Episode 297: No Pleasure in Meanness (Flanner...

Are you a college student or about to be one? Do you have friends or family in college? This is the most important episode of your life. David and Tamler do something a little different this episode and tier rank a wide range of academic fields from engineering to art history, co ...  Show more

David and Tamler return to Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and Profane and discuss the chapter "Sacred Time and Myths." How does viewing time as circular give us a periodic window into the sacred? What does it mean to reactualize the creation of the universe in ritual and to view time ...  Show more

In this episode, I attempt to give a fresh biographical account of Nietzsche's life, by examining his life in light of his Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit, found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the course of this biography, using Nietzsche as our concrete example, we discuss the ...  Show more

Irina Dumitrescu joins Tom for a Close Readings fusion episode looking at Chaucer’s classical mind, and in particular his use of Ovid’s Heroides in The Legend of Good Women, in which the poet does penance for his poor depictions of women by retelling the stories of Ariadne, Phaed ...  Show more

The life of Joseph Merrick, the man they dared to call "The Elephant Man", will fill you with pain and anger. He was treated so cruelly by society that he found becoming a freak show exhibit preferably to the life available to him elsewhere. Yet alongside darkness there is lig ...

Lost in stories

Is life a story or a sequence of events?

Our narratives enable us to make sense of the complex, often confusing, world that we live in. And yet there is a risk that rather than helping us to truly understand this world, narratives c ...