Nikita’s Soviet experience ... The individual in Russian and English languages ... Toska, the noble Russian sadness ... Nikita's American friend, the murderer ... David’s Negative Mystical Experience and brush with Sai Baba ... What Nikita learned from DMT trips ... Creativity and depression ...

The fight, and meta-fight, in philosophy over trans issues ... David's essay on philosophy and activism ... The admonition to "go read the literature" ... Dan: The profession needs to push back against the mob ... Should philosophers avoid signing petitions? ... David regrets the "neglect of the ordinary virtues" in this battle ... How professors should teach controversial subjects ...

Nina's research on how we understand the self ... The traits that make your self yourself ... Buddhism and the continuity of self through time ... The link between egocentrism and an equanimous attitude toward death ... Bob: Not-self is hard to experience and very hard to understand ... Asian Buddhists vs. "white boy Buddhists" ... Does a happy life require virtuous behavior? ...

A brief history of 20th-century literary criticism ... John's battles against radical feminists as a grad student at SUNY Albany ... Post-structuralism and "how modernity failed itself" ... English department politics ... John: "Postmodernity is all around us" ... Postmodernity in the world vs. in the academy ... Post-postmodernism and cultural stagnancy ...

Why Alex shifted from international relations to quantum physics ... Alex: "We are walking wave functions" ... Do the origins of consciousness and free will lie in the wave collapse? ... Quantum decision theory and human irrationality ... The advantage of viewing humanity as quantum rather than classical ... How a nation-state is like a quantum state ... Alex: Language is best understood quantumly ... The possibility of collective consciousness ...

How Frederick became a Freudian and then an anti-Freudian ... Frederick: Psychoanalysis is the Metamucil of the intellectuals ... The politics of anti-Freudianism ... Why has Freud persisted in the public imagination? ... Frederick psychoanalyzes John ... Repressed memories as a Freudian legacy ... Frederick's new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion ...

Crispin's recent essay, "Western Philosophy as White Supremacism" ... Dan accuses Crispin of ahistorical revisionism ... Descartes as a product of his age ... Privileging the intellectual over the physical ... Is "the conquest of nature" a good or bad thing? ... Crispin: Metaphysics and racism feed each other ... Is self-mastery a key to freedom, or antithetical to it? ... The worst political philosophy, except for all the others? ...

Ron's new book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality ... A brief history of mindfulness in America ... Ron's critique of the corporate teaching of mindfulness ... A tool vs. a path ... Ron: The mindfulness industry individualizes social problems ... A call for civic mindfulness ... Can capitalism and spirituality be reconciled? ...

Journalism, from information scarcity to attention scarcity ... Is it harder to find “good” information these days? ... Oliver: Reliance on social media creates false controversies ... Has the mainstream media really drifted towards partisanship? ... How to dismantle the partisan divide ... Dan: Americans were more divided in 1968 than now ... Social injustice: Perception, reality, and urgency ...

Jenny’s new book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy ... Learning from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (part 1) ... Cultivating attention through art and mindfulness ... Josh’s critique of contemporary mindfulness ... How social media destroys context ... Jenny: “Aliveness is change” ... Learning from “Bartleby, the Scrivener" (part 2) ...