Episode 55: The Great Weird North: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo'
No survey of weird literature would be complete without mentioning Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). As with all masters of the genre, Blackwood's take on the weird is singular: here, it isn't the cold...
11 Sep 20191h 23min
Episode 54: Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods
"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back in vogue -- with good reason. The problem of how in...
28 Aug 20191h 17min
Episode 53: Astral Jet Lag: On William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, in the wake of 9/11. You would think that a novel about the early Internet's effects on the collective psyche would feel dated today. But Gi...
14 Aug 20191h 2min
Episode 52: On Beauty
The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally told, ...
31 Jul 20191h 15min
Episode 51: Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood'
Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood,...
17 Jul 20191h 36min
Episode 50: Demogorgon: On 'Stranger Things'
The Duffer Brothers' hit series Stranger Things is many things: an exemplary piece of entertainment in the summer blockbuster mold, a fresh take on the "kids on bikes" subgenre of science fiction, a l...
3 Jul 20191h 36min
Episode 49: Out of Time: Nietzsche on History
In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche attacks the notion that humans are totally determined by the historical forces that shape their physical and mental environm...
19 Jun 20191h 22min
Episode 48: Walking the Tightrope with Erik Davis
Journalist and historian of religion Erik Davis joins Phil and JF to talk about his latest magnum opus, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. In this masterwork ...
5 Jun 20191h 25min
