You have ants. We all have ants, but do we KNOW ants? Get ready for cult-leader queens, bullet ant stings, kitchen pest hacks, the dynamics of a billion-sister megacolony. Dr. Terry McGlynn sits down to have a BIG discussion about itty-bitty creatures in this encore because I was out of town seeing my family and just needed a week off. Learn about tropical ants, urban ants, how they walk on water, which ones are picky eaters, which ones make weird sounds, what ant movies are bunk, and some help-help takeaways. Also: sniffing your relatives before deciding to kill them. Ooooh, it’s a classic.
A long-awaited report confirms rumours that have consumed Boris Johnson’s premiership. He may be weakened, but early signs suggest he will not fall. One year after Myanmar’s military coup, the protest mood has not faded; the murderous junta is failing to rule and the country is falling apart. And the pain of losing one’s native tongue in a foreign land.
Bundle up for a smol, classroom-friendly episode with Princeton University evolutionary biologist and Thermophysiologist Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton. You’ll learn about everything from heat tolerance to frostbite, anti-freeze woodfrogs to icy alligators, why some people run hot, why your toes run cold, how a fever is like a honeybee, how geography influences our body composition, why mammoths are big, and why you should grab your hat before running out the door. Also: what counts as “balmy” in Alaska.
The idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is often trotted out as a metaphor for understanding empathy. The act of imagining someone else’s reactions may be hard, but based on the body of work by George Loewenstein, predicting how -- under varying circumstances -- we might walk in our own shoes may not be all that easier.
Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His enormous range of research interests can be boiled down, after a lot of boiling, to applying psychology to economics and, more recently, economics to psychology.
His career as a founder of both behavioral economics and neuro-economics has seen him delve deeply into how we react when our “affective state” is cold – when are emotions are absent and our physical needs are currently met – compared to when our affective state is hot. The latter is when out emotions are active or when our passions, as the old philosophers might term things like things hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, are pulling us.
It turns out, as he explains to interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “when we are in one affective state it’s difficult for us to imagine how we would behave if we were in a different affective state. … The worst mistakes we make are when we are in a cold state, because we just can’t imagine how we would behave if we were in a hot state.”
While this may seem like something we know intuitively (or after years of high-profile experiments by Lowenstein, his frequent collaborator Leaf VanBoven, and others have conducted, several described in this podcast), it’s not something we act on intuitively. “No matter how many times we experience fluctuations in affective states,” Loewenstein says, “it just seems we don’t learn about this. We are always going to mis-predict how we’re going to behave when we’re in a hot state if we’re making the prediction when we’re in a cold state.”
This, in turn, affects the products of people who make predictions (or if you prefer, policy prescriptions) as a profession, he adds, such as economists.
“According to conventional economics, when we make decisions about the future we should be thing about what it is will we want in the future. What all of these results show is that your current state influences your prediction about what you’re going to want in the future; it influences these decisions that we make for the future in unproductive, self-destructive ways.”
The biggest Dry January ever just ended, but we noticed something strange: A bunch of new alcohol. Joe Rogan and Neil Young’s Spotify duel has ended and we have a winner. And while it’s Crypto Winter for cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin Ben has lost ½ his value since November), it’s Crypto Spring for crypto-companies (one just hit a $32B valuation).
$PEP $KO $SPOT
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“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style.
In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski’s “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century.
Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura.
As we celebrate the beginning of Black History Month, conservatives are actively and aggressively silencing educators’ ability to talk honestly about history. Book bans are gaining steam with schools banning everything from "The 1619 Project," to Toni Morrison’s "Beloved," to Art Spiegelman’s "Maus." Journalist and activist George M. Johnson joins us to discuss the issue from an author’s perspective after their book, "All Boys Aren’t Blue," was targeted for removal in at least 14 states.
And in headlines: A Georgia judge rejected plea agreements in the federal hate crime trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael, the FDA granted full approval of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine, and The New York Times announced it had acquired Wordle.
