How a Country Chooses Its Fools
So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law ag...
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David Boles: Human Meme
This Human Meme podcast is the inflection point for what it means to live a life of knowing. We are in the critical moment of human induction. David Boles is a writer, publisher, teacher, ly...
David Boles: Human Meme Podcast Guide
Listen to David Boles: Human Meme, a Society & Culture podcast by David Boles. Stream 867 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
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Episodes
20 of 867 episodesNot My Thing
In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of t...
The Three Boxes
Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exact...
The Sound of a Bought Room
Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedul...
The Off Switch
Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by...
The Nearest Hand
There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth...
The Brittle Self
In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush...
Beyond the Burial Tree
In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied....
In My Mind I'm Standing Up
The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the w...
The Mask in the Glass Case
I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximatel...
Tomorrow as Tribute
The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material future of...
What Was Kept From You
There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it ha...
The River and the Trained Eye
I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a place along the New Jersey side of th...
The Painters of 1839 and the Question of Now
Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, stands at a joint session...
UNDERWRITTEN
I want to start with four seconds. If you watched public television anywhere in the United States between 1971 and January of this year, you...
The Apothecary Who Was Not Written
Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text. Think about what that means for a moment. Romeo, banis...
The Claimed Body
1862. That is the year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public lan...
Carceral Nation: The Pause Before You Speak
We talked once on this podcast about the pause before a lie. That episode, "Pause Before the Lie," examined the 200-millisecond hesitation t...
The Grammar of Want
I was seven years old, sitting on red shag carpeting in Nebraska, in front of a wood-grain television cabinet heavy enough that two adults w...
The Human Universal Beautiful
In the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak C...