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

David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would it be like to have perfect memory, to have full ac...

6 Sep 20221h 51min

David and Tamler continue their discussion of Leo Tolstoy's 'Confession.' When we left him last time, the famous author had bottomed out just years after writing two of the greatest novels ever writte...

16 Aug 20221h 32min

We have a sneak peek for our listeners--the first episode our new Patreon bonus series on David Milch's brilliant (but short-lived) series "Deadwood." In this inaugural edition of "The Ambulators" (we...

9 Aug 20221h 30min

David and Tamler find themselves unable to attach rational meaning to a single act in their entire lives. Let's say we publish more articles and books. What then? What about our kids? They're going of...

2 Aug 20221h 33min

David and Tamler mask up and wander through the audio and visual orgy of Stanley Kubrick's final masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut. What is this movie really about? Dreams? Wealth and power? Marriage? Jealou...

19 Jul 20222h 35min

David and Tamler descend into the dark pits of Hell to look Satan in the eyes and discover the nature of evil. OK…that's not fully accurate, we just read and talk about a couple of philosophy articles...

6 Jul 20221h 33min

David and Tamler lose themselves in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's (pr. 'chick sent me high') classic paper on the concept of flow. We talk about the features of flow activities – loss of ego, the merging ...

21 Jun 20221h 23min

Ivan Ilyich is a man. All men are mortal. So Ivan Ilyich is mortal. Sure absolutely, that's true for Ivan Ilyich and for all men. But we're not Ivan Ilyich and we're not 'all men'- so what does this h...

7 Jun 20221h 58min