It isn’t a good idea to complain that someone else hasn’t treated some topic in the way you would have treated it. Nevertheless, I want to put down a marker. I listened to two podcasts this week each of which, in my opinion, left a big question unasked.

If I were a character in this terrific novel, I would remember exactly who had recommended it to me, under what circumstances, and everything else about them. Alas, I am not, nor do I really wish I were, but as a story it has that kind of appeal, of making me think, what would I have done. The plot covers a dozen or so years, from Bulgaria in the early 1930s to America in 1946, and it concerns a group of NKVD recruits whose allegiance to one another is stronger than their allegiance to the NKVD. Or is it?

Episode summary: If moral philosophy is a train to crazy town, at what stop should we disembark?

I don’t think I heard an answer to this provocative question, but I did hear some things that I could not grasp. All this talk of “what if we’re living in a simulation” smacks to me of late nights in t...

Episode summary: Sunday, June 26, 2022; May I suggest listening to yesterday's podcast. It's full of timely stories, and reason to hope that now we will do what we've been putting off since the end of the Civil War. In the podcast I reference Bruce Sterling's talk in Copenhagen in 2009 and Elie Myst...

Robert MacFarlane’s previous book, The Old Ways, I read in partial preparation for a long walk on one of the old ways, which has yet to materialise. Underland, on the other hand, informs me of journeys I will never make. Extreme cold, cramped passageways, far-off places — all of which become, in...

Episode summary: The United States had a pandemic plan. But when a pandemic came, we hesitated to follow it. The country was hobbled by argument and doubt. Much of that doubt came from experts who proposed that Covid might not be as lethal as scientists feared. Michael Lewis returns to the subject o...

Episode summary: Old MacDonald had a farm—and on that farm he had rich terrain for an episode of Getting Curious. Join Professor Gabe Rosenberg and Jonathan as they explore what agricultural history has to do with our modern understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. They cover the concept of “an...

Episode summary: Even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices tend to prioritize the lighter end of that range.

So interesting to listen to this immedately after seeing The Harder They Fall on Netflix last...

Episode summary: Part 1 of our series on the climate emergency. How did we drive ourselves into the ecological ditch? And, crucially, who is this ‘we’? Our story starts with … Genesis. By host and producer John Biewen, with co-host Amy Westervelt. Interviews with David Pecusa, Bina Nir, and Kate Rig...

Looking back, I cannot remember which particular recommendation engine thought I might like to read this. I asked a couple, telling them how much I had enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. After I had ploughed through a couple of things for work and John Le Carré’s Sing...