Weird Studies

In his 1978 bestseller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described humans as "survival machines" whose sole purpose is the replication of genes. All of culture needed to be understood as a side-effect...

16 Feb 20221h 29min

Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this episode to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, ...

2 Feb 20221h 15min

Season five kicks off with a new installment in the ongoing series on the Tarot's twenty-two major arcana. This time, your hosts overcome the trials that fortune has dealt them -- a hangover in the ca...

19 Jan 20221h 35min

Shannon Taggart's book Seance is a landmark in art photography and the history of psychical research. Taggart spent years photographing practitioners of spiritualism in the U.S. and Europe in an effor...

22 Dec 20211h 21min

The Book of Probes contains a assortment of aphorisms and maxims from the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, each one set to evocative imagery by American graphic designer David Car...

8 Dec 20211h 29min

A wish-fulfilment fantasy for pubescent boys of all ages, or a subtle disquisition on the ethics of a sorcerous world? John Milius' Conan the Barbarian (1982) manages to be both, although one may be ...

24 Nov 20211h 22min

In the current "attention economy," which has resulted in plummeting literacy rates and the almost wanton neglect of various cultural practices, what significance does culture even have? Why seek to p...

10 Nov 20211h 13min

JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that alights on some of the key ideas that run through t...

27 Okt 20211h 20min