Caravaggio’s Bodies

‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. It’s a sentiment shared across Europe, where leaders have cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of Chinese power and US insta ...  Show more

‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres per hour. Yet postal systems, as pioneered by the enterprising Tassis family, were ...  Show more

I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich.

Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically ...

The story behind Dr. Gerta Keller’s world-shattering scientific discovery that dinosaur extinction was NOT caused by asteroid impact, but rather by volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula, a discovery that highlights today’s existential threat of greenhouse gasses and climate ...  Show more

Can myth itself serve as a material force in struggles for liberation? Federico Campagna joins me to discuss how myth—too often dismissed as escapism or co-opted by reaction—can instead become a practice of imagination, solidarity, and survival. We look at myth’s place in anti ...

The girlies are joined by friend of the pod P.E. Moskowitz to discuss our collective brain atrophy and the ever-deteriorating state of thinking in our society. The binchies explore the stupidity of it all—how anti-intellectualism is both a tool of fascis ...