Episode 194: Animal Songs, with Meredith Michael
In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery....
23 Jul 20251h 23min
Episode 193: On Conversion, or Arousing the Bodhi-Mind
How do you become religious? What is a conversion experience? Does it happen all at once or gradually? What's the point of religion, anyway? These are questions that JF (a Catholic) and Phil (a Zennis...
9 Jul 20251h 28min
Episode 192 - A Dream of Landscape: On Walking
Phil and JF first explored the mysteries of walking back in episode 59. That episode felt like a mere introduction—a tentative first step on a long and winding path. Now, 133 episodes later, they retu...
25 Jun 20251h 13min
Special Episode: Theory, Philosophy, and Uranus
This conversation was originally recorded in August 2024 and released for our Patreon supporters. Weird Studies will be back with a new episode on June 25, 2025. What is cultural theory? How is phil...
18 Jun 20251h 2min
Special Episode: Myth, History, and Form
This special release is a Patreon extra we’re making available to all listeners, in lieu of the official episode originally scheduled for today. As explained in the introduction, we will be back with ...
4 Jun 202546min
Episode 191 — The Acid Queen, with Susannah Cahalan
Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary Woodruff was in fact a central figure in the psychedelic movement in her own right—a political radical, underground fugitive, and neglecte...
21 Mai 20251h 28min
Episode 190 – Here Be Shrubs: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows'
In this episode, JF and Phil paddle into the marshlands of Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 masterpiece The Willows, a tale Lovecraft once called the finest weird story of all time. They explore how a narrat...
7 Mai 20251h 15min
Episode 189: Care of the Dead, with Jacob G. Foster
In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe Institute—for a conversation about their recent col...
23 Apr 20251h 35min
