This one comes at the intersection of Sense & Sensibility and art history. I’ve been interested in the idea of the sublime–almost a “so bad it’s good” kind of thing, but not in the way you’d expect–for a while now. Courtney does a great job here of exploring it with me.

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Both this week’s and next week’s pairings were inspired by a viewing of the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson movie this past Super Bowl Sunday. I wonder what would have happened if I had watched the game.

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Of the six (six!) college and grad school professors who I approached for Necessary & Sufficient, Rachel was the only one who wrote me back. Good thing too, as I could not have asked for a better…what’s the best term here? Interviewee? Conversationalist? Foil?

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I feel like I’ve been having this kind of conversation with Lukas forever, and I’m so happy that I finally got one on tape. As anybody who knows us can probably guess, I edited this down to a tidy 23 minutes from a much, much longer discussion.

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Another pair of words with a strong “which would you rather be?” factor. I suppose we’re all weird and strange, in our own ways. How about you?

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Raquel, as one might expect, threatens to undermine the conceit of the exercise and turn our nice, neat duality into a sort of Ham & Cheese & Schmaltz Mexican standoff slash Kubrickian triangular conflict. We recover.

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Amazingly and improbably, after recording this conversation but before posting it, the guest on next week’s episode suggested that I do an episode on this very topic. Completely out of the blue. I immediately knew that I had hit on something out there in the cultural zeitgeist. Lightning in a bottle, if you will. Will you?

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This was a blast–a chance to reconnect and ruminate with my old North Hall pal Sofia Klatzker-Miller. I think that I may have first encountered the idea of signal and noise in the title of a song by Peter Gabriel, another figure who loomed large to my 1993 self.

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This was a blast–a chance to reconnect and ruminate with my old North Hall pal Sofia Klatzker-Miller. I think that I may have first encountered the idea of signal and noise in the title of a song by Peter Gabriel, … Continue reading →