Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive. Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, the “add diversity and stir” model for syllabus design in many ways fails to a...

The HBS hosts discuss the role of superheroes in culture and popular media.  In American graphic fiction and contemporary film, the superhero stands at the center of many popular narratives. Superhero stories published by DC Comics and Marvel are a multi-million dollar per year industry and, in 2019 alone, superhero movies grossed 3.19 billion dollars in revenue. Although it may seem to the novice...

The HBS hosts take a critical look at the white working class and their grievances. Leading up to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and even more so afterwards, the U.S. found itself inundated with analyses of the allegedly “overlooked” grievances of the white working class. Were those legitimate grievances that should have been affirmed and addressed? Who belongs to the WWC in America,...

 The HBS hosts discuss conspiracy theories and what motivates people to believe in them.  The word "conspiracy" derives from the Latin con- ("with" or "together") and spirare ("to breathe"), and it seems like more and more people are breathing in the thin air of dubious explanations and bonding together over them. From Q-Anon to flat earthers to anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers to people con...

The HBS hosts lower themselves into the muck in this NSFW episode. Dr. Charles F. Peterson is in the hot seat for this episode’s discussion of vulgarity. What is the difference between obscenity, profanity, and vulgarity? Who determines what is “appropriate”? Is the very concept of vulgarity elitist? Full episode notes available at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

In advance of Rick Lee’s forthcoming book on laughter, co-hosts Charles and Leigh ask him why he thinks all “theories” of comedy are inadequate. What exactly is the “joke” part of a joke? Is comedy fundamentally formulaic or does it escape systematic analysis? What is happening when we laugh together– as the HBS co-hosts do a lot in this episode!– and how does laughter connect us to other people?...

Co-host Leigh M. Johnson is in the hot seat for this episode's discussion of digital afterlives. If we consider the "digital," information-based self to be distinguishable from the meatspace self, we should ask: how long can the Digital Me live on after my meatspace body dies? Technology already enables us to "re-animate" archives of personal information in many ways, and some futurists believe th...

This episode explores the political and ethical dimensions of the category of “citizen”. In anticipation of his soon-to-be-released book Beyond Civil Disobedience: Social Nullification and Black Citizenship (August, 2021), Charles sits down in the captain's "hot" seat for this episode's discussion of the limits of citizenship, the failure of the state, and the construction of new categories of pol...

The HBS hosts discuss how cities, once considered hubs of public life and interaction, have become increasingly segregated, partitioned, disconnected, and privatized. Drawing on his experience using the city of a Chicago as a classroom, Rick Lee asks: can we identify the material markers of "privatization" in contemporary cities? How do we know which parts of the city are for "us," which parts of...

Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Is the world in itself a mystery that science and philosophy take different routes to try to solve? How do luck, logic, empirical investigation, and intuition all work together to make sense of the world? What would a solution even look like? Are philosophers basically just detectives? Is a crime requisite to initiate investigations in mysteries? Is the unknown connected to Aristotle’s idea that p...

Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts talk about love. What is love? Is it a feeling? Is it a cosmic or metaphysical force? Is it a primary motivating drive to propagate the species or to create ideas? What happens when love goes wrong? Full episode notes at this link . ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts chat about our impending doom. Is the apocalypse nigh? Will it be environmental, political, technological, or biological? Can we imaging human beings existing in 50 years? 100 years? 5000 years? Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts take a look at the political, philosophical, cultural, and personal dimensions of nostalgia. Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

For Episode 6, the HBS hosts take a look at several of the metrics by which we are rated and ranked. We talk about grading, student evaluations, the Philosophical Gourmet Report (in professional Philosophy), social media algorithms, China's social credit systems, and we delve into some of Cathy O'Neal's arguments in *Weapons of Math Destruction.* Full episode notes at this link . ★ Support this po...

For Episode 5, the HBS hosts consider the last year living with COVID: what can we not believe that we did before COVID? what can't we wait to get back to doing? and what do we hope we never go back to doing? Full episode notes at this link .  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

For Episode 4, the HBS hosts look into the stories we tell, whether or not they are true, and what happens when those stories fall apart. Specifically, they discuss the various ways that origins are grounded in myths, documents, and self-narratives. By way of access into these problems, they take on the new Netflix series, Murder Among the Mormons , which centers around the story of Mark Hoffman,...

For Episode 3, Leigh M. Johnson is in the hot seat to explain why philosophers should be thinking more about emergent technologies. Co-hosts Shannon and Ammon make her seat hotter with questions about what counts as "intelligence," how close we are to the Singularity, whether robots will have feelings or should have rights, and which emergent technologies we should be excited (and worried) about i...

For Episode 2, Ammon Allred is in the hot seat to explain how thinking about aesthetic experience more seriously can free us from the hold of normativity. Co-hosts Leigh and Shannon make his seat hotter by forcing him to listen and respond to an atonal polka rendition of The National Anthem and then asking questions about what counts as art, what aesthetic experience does for us, whether or not no...

For our first episode of HBS, Shannon Mussett is in the hot seat to explain how the existentialist conception of freedom remains useful and important for Philosophy. Co-hosts Ammon and Leigh make her seat hotter with questions about how "radical" human freedom is, whether or not it is an illusion, why Shannon feels the urge to spontaneously drop babies, and the possibility of freedom for non-human...