Something Interesting

Birds have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. And people have long looked to birds to explain humans. For Aristotle, birds were one of the nonhuman species closest to us. The similarities are noted, however, en route to arguing that human beings are distinct, unique, and elevated over the rest of nature. People constantly cherry-pick examples from nature to defend our behaviour o...

Being a person means constantly navigating deep and genuine uncertainty. We are uncertain about what we think, how we feel, what might happen, and what we should do. Being uncertain means confronting the limits of our knowledge or our foresight in our lifelong efforts to persist and thrive, to seek safety and security, to find companionship and community, so make some sense of the world. We live i...

Cuturally, we are both fascinated and repelled by guns. They play a huge role in our love of action films and our fears of criminal violence. There are deep divisions in knowledge and communication between the communities of people who do and do not own guns. The reality of guns is obscured and shaped by the stories we tell about them. In my early 40s, I took up hunting and became a gun owner. Cro...

Aphantasia refers to the absence of internal sense perceptions when remembering or imagining. It means knowing that you just ate a delicious chocolate cake, but not being able to re-experience its taste in your mind. People with visual aphantasia don't generate an image in their mind’s eye when hearing words like “apple” or “tree” or “dog.” The brain’s image-processing and memory systems are invol...

Something Interesting is an audio essay anthology that explores the philosophical, the political, and the personal. I’m Steve, your host. My background is eclectic. I headed to university to study Applied Physics but wound up doing a PhD on Holocaust memoirs. I've been programming computers since I was a kid, and when I escaped the academic world, I worked for years as a web developer. More recent...