logo
episode-header-image
Jan 13
41m 50s

Sneak Preview: The Other Side of Change ...

Pushkin Industries
About this episode
tail spinning
Up next
Mar 2025
The Terminator from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.” Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intelligence. Why? Jill Lepore tours through a century of imagined robot rebellions, and argues that these stories are never only about robots. So wh ... Show More
27m 47s
Mar 2025
Body Snatchers from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and renamed it X. When asked why he wanted to own the social media network, Musk talked a lot about something he called the “woke mind virus.” Where does the idea of a mind virus come from? Jill Lepore looks to Cold War science f ... Show More
27m 24s
Mar 2025
Baby X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk adore concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful, immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at some of the science fiction that’s usually left out of this ... Show More
27m 52s
Recommended Episodes
Jun 2024
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams
The work of Douglas Adams - comic genius, futurologist and erstwhile hitchhiker - is the subject of this episode of Backlisted, in particular The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, first published by Pan Books in 1985. H2G2, as it is known to fans, was ... Show More
1h 21m
Sep 2024
From the Vault: The Mind of Douglas Adams, with Kevin Jon Davies
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Kevin Jon Davies about his new book “The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams,” detailing the mind of the author who gave us “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.” (originally published 08/31/2023)See omny ... Show More
43m 25s
Jul 2025
561. Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson
In this deeply personal interview, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with Scott Adams, cartoonist and creator of Dilbert, to explore the unlikely paths that shape a life—from illustrating a nationally syndicated hit comic to fatal illness and facing the metaphysical. Adams shares ... Show More
1h 24m
Sep 2024
Jean-Paul Sartre: 'Being and Nothingness'
This week, a chapter from a new LRB audiobook, Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre by Jonathan Rée. This collection of ten biographical pieces, read by Rée, describes the lives of some of most influential thinkers of the past four hundred years and the radical and sometimes ... Show More
35m 41s
Sep 2025
A landscape of consciousness | Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Hilary Lawson
<p>Will we ever reach a conclusive, agreed-upon theory of consciousness?</p><p>Over the millennia of recorded history, countless stories, theories, and arguments have emerged to explain the origins of consciousness. And yet, here we are in 2025 - post-Plato, post-Descartes, post- ... Show More
41m 19s
Sep 2025
Screaming Into the Void
<p>In August we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One about a fish that screams into the night – and the mystery of its counterpart ... Show More
57m 16s
Mar 2024
Escape From Pluto by William Oberfield - Short Science Fiction Story From the 1940s
<p><em>Exiled to Pluto's harsh wastes, Marcius Kemble listened eagerly to the evil voices planning his triumphant return. But even the Plutonians underestimated the flaming glory to which they sent him. Escape From Pluto by William Oberfield,</em> that’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi P ... Show More
23m 6s
Oct 2024
The world according to Werner Herzog
Sean Illing speaks with one of his heroes: Werner Herzog. Herzog is a filmmaker, poet, and author of the memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The two discuss "ecstatic truth," a term invented by Herzog to capture what he's really after in his work, why he's intereste ... Show More
56m 49s
Apr 2025
Book Club: Let’s Talk About Adam Ross’s ‘Playworld’
<p>Set in New York in the 1980s, Adam Ross’s new novel, “Playworld,” tells the story of a young actor named Griffin as he navigates the chaos of the city, of his family and of being a teenager, and the dangers that swirl around each. </p><p>Although “Playworld” grapples with blea ... Show More
43m 55s
Jan 2025
Book Club: Let’s Talk About Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘Our Evenings’
<p>The novel “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst, follows a gay English Burmese actor from childhood into old age as he confronts confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate in the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s the st ... Show More
47m 52s