There are two kinds of apocalypse. One is the question of survival in which one inevitably loses. Night of the Living Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are in this category. Here one attempts to survive, but fails. We see protagonists struggle against impossible odds that ultimately overwhelm them.

Another great discussion with Ryan Reeves. Topics include academic fads, hotels and traveling, doing voices and channeling Karl Barth, and the oddity of the "van Gogh effect."

The PBS special, Hamilton’s America (beyond what I guess should be called a donation-wall), is really remarkable in and of itself. You get glimpses of the show, interviews, and locations. Bbrief interviews range from President George W. Bush to Senator Elizabeth Warren, and there’s a great shot of Lin-Manuel Miranda looking up at Hamilton’s statue in Grand Central Park. Miranda, working with Ron Chernow’s magisterial biography, has revitalized Hamilton’s place in American history. He is no longer an outsider, but an insider.

Season 1 ended with a cliffhanger episode with our first guest, Jason Fout. How did things end? Find out with season 2, as we chat about the oddity that is the American Academy of Religion.

Marie Kondo’s approach to organization is, in many ways, very ancient, as it sees material things as a burden. She is deeply opposed to keeping things just for the sake of keeping them. To hang onto things, simply because we “might” want them someday, creates a burden in the psyche.

The New York Times has an article about the polarizing effect of new media. It's an argument that's been around for several years: we have lost a shared cultural television experience with the proliferation of cable and internet entertainment. Shows such as "All in the Family" and "Mash" were watched by nearly everyone in their time, but today people pick and choose and time-shift their entertainment. As thin as television can be (so the argument goes), at least in the old media days it was a shared experience and common cultural language.