns, but by reframing democracy as more than a political system—it was, to him, an ethical ideal and a form of social cooperation. Viewing society as an interconnected organism, Dewey believed individuals flourish only through participation and education. He saw democracy as a continuous process of mutual growth, where every person contributes uniquely, and where the antidote to authoritarianism lies in cultivating thoughtful, empowered citizens—not in retreating from democratic ideals, but in deepening them." Further Reading: Public Opinion – Walter Lippmann (1922); Democracy and Education – John Dewey (1916); The Problematic Public: Lippmann, Dewey, and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century – Eds. G. Mitchell Reyes & Nathan Crick (2023)]
---. "Simone De Beauvoir Pt. 1 - The Ethics of Ambiguity." Philosophize This! #106 (July 19, 2017) ["In this episode, the discussion builds on Sartre’s view of human existence as a constant tension between facticity—the unchangeable facts of our lives—and transcendence—the possibilities we have to shape ourselves. Simone de Beauvoir deepens this idea in The Ethics of Ambiguity by arguing that human beings do not live in just one tension but inhabit a web of overlapping dualities: subject and object, individual and collective, mind and body. Rather than simplify these contradictions, she insists we must face them honestly, embracing the inherent ambiguity of existence. De Beauvoir critiques historical philosophy and religion for offering comforting but false narratives that obscure this truth. She emphasizes that freedom—our unavoidable capacity to choose—is the foundation of any ethical life. However, she warns that many fall into “bad faith,” adopting fixed identities or nihilism to escape the discomfort of freedom. Instead, true ethical living requires not only accepting our own freedom but working to maximize the freedom of others. Through this lens, meaning is not discovered but created through action, and ethics begins with the acknowledgment that we are condemned to be free."
Further Reading:
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (2016)
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre edited by Walter Kaufmann (1956)
Existentialism for Everyday Life: Finding Meaning in a Chaotic World by Aurora Koskinen (2023)]
Further Reading:
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (2016)
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre edited by Walter Kaufmann (1956)
Existentialism for Everyday Life: Finding Meaning in a Chaotic World by Aurora Koskinen (2023)]
---. "Simone Weil - The Mathematician." Philosophize This! #174 (February 2, 2023) ["So in one of her earlier journals Simone Weil writes about a moral dilemma that ends up being a metaphor, for a situation that a lot of people might find themselves in while living in the modern world. She says to imagine a man…who lives in a society…where he is forced to solve complex math problems all day long…but the catch is that when he solves one of these math problems…any time he arrives at an answer, and that answer is an even number…he gets beaten with a stick…by the powers that be. They tell em we don’t take too kindly to even numbers round here son. Now go on…solve another one of them math problems, as he twirls the stick smiling with his dirty hands. The moral dilemma for Simone Weil was this: what should the mathematician do when he finds himself in this situation? Should he resist and fight back? Should he just refuse to solve any more of their math problems? Should he make a sign and protest about how upset he is? By the end of these two episodes released here today we’ll understand why Simone Weil came up with the particular solution that she did to this moral dilemma…and also why as the years went on…she grew in her thinking enough to realize that the answer…. might not be as simple as the one she originally came up with."]
---. "Simone Weil - Vessels of God." Philosophize This! #175 (February 2, 2023) ["This episode explores Simone Weil’s view on self-transformation, contrasting the Western emphasis on willpower and discipline with her deeper focus on cultivating attention. While will is effective for physical action and routine habit-building, Weil argues it falls short when it comes to moral clarity, inspiration, and spiritual depth. Attention, for Weil, is not passive but a disciplined openness to truth, beauty, and obligation—qualities she sees as reflections of a higher moral order, which she calls God. Crucially, Weil believes that goodness only becomes real when individuals act as vessels for this universal good, through conscious participation in the world. The episode also outlines three pathways to developing attention—love of beauty, love of neighbor, and religious or transcendent experience—and emphasizes the need for humility and lucid thought as safeguards against ego-driven moral blindness, especially in times of collective conflict." Further Reading: Waiting for God by Simone Weil (1951); Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (1952); The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza (2022)]
