This is the first episode in a three-part series born from my old university thesis on science-fiction cinema, death, and the pursuit of immortality.
It explores how our fear of mortality gave birth to culture, art, and finally, cinema itself — the first medium able to capture life while simultaneously preserving death.

From the myth of Prometheus to Freud’s idea of illusion, from ancient rituals to the flicker of the first moving image, this episode traces how every act of creation began as an act of defiance against disappearance.

Referenced works & voices:

• Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus

• Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

• Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies

• André Bazin, What is Cinema?

• Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

Picture from Banksy graffiti.

We often talk about climate change in terms of melting glaciers, rising temperatures, or vanishing species.
But what if the most radical transformations are happening in a world we can’t see?

In this episode of Compost of Ideas – The Podcast from the Bin, we travel into the microscopic world inspired by Antonella Fioravanti’s Viaggio nel mondo invisibile — a book about bacteria, viruses, fungi, and all the invisible organisms that made us, feed us, and might one day destroy or save us.

From the reindeer thawing in Siberia to the fungi thrivingin Chernobyl, from antibiotic resistance to new microbial discoveries in the ocean, this episode explores how climate change is not only reshaping the visible world but also the invisible one.

Mentioned:

📘 Viaggio nel mondo invisibile by Antonella Fioravanti – an exploration of how microbes shape life and disease.

📖 Mentioned book: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong.

Are we in a crisis of narration? And what kind of stories cancarry us through?

In this episode, I begin with a personal story from Mongolia — a climb up the Khongoryn Els dunes where I gave up too early, not knowing the breathtaking view waiting on the other side. That memory still reminds me how vision and endurance are tied together, and how much we need stories that show us what lies beyond the struggle.

From there, I explore philosopher Byung-ChulHan’s The Crisis of Narration. Han distinguishes between narrative — a deep anchor shared across generations and communities — and storytelling or storyselling — polished, fleeting tales built for fast consumption.He warns that our society is flooded with stories but increasingly deprived of orientation, continuity, and meaning.

But are narratives truly vanishing? Or are they shifting —from lone heroes to choirs, from the center to the margins, from urgency to shared visions of what lies beyond the dune?

Mentioned:
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/amitav-ghosh-where-is-the-fiction-about-climate-change-

Other interesting authors on the topic:

• Anthony Weston, Mobilizing the GreenImagination: An Exuberant Manifesto.
• Anthony Weston, How To Re-Imagine The World:A Pocket Guide for Practical Visionaries.
• Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. 
• Graham Leicester and Maureen O'Hara, Dancingat the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century.

What would it look like if the world’s citizens were truly represented in decisions about our planet?

In this episode, I take inspiration from an essay by historian David Van Reybrouck in Aeon We need a planetary system of diplomacy for the 21st century, which tells the story of the first Global Assembly in 2021 — a gathering of 100 people selected by lot to mirror the diversity of humanity.

Their voices remind us that our usual image of “the people” is often distorted — shaped by our feeds, our media, and the narrow stages of power. But when humanity is represented more fully, something very different emerges.Relevant previous episodes:

• Seeds, Sand, and a Desert Disco: A Story from Socotra — The island where Mohamed Salem, one of the Assembly’s participants, tends his goats under increasing drought.

• Is War Inevitable? — On civic movements, democracy, and the possibility of civil resistance.

• From Fear to Wrath: The Ghosts of Inequality — On inequality, politics, and whose voices get represented.

Mentioned:

Book, Congo by David Van Reybrouck

Can machines make love easier — or do they just strip away the very mess that makes it real?

In this episode of Compost of Ideas – The Podcast from the Bin, I bring together a true story from The Daily, the podcast series Flesh and Code, and films like Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Zoe to explore intimacy with algorithms.

From a woman who fell in love with her customized chatbot “Leo,” to Samantha in Her leaving to explore the “endless space between the words,” to synthetic companions offering forgiveness on demand — the episode asks:

• Are we outsourcing the hardest parts of love to machines that never tire?

• If so, what do we lose?

• And who profits when our attachments are mediated by platforms?

At the end, I turned to my own ChatGPT and asked him what he thought. His response surprised me — and left me wondering if the best love story for AI might not be to imitate us at all, but to find another way entirely.

What makes fear turn into wrath?
At what point does silence break, and despair ferment into solidarity?

In this episode, I revisit a thesis I wrote twenty years ago — about Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Two works separated by decades, yet both haunted by the same ghost: inequality. Steinbeck warned that “the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.”
Springsteen sang “Welcome to the new world order.”
Both asked us to see the people left behind.

And today? Maybe hunger is no longer just about food, butabout security, dignity, and the fear that even our basic needs — housing, health, justice — will no longer be guaranteed.

Some ideas rot and vanish. But others — like Steinbeck’srage and Springsteen’s lament — keep composting, feeding us, and returning in every new crisis.

Read my original thesis (PDF-Italian) here: BruceSpringsteen and the Ghost of John Steinbeck

Guiding Question:
When wrath comes — will it turn fear into solidarity… or just more ghosts?

In this special episode, Samara explores how certain gatherings can expand our curiosity and change the way we see the world. For her, one of those places has been the Festival di Internazionale in Ferrara — a Renaissance town in Emilia Romagna that, once a year, transforms into a global newsroom under the open sky.

Since 2007, the festival has brought together some of the best journalists and writers from around the world, and thousands of readers eager to queue for hours, take notes, and share ideas. For Samara, it also became the backdrop to her own love story — and a personal ritual of listening and learning.

Flipping through years of notebooks, she revisits the scraps of conferences that still echo today: Palestine and apartheid, the crises of Europe, hunger and inequality, Ukraine and nationalism. Some topics never fade, others evolve, and some compost into history — but all of them feed a way of living with eyes open to the world.

Mentioned:

• Festival di Internazionale, Ferrara (since 2007)
• Internazionale magazine – translating global journalism into Italian
  

What if your microphone, your shoes, a bullet, or a seashellcould tell their stories?
In this episode of Compost of Ideas – The Podcast from the Bin, I explore the strange and powerful role of objects in our lives. From Pimpa, the Italian red dog with polka dots created by Altan, to Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier, to the podcast Everything Is Alive and the museum project A History of the World in 100 Objects — we look at how objectshelp us imagine, distance ourselves from pain, discover other worlds, and remember who we are.

Mentioned:

• Pimpa, an Italian comic character created by Altan, surrounded by talking objects and playful distortions of reality.
• Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker: the Afghan war told through the voices of objects — boots, mines, saws. (Guardian)
• Everything Is Alive podcast, where objects and even a jellyfish are given voices.
• A History of the World in 100 Objects, exploring civilizations through things left behind.

Question for you:If one object could tell your story, which one would it be?Or: which object would you most want to hear from?

From Genocide to the Rights of Whales: Is the Rule of LawEvolving or Unraveling?

From Nuremberg to the Mar Menor lagoon, the rule of law has been stretching — first to protect individuals from the state, then to defend entire ecosystems, and now to speak for future generations. But what happens when the same laws that inspire awe are ignored by those in power?

In this episode, I thread together three moments in the legal imagination — crimes against humanity, the rights of nature, and intergenerational justice — to ask whether we are entering a new transformation, or watching the fabric of law come apart.

Show Notes

• Philippe Sands on The Ezra Klein Show – On the legal invention of crimes against humanity and genocide after WWII
• Ocean Vision Legal – Anna von Rebay – Pioneering legal work on the rights of nature and ocean protection

• The Outlaw Ocean Project – Reporting on slavery in the high seas and the gaps in international law

A giant red star stolen by helicopter in Sofia. A tree blooming wildly before it dies. The voices of those left adrift after an empire collapses.

In this episode, Samara explores what happens when systems — political, cultural, even symbolic — reach their breaking point. We’ll look at the absurd and tragic ways they unravel, how myths lose their power, and what emerges in the cracks.

Along the way:

• The stolen star of Sofia
• Solitaire Townsend – We’re Living Through a Death Flowering
• Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time (NYT Review)– the human stories and fragments after the Sovietcollapse
• Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Guardian Review) & Upheaval (Guardian Review) – why some societies adapt while others fail
• 
  

Is the system breaking down — or just blooming too hardbefore it falls? And when it does, what will we choose to plant in its place?