Young Heretics

We are truly on the home stretch now--folding up the frame story around Odysseus' adventures, we can see there are three women that walk beside him on his way back to Ithaca. Each of them, in her own way, must love him without holding on to him, as he goes through the painful process of recovering who he is after all the accretions of war and wandering have been stripped away. It's an epic drama b...

We're so back, folks--it's Words, Words, Words, our series on translation! Election or no, we stay translating Homer. This time I've taken one of the passages from our Odyssey walkthrough--the summoning of the dead in Book 11--and compared versions from the 1700s to today. What sorts of compromises do translators have to make, and how well have different translators (including me) made them? We'll...

We're nearing the last leg of Odysseus' journey, and he's really caught between a rock and a hard place. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Between...well, between Scylla and Charybdis. After a dramatic turning point among the dead, Odysseus is now faced with what he says is the saddest and most pitiable horror he has ever seen on all his suffering journeys across the sea. What is it--and wo...

It's been just under a week since my new book,  Light of the Mind, Light of the World was released. In that time, I've been privileged to have a whole array of wonderful conversations about the book and its themes. One of the most stimulating, wide-ranging, and enjoyable of those was with the UCSD physicist Brian Keating, who asked well-framed and fascinating questions about the reconciliation of...

I was startled when I walked into my living room today to find Andrew Klavan (no relation) sitting in my chair! But while he's in town I thought we might as well talk about his new book,  A Woman Underground , the latest in the Cameron Winter series. It's a detective story that's at once gripping and intellectually fascinating, so we explored some of the influences and themes that make this book a...

It's about time for our Halowe'en special--and as luck would have it, I can think of no more chilling or eerie storie than the one we have to tell today. It's Odysseus' meeting with the shadows of the dead in the  Odyssey Book 11. In it, both Odysseus and Homer must confront the ultimate existential crisis and grapple with the possibility that life itself ends in nothing but worm food. So why go o...

Who doesn't love a free sample? This week, to change it up, I'm offering a sneek peak behind the paywall at rejoiceevermore.substack.com, where I've been creating an audiobook of John Milton's epic  Paradise Lost . Hard to believe it's almost done! But to entice you to join, and to solicit suggestions for what to record next, here's the latest installment, in which Adam--newly expelled from Paradi...

Life is very hard for Odysseus. He's lost comrades to war and to people-eaters of both the one- and two-eyed varieties. He's far from home, wandering at sea, and now, after all that...he has to go to bed with a beautiful goddess. Please bow your heads in a moment of silence. Truly, though, the island of Aeaea, where Circe the witch lives, does represent a major trial that Odysseus must go through...

Translation should be impossible--but it works. Does that prove there's such a thing as universal, objective reality? For that matter, what would "objective" reality even mean? This week, thanks to a listener question, I'm lead to the heart of these ancient mysteries via Aristotle, Kant and...Kanye West? Plus: the  Light of the Mind book tour begins! Guess where I am this week... SIGNUPS OPEN: Reg...

Ah, the state of nature: a peaceful utopia where each man is free to live off his own vineyards, sit under his own fig tree, and eat people alive. Wait--what?? In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Homer gives us a diabolical bait-and-switch, from the pure serenity of primitive life to the gruesome horrors of a world without law. It's the perfect antidote to the wishful thinking that might set in around elect...

Let's pick up where we left off last week: words are symbols of symbols, representing inward states of the soul. But those inward states are  also symbols, because the world is symbolic--that is, it naturally produces symbols as a real feature of its construction. So...what do we do about it? To answer that question we turn to Thomas Aquinas, whose little book  De Natura Verbi Intellectus tells yo...

The  Odyssey begins with a big empty space where Odysseus should be. His home, his familiy, his household are all suffering for want of him. But where is he--and more importantly, who is he? That's the poem again and again and today, we begin trying to answer it. If there's one thing everyone remembers from this poem it's the adventure stories in the middle: the Cyclops, Circe, the Lotus Eaters. W...

If a tree falls in the forest...does it make a sound? There's actually a great answer to that question, and Aristotle just tweeted it out way back when. Today, in response to a listener question, I finally lay it all on the line and tell you my nuts-and-bolts theory of translation, which is also a theory of the world. It's basically Aristotle, with some Thomas Aquinas mixed in: the mysteries of th...

Let's check in on how Odysseus' other buddies from Troy are doing. *Briefly scans news report from Proteus* Yeah so uh it's a dumpster fire. Today Telemachus arrives at Troy, where he hears from Menelaus about his own fraught journey home, including his encounter with an immortal seal dad (real) which led to the first news of Odysseus in years. It won't bring him home but it will bring his son hop...

The name "Rosetta Stone" has great brand recognition, but how much do you really know about Ptolemy V's royal decree? When you get right down to it, it's one of the wildest little corners of world history, stretching from the conquests of Alexander the Great to the defeat of Napoleon, with lots of bonkers facts in between. Plus it'll help us uncover more about the nature of language, logic, and hu...

The  Odyssey  is a very different poem from the  Iliad  in many ways, but in one way it picks up right where the  Iliad  leaves off: with the fallout of war and the journey to re-integrate soldiers back into the civil society they came from. Today we begin Odysseus' long journey home, which actually begins at the end and works backward, starting with his son Telemachus' journey to grow to manhod w...

Is prophecy a species of translation, or encryption, or both? This fascinating question, prompted by last week's episode on quantum cryptography, breaks down into two different sub-questions: how do prophets receive and communicate their messages, and how should we understand them? There are lots of ways to go wrong here--think doomsday cults--but also some fascinating ways to go right that help r...

Fall is in the air, which means the time has come for us to close out our study of the  Iliad . From book 16 to the end in book 24, the poem engages in what remains one of the most enduring subtle studies of rage, war, grief, and even PTSD that the human mind has ever produced. It shows us the roots of all tragedy in our own lives and throughout history, leaving the stage set for a new adventure i...

Ifmmp! After months spent explaining how communicating works in different languages, I've gotten a question about now  not  communicating works, in any language. Turns out the answer will take us through ancient mysticism, the invention of computers, and the technology behind Bitcoin...all in 30 minutes! At the end of it all, a tl;dr on what we should think about the race to build bigger faster qu...

If I were making a movie of the  Iliad  (a good one, not the Brad Pitt version of  Troy ), there's no question the trailer would have to include today's central scene: Hector and Andromache on the wall. This is the money shot that reveals the poem in its full greatness, honest and sober about the realities of war but capable of mourning with those who suffer defeat. The Trojans might be the most i...

"A word is a kind of painting of which the subject is a thought," wrote Nicolas Beauzée. Even an Enlightenement Frenchman is right twice a day. But where does that leave the written word--as a picture of a picture of a thought? Yes, I argue in this episode, and there's profundity in that which goes far beyond the history of alphabets--though that is, in its own right, exceptionally cool too. It's...

The cotton gin, the railroad, the printing press, the internet...there are plenty of candidates for the world's biggest tech revolution, but the biggest one might be one we've never even thought about before. And it has to do with how we process language, so naturally...I'm obsessed. PLUS: in a very special announcement, all my listeners are invited to join me at New College Florida this fall seme...

And we're off to the races! The  Iliad  begins in earnest this week with the outbreak of the feud between Achilles and Agammemnon (#TeamAchilles). The drama that unfolds contains almost the entirety of all that was to come in Greek culture, from the terror of hubris to the magnificent achievement of city-states in coalition. Plus: stick around to the end for a bunch of very cool announcements. Tru...

Is the  Iliad  just a cautionary tale about toxic masculinity? Or is there something deeper at work in Achilles' murderous rage? To really understand the poem, you have to understand--and internalize--what it means to live in an honor culture, and to seek justice in a universe that makes no guarantees. After listening to this episode you can understand the story of the poem as it was meant to be u...

What a time to be alive. New Euripides just dropped! Results are pouring in not only from the AI project that's unearthing new passages from the charred scrolls of Herculaneum, but also from the good old-fashioned method of leafing through mounds of old scrolls. Some of it is directly related to everything we've been talking about in Homer and the mythic cycle. It's the only Young Heretics news th...