109: The Pursuit of Intelligence: Flowers for...

"Prime Intellect was an uncertain god. It had acted because it had to, but if it had been human its hand would be shaking on the controls." Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! This episode dives into The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams, a soft sc ...  Afficher plus

"The greatest polluting element in the earth's environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment." Welcome back to another episode of Made ...  Afficher plus

An episode interesting from every point of view, we train our eyes on Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph." The first segment wins the kudos of the learned, the academician, the Hellenist, as we talk about the favorite things we saw this year. The second segment — baroque? decadent? ...

“I felt like I was sort of drifting along as something besides human, like I had stepped onto another planet inside my head.”

Producers: Whit Missildine

Episode Summary: A man haunted by an early chil ...

Sometimes a book is so meta it sort of breaks your brain! How to talk about a book that is all beginnings and no ends? How to discuss a book that enlists You, the Reader, in its chicanery? We try to get on the wavelength with Calvino's text. You be the judge of if we get there. O ...  Afficher plus

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace's celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech "This is Water". How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, ...