Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water").

David and Tamler take the first excursion into the work of Haruki Murakami and talk about his short story "Sleep." A thirty-year-old woman, the wife of a dentist and mother of a young boy, has a terri...

9 Mai 20231h 29min

The great Paul Bloom returns to the show to explore the many mysteries of Todd Field's 2022 film "Tár." Is it a ghost story? A movie about cancel culture and abuse of power? Guilt? Professional disapp...

25 Apr 20231h 56min

David and Tamler talk about William James' chapter on mysticism from his book "Varieties of Religious Experience." What defines a mystical experience? Why do they defy expression and yet feel like a s...

11 Apr 20231h 33min

David and Tamler deliver a PODCAST episode, one of many that comes from the INTERNET, that you'll probably listen to through Air Pods or some other kind of WIRELESS HEADPHONES as you go about your day...

28 Mar 20231h 39min

Here's an episode with something for both of us – a healthy serving of Kantian rationalism for David with a dollop of Marxist criminology for Tamler. We discuss and then argue about Jeffrie Murphy's 1...

14 Mar 20231h 36min

David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and even Parfit. The first part of our conve...

28 Feb 20231h 43min

Tamler's earlier self committed to doing an episode on Parfit, and David holds his current self to that promise, which shows how unconvinced David was by Parfit's skepticism about personal identity. O...

14 Feb 20231h 19min

It's the episode that Tamler has been waiting for – a long deep dive into Andrei Tarkovsky's mysterious masterpiece "Stalker." A writer and professor are led by their guide (Stalker) into a cordoned o...

31 Jan 20232h 8min