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Curing the Human Condition: On 'Wild Wild Country'
Episode 99
In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Countr…
4 years, 7 months ago
Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica
Episode 98
Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound…
4 years, 8 months ago
Art in the Age of Artifice
Episode 97
The question of art has been of central concern for JF and Phil since Weird Studies began in 2018. What is art? What can it do that other t…
4 years, 8 months ago
Beautiful Beast: On Jean Cocteau's 'La Belle et la Bête'
Episode 96
Jean Cocteau's visionary rendition of Madame de Beaumont's fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," itself the retelling of a story that may be se…
4 years, 9 months ago
Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's 'The Fifth Child'
Episode 95
Doris Lessing's uncategorizable oeuvre reached strange new heights in 1988 with the publication of her short novel The Fifth Child. The stor…
4 years, 9 months ago
All is Mysterious: On the Moon Card in the Tarot
Episode 94
"Here is a weird, deceptive life." Thus does Aleister Crowley describe the meaning of one of the most sinister and spectral cards in the tar…
4 years, 9 months ago
Living and Dying in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment
Episode 93
In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world aft…
4 years, 10 months ago
Glitch in the Matrix: A Conversation with Rodney Ascher
Episode 92
With his latest film, a meditation on what it means to believe we live in a computer simulation, Rodney Ascher has once again placed himself…
4 years, 10 months ago
On Susanna Clarke's 'Piranesi'
Episode 91
In this episode, Phil and JF explore the vast palatial halls of Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. Set in an otherworld consisting of endless …
4 years, 11 months ago
'The Owl in Daylight': On Philip K. Dick's Unwritten Masterpiece
Episode 90
Weird Studies has so far devoted just one show to Philip K. Dick, and that was way back in April 2018, with episode 10, "Adrift in the Multi…
4 years, 11 months ago