180. Benjamin Dreyer (copy chief of Random House) – Really actually truly great English
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who don’t give a damn about grammar, style, or syntax, and those who write aggrieved letters to publishing houses about split infinitives. My guest...
2 Feb 201957min
179. Edith Hall (classicist) – from Aristotle to Oprah and back again: how to live your best life
We’ve been talking a lot lately on this show about happiness. What it is, where we can get more of it, why it does not yet seem to be available on the Internet. Author Ruth Whippman presented some com...
26 Jan 201959min
178. Douglas Rushkoff (freelance intellectual) – It's not the technology's fault
For me, the very best Onion article of 2018 was this one about Jeff Bezos revealing Amazon’s new headquarters to be the entire Earth, as an Amazon-branded glass sphere clicked into place, encasing for...
19 Jan 201954min
177. Joseph Goldstein (Buddhist teacher) – Lighten Up: mindfulness, enlightenment, and everyday life
Love, money, health, great sex, peace of mind—however you define it, happiness in this world is impermanent and unreliable. But we’re all invested in the illusion that we’re just one career move or on...
12 Jan 20191h 13min
176. Area 51 and the epistemology of the unexplained - Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell (filmmaker)
Between subjective experience and the things most people can accept as objective facts, there yawns a cavernous gulf. Imagine you’re on a stage in front of 50,000 strangers trying to explain what it f...
22 Des 20181h 1min
175. Helen Riess (psychiatrist) – Empathy in the brain and the world
Empathy is the basic stuff of human connection. It’s how we hear and are heard by one another. It’s how we deal with one another as people rather than objects. But with massive, relentless trouble in ...
15 Des 201846min
174. Ruth Whippman (writer) – A mindful, productive, super-positive nation of nervous wrecks
In the years before the election of the impossible president rent forever the very fabric of being, the band Radiohead was busy channeling something many of us were feeling but nobody was really talki...
8 Des 201847min
173. Wesley Yang (writer) - The Souls of Yellow Folk
Such and such “doesn’t suffer fools gladly”. That phrase has always bugged me a bit. It’s like someone has just squeezed a pillow infused with an admiration-scented vapor that then hangs in the air fo...
1 Des 201856min
