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Some really weird shit you didn't know about taxes
Season 1 Episode 174
Why are taxes the secret weapon in so many science fiction and fantasy stories? And why the heck do archaeologists measure the complexity of ancient civilizations partly by looking at their taxation …
Published on 4 months, 2 weeks ago
Severance and the New Hellscape (w/ Carl Zimmer)
Season 1 Episode 173
Welcome to the new dystopian era. The series Severance, which just finished its second season, is perhaps the best-known of a fresh crop of dark, absurdist stories that tackle the horrors of high-tec…
Published on 5 months ago
Hip Hop x Cyberpunk (with clipping.)
Season 1 Episode 172
Hip hop group clipping. has just released a brilliant new cyberpunk-inspired album, Dead Channel Sky, and we're talking to the members about how hip hop and cyberpunk have inspired each other from t…
Published on 5 months, 2 weeks ago
"Interior Chinatown" Just Became a Very Weird TV Show (with Charles Yu)
Season 1 Episode 171
In his award-winning novel Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu took a scalpel to television's tropes and stereotypes. Now he explains to us how he managed to turn that book into a brilliant, challenging T…
Published on 6 months ago
Forced Feminization and Cute Robots
Season 1 Episode 170
We're catching you up on all the movies we've been watching recently, from The Substance to The Wild Robot, and a few themes emerged. One is that there are an awful lot of feminists who are mad about…
Published on 6 months, 2 weeks ago
No, We Don't Live in a F---ing Simulation!
Season 1 Episode 169
It's a fun thought experiment: what if the universe is a simulation, and nothing around us is real? But lately, some of the most powerful people in tech (and politics) have been saying they believe t…
Published on 7 months ago
Never Forget Where We Came From (with Tananarive Due and Nicola Griffith)
Season 1 Episode 168
History is on our minds lately. In this episode, we talk to two incredible authors who recreate history in their work. Tananarive Due draws on her own family's experience in her award-winning novel T…
Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago
The Truth About Gigantic Objects in Space (with Sarah Parcak)
Season 1 Episode 167
From Ringworld to Rama, space is full of mysterious giant objects created by ancient civilizations. Do these gorgeous macrostructures bring poetry to the prosaic genre of space opera? Or do we love t…
Published on 7 months, 4 weeks ago
Encore Episode: Fascism and Book Bans (with Maggie Tokuda-Hall)
Season 1
Here's one of our favorite episodes from 2024 — it's about the mass psychology of fascism, plus how to fight book bans. We talk to friend of the pod Maggie Tokuda-Hall from the wondrous organization …
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
Manufacturing loneliness
Season 1 Episode 166
Are we getting toxic messages from speculative fiction about what it means to be alone? We're tackling troubling tropes and eviscerating myths about where loneliness comes from. Later in the episode,…
Published on 8 months, 3 weeks ago