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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juli 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 Juni 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 Juni 20191h 25min
Episode 47: Machines of Loving Grace: Technology and the Unabomber
Made in 2003, Lutz Dammbeck's documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet is a film about many things, but the gist of it is something like what William Burroughs called the doctrine of ...
22 Maj 20191h 8min
Episode 46: Thomas Ligotti's Angel
In his short story "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel," contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti contrasts the chaotic monstrosity of dreams with the cold, indifferent, and no less monstrous purity of angels. It...
8 Maj 20191h 29min
Episode 45: Jeffrey J. Kripal on 'Flipping' Out of Materialism
"May the present 'you' not survive this little book," Jeffrey Kripal writes in the prologue to The Flip. "May you be flipped in dramatic or quiet ways." Indeed, Kripal's latest is a kind of manifesto,...
24 Apr 20191h 10min
