Standing at the Rail
For most of Western history, the word art meant something wider and harder than it means now. Ars in Latin, techne in Greek: a principled, t...
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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 875 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
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Episodes
20 of 875 episodesThe Line in the Stone
January, in the year 897. A courtroom in Rome. In the defendant's chair sits a pope who has been dead for nine months. His name was Formosus...
The Direction of Hope
I want to start with a red pen. In August of 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman sat reviewing computer printouts from a radio te...
Held Until Called For
A thousand years ago, the early English law, and the Germanic law behind it, had a word for settling a death. Wergild. Wer, meaning man. Gel...
The Animal We Blame
Somewhere in the last year, a group you belong to went looking for a villain. Maybe it was a workplace after a project collapsed. Perhaps it...
The Synthetic Cause
Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to wh...
Synalosis: The Shape That Closes
Two thousand years ago, on a hillside in eastern Gaul, a Roman army under Julius Caesar trapped a Gallic army inside a hill town called Ales...
The Goldfish that Never Swam
This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a n...
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...
Not 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...