278 | Kieran Healy on the Technology of Ranking People

We are all alive, but "life" is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a "living organism" from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reac...

13 Jan 20201h 23min

Wilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term. (Substitute "exploring" for "explaining" and...

6 Jan 20202h 1min

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what's on my mind. Since the big event for me in ...

22 Des 20191h 6min

In the United States, more than one in five deaths is caused by cancer. The medical community has put enormous resources into fighting this disease, yet its causes and best treatments continue to be a...

16 Des 20191h 22min

It's too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won't be pushing us away tomorrow? We extrapolate from past experience to future...

9 Des 20191h 25min

We've talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That's one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also the cosmological multiverse, which we talked abou...

2 Des 20191h 11min

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical...

25 Nov 20191h 6min

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated...

18 Nov 20191h 18min