Welcome to the desert of the real.

Does voting matter?

What happens when AI takes on the role of human journalists?

Can queer theory overcome its ties to sexuality?

The HBS hosts discuss the current peer review crisis.

Ideology is said in many ways. Which one is emancipatory?

The ocean and space and “Ode to Joy” are sublime, of course… but what about an excellent lentil soup? In a confusing twist of etymology, where one would expect “sub” to mean “below,” in the word “sublime” it indicates something above or even beyond. We use it as a superlative, but a superlative of what?...

What motivates people to live off-grid in the 21st C? And how hard is it to survive out there? This week, the HBS hosts are joined by Eric Mack, journalist and co-host of Our Uncertain Future podcast, who decided in 2020 to move his family “off-grid.” Currently residing in a 100% water- and energy-independent compound in the...

What, if anything, is the difference between having ideological commitments and belonging to a “cult”? This episode is a “deep dive” into the very deep waters of ideology and ideological commitments. A couple of important notes for listeners: first, this episode was recorded the day before William Clare-Roberts’ excellent essay “Ideology and Emancipation: Voluntary Servitude, False Consciousness,...

Generative Ai is a still new and emergent technology capable of producing not only text that could be mistaken as human-generated, but also images, video, music, and “voice.” For all of the amazing opportunities opened up by generative AI, however, it does not come without its own risks. Secondary and post-secondary education, for example, was...

The HBS hosts are not here to make friends. They’re here to WIN. We all have our low-brow guilty pleasures and, for millions of Americans, one of those is reality TV. Only a few months ago, amidst a war raging in the Ukraine, a new regent being crowned in the U.K., and reproductive rights being...

The HBS hosts discuss how friendships are forged, maintained, and sometimes broken. In The Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida invokes a statement originally attributed to Aristotle: “My Friends, there are no friends,” capturing something that seems to be fundamental about friendship. Friendship is essential to human thriving, but also difficult, if not impossible, to attain...

What is a person? What is a thing? And what difference does that difference make? Although we tend to use the terms “person” and “human being” interchangeably, it hasn’t always been the case that all human beings were considered (moral or legal) persons, nor is the case today that all persons are human beings. Here...

The HBS hosts ask: what’s so special about originality? Today, originality is being challenged in so many ways: comedians “stealing” jokes, cultural appropriation, remixes, not to mention the myriad ways that generative artificial intelligence has made plagiarism of all kinds possible. We  value originality over imitation, creativity over copying, and novelty over the “same old,...

Michael Norton explains why “Joe Versus the Volcano” is the perfect existentialist film. Continuing our tradition of going to the movies for the first episode of teach new season, we watch the 1990 film Joe vs. The Volcano with Michael Norton from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Michael has an argument that the movie...