No Shortcuts to Now

🎧 Waypoint 6.5 — The King of No Kings: The Contingent Crown This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through myth, history, philosophy, and the stories that shape the civilizations we inherit. In this episode: a democracy under siege, a mercenary's invasion, a general's ambition, a constitution carved in stone, a mother teaching her son to sing—and a philosopher who discovers...

🎧 Waypoint 6.4 — The Heir of Pain: Birth Pangs of a Democracy This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through myth, history, philosophy, and the stories that shape the civilizations we inherit. In this episode: a king flaunting his wealth before the Mediterranean world, a miraculous chariot victory, a poet paid to praise the gods, a people forced to pay the bill, foreign mer...

“When, then, does the soul attain to truth?”—Plato, Phaedo Cyrene became the Athens of Africa. One of the great minds the ancient city produced was the geometer Theodorus, who lived in the age of Socrates. Before him, the Pythagoreans believed the universe was governed by mathematical harmony and could be measured using only whole numbers and fractions. But then Theodorus fitted one right triangle...

🎧 Waypoint 6.2 — To Refuse a God: The Crescent Shape of Certainty This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through myth, history, and the stories that shape the civilizations we inherit. In this episode: a stammerer commanded by a god, an island broken into the shape of a crescent, two ships turned back by fear, a fisherman abandoned on a barren rock, and the long search for...

🎧 Waypoint 6.1 — Where There Is a Hole in the Sky: The Lady of the Lovely Arms This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through myth, history, and the stories that shape the civilizations we inherit. In this episode: seven white swans, a sea nymph hidden in the name of an alpine flower, a huntress who wrestles a lion with her bare hands, and the founding myth of the ancient c...

🎧 Field Note 5.6 — Of ICE and Men: Curley Edition This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through memory, literature, and the stories we tell ourselves about strength. In this episode: a Halloween night, two seventh-grade boys, a confession more than forty years old, and a question that still lingers: What does it really mean to be tough? Set in a small mountain town in the...

🎧 Field Note 5.5 — The Ballad of Bill and Bud This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through myth, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves to get through the day. In this episode: a gas station, a Reagan-era paycheck, two men who share a shift but not a worldview, and a question that won't stay buried: What's the difference between what a man believes about himself and wh...

🎧 Waypoint 5.5 — Black Swans and Sacrificial Goats This audio essay continues the journey of No Shortcuts to Now through myth, memory, philosophy, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode: black swans, Greek oracles, Karl Popper, and a simple question: What is the difference between suspicion and knowledge? Drawing on Popper’s philosophy of falsifiability, the fall of Croesus, and the trag...

🎧 Waypoint 5.4 — Not Every Riddle: The End of Inquiry This is the final audio installment of the Oedipus cycle — part of No Shortcuts to Now, a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode: The servant is summoned. A messenger arrives from Corinth. And the inquiry Oedipus refused to abandon finally returns its answer. Part IV of the Oedipus cycle brings the arc to...

🎧 Waypoint 5.3 — The Man You Seek This is the latest audio installment of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode:Oedipus ascends the throne of Thebes after answering the riddle of the Sphinx. But when plague strikes the city, the search for truth begins to turn inward. Tiresias speaks. Jocasta remembers. A crossroads returns. Part III...

“We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.” —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Part II Descending from Mount Parnassus along the Pythian way, Oedipus traveled east toward the sunrise. By midday he had reached the triple meeting of roads. Behind him rose Delphi. Before him two roads diverged. One bent toward Daulia’s quieter fields. The other led...

🎧 Nine Moons Certain: A Fate Unfalsifiable (Part I of III) What makes a belief dangerous? This is the first installment in a three-part cycle exploring the myth of Oedipus through an epistemic lens—drawing on the philosophy of Karl Popper and the problem of unfalsifiable belief. In this episode: prophecy and certainty, doubt and identity, the word that cannot be unheard, and the quiet beginning o...

🎧 Veni, Vidi, Vaccine What does it mean to be master of your fate—when history is still unfolding around you? This is the next audio installment of No Shortcuts to Now —a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode: the Ides of March... a long-awaited vaccine…a quiet California parking lot… a moment of misrecognition…and the fragile line between fear, laughter, a...

🎧 Waypoint 4.6 — The Dolphin’s Always Right This is the next audio installment of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. Question: If wisdom begins with admitting what we do not know, why are people so eager to follow those who claim certainty? In this episode: the rebirth of Dionysus, the return of Apollo to Delphi, the Pythia’s ritual trance, Socra...

🎧 Waypoint 4.5 — Only the God Changed: On the Return of the Repressed What happens when a god dies—but the ritual remains? This is the next audio installment of No Shortcuts to Now —a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode: a goat in a chasm, vapors rising through fractured stone, the birth of the Oracle at Delphi, geology beneath theology, Nietzsche on inve...

🎧 Waypoint 4.4 — The Oracle at Dolphin: The Dragon Still Breathes What survives when power buries what it fears? In this Waypoint, we return to Delphi—to the cave beneath the polished marble, to the dragon who guarded the earth’s navel, and to the god who claimed the site as his own. The slaying of Python is often told as a simple triumph myth. Here, it becomes a meditation on how authority estab...

🎧 Field Note 4.3 — X Marks the Name of the Father What does power reveal when it stops guarding its words? In this Field Note, we listen closely to a White House press conference delivered one year into the administration. Rather than arguing with its claims, the piece attends to its language—its slips, repetitions, and sudden turns inward. As speech loosens, private memory and public authority b...

🎧 Waypoint 4.3 — The Wombstone Why does power fear what comes next? In this episode, we enter the ancient myth of Cronus—the Titan who devours his children to stop time, prevent succession, and secure his rule. Drawing on Greek myth, etymology, and cosmological symbolism, this waypoint traces a recurring pattern: liberation hardening into domination, anxiety masquerading as wisdom, and authority...

🎧 Field Note 4.2 — An Ontology of Equality Why authority collapses when it forgets the ground that made it possible. What does it mean to say that all beings are equally real —and what changes when we take that claim seriously? In this Field Note, we pause along the trail to reflect on the conceptual ground crossed in Waypoints 4.1 and 4.2, moving from questions of knowledge and language into que...

🎧 Waypoint 4.2 — The Wombfish How sea-goddesses, dolphins, eggs, and fish with feet reveal the deep, watery origins we still carry within us. What does it mean to remember that we come from the sea—and never fully left it? In this episode, we descend from Lassen’s alpine slopes into deep time, following a trail that runs from mountain heather and melting snow into mythic oceans, ancient wombs, an...

🎧 Waypoint 4.1 — Of Roots, Rhizomes, and Fish with Feet: The Lurid Bait of Egotism How mountain heather, ancient rhizomes, and deep time unmask the arrogance of kings, conquerors, and modern Ozymandians. What happens when we stop mistaking what blooms for what endures? In this episode, we climb Lassen’s volcanic slopes—where butterflies rise on summer winds, heather crowns the blasted heath, and...

🎧Waypoint 3.4 — From the Rhetoric of Valley Forge to the Forge of Fallacies How Reagan empowered creationism, undermined science education, and reshaped the American political landscape. What happens when presidential rhetoric sanctifies doubt over discovery? In this episode, we travel back to August 1980—when Ronald Reagan told a stadium of evangelical voters that he had “a great many questions”...

🎧 Waypoint 3.3 — “Faith, Fury, and the Ditto-Headless Horsemen of the Post-Truth Apocalypse” What happens when the Medal of Freedom becomes a prop in the post-truth carnival? Ecce homo. In this episode, we revisit the 2020 State of the Union—when a reality-television president draped the nation’s highest civilian honor over the shoulders of a talk-radio demagogue. From Rush Limbaugh’s “AIDS Updat...

🎧 Field Note 3.2 — All the King’s Candy What do we swallow when we crave certainty, and who’s feeding it to us? In this episode of No Shortcuts to Now : childhood sweetness and modern certainty; gum scraped from the sidewalk; Sunday school lessons and post-truth prophets; how a sour little candy foretold an empire of outrage. 👉 Subscribe to No Shortcuts to Now 📖 Prefer to read? The full text is...

🎧 Waypoint 3.2 — The Loudest Belch: Reagan’s Revolution & the Birth of Outrage Media When did truth become a matter of volume? When did anger start selling better than honesty? This is the second episode of season three of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times. In this episode, we travel from the Revolutionary stage at Valley Forge to the volcanic sl...