Young Heretics

The game is on, Helen is abducted, and now it's time to gather the Greeks for war. There are lots of stories about how the Achaean forces made their way to Troy, and some of them--like the story of the Achilles heel--are permanently associated in the popular imagination with Homer's stories. But how many of them are actually in the  Iliad ? And what's Homer doing by making  this version of Achille...

Time's up! I gave you a weekend extension on the first-ever Young Heretics homework assignment, but now it's time to review some of the responses that came in. From a purely grammatical perspective, it turns out to be one of the most fascinating sentences in the English language, and the grammar actually has a little bit to say about the theology of the thing, too. As if you guys needed another re...

Stop me if you've heard this one: guy walks into a bar...and his head is an orange. If you know, you know. If you don't know, let me tell you how my favorite joke is also a perfect foil for the story that started it all in the Homeric universe, the Judgment of Paris. In hindsight it's pretty clear that Paris could have navigated the situation a little better, but...if you'da been there...if you'da...

I always say I don't want to step on any theological land mines. Then somebody tosses me a juicy theological question and it's like...LEEEEROOOOOOOOYYYYYYY JEENNNKINNNNS. Actually today's question is mostly about grammar, but it's also about transubstantiation and somehow also, the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Basically it's "what does 'is' mean?" And the answer is ... it's complicated. Buckle up! Che...

GUYS. Guys. They're making an Odysseus movie. With Ralph Fiennes. Will it be any good? Will it do well at the box office? Does this mean I finally have to learn how to spell "Fiennes"? I don't know. But I do know I've been waiting for an opportunity to go back to Homer on this show since way back in episode one. So get in, losers, we're telling the whole story of the Homeric epics, starting today...

Enough about politics! Let's answer the really tough questions in life. Is "Logos" an English word? How about Sitzfleisch? Algebra? Café? This week, in response to my previous Words, Words, Words episode, I got an exceptionally astute question about what makes something a "foreign word" versus simply a "loan word" that has been integrated into English. The answer is...#itscomplicated. But also ama...

This isn't a politics podcast, but sometimes politics comes for you. We've just lived through a deadly serious event--the kind that defines an epoch and brings us face-to-face with some of the most consequential political realities of our era. There couldn't possibly be a better use case for stepping back and using the archives of the Western Canon to get some distance on the situation. And there...

I know you've been waiting with bated breath...at long last, it's the much-anticipated conclusion to our two-part episode on what happens when a word just doesn't want to be translated. I've covered some bad options here, now I'm proposing a few good ones. These will help not just if you want to write a translation of your own, but if you're not interested in any of that noise and just want to pic...

Sex, violence, arson, theological disputes...the story of the Nika Riots has it all. Today, in response to a listener question, I'm telling one of history's most underappreciated stories about an utterly bananas and ultimately catastrophic breakdown in law and order that began with a rivalry over chariot racing. But the full story, like all sports stories, is about so much more than that. It revea...

If you thought I was all patriotism-ed out...you'd be wrong! The banger of a July 4 poem we read on Tuesday is a perfect chance to learn more about the basics of poetry analysis. Turns out, Tennyson was pretty good at like, writing poetry and stuff. His ode to England and America is an absolutely metal fusion of old-timey balladeer adventure and statetly classical grandeur. A perfect mash-up, kind...

It's not the most inspiring July 4 I've ever lived through, I'll say that much. But even after a thoroughly disorienting debate experience, and even with the Brits stealing thunder from our special day by hosting their own election (rude!), what we celebrate on the 4th isn't whatever happens to be going on at this particular moment, since in any given year it's likely to be grim. What we celebrate...

The conversation after this week's episode on demons and psychology has been so fascinating that I wanted to add one more thing. If on Tuesdays we wear pink, on Fridays we talk about language--so in this episode I'm exploring what it means to think about the transition from soul-talk to therapy-talk as an act of  translation , by which, as in all such cases, some things are lost and some are gaine...

Untranslatable...that's what you are...and forevermore...that's how you'll...stay? This week, prompted by a listener who's working on a very cool coding project, I'm talking a little bit about famously untranslatable words like logos, ruach, and my personal favorite, aphiēmi. It's an ancient problem, debated and fussed over basicaly since the Bible was written...can it be solved? Where to begin? I...

Is Anxiety a demon? It's a question raised, weirdly, by the most popular kids' movie in America right now--and by the entire practice of modern psycotherapy. Typically, when we try to understand mental illness, we refer to natural causes like brain chemistry or personal and family history. But are there some forms of cognitive disorder that don't originate within us--that invade us from the outsid...

Is AI taking on a life of its own? Or is it just a mindless machine?  Sly grin why can't we have both? Some of our earliest Western literature is fraught with the suggestion that one day we might make a machine so complex, it would think for itself. But what would that say about us? Our new, allegregorical way of talking about AI shows that when we fear that our machines might be like us, we're re...

Next time you want to get everyone's attention for a speech at a party, try this: stand up on a table, pound your mead-chalice on a hard surface (you've got a mead-chalice, right?) and shout HWÆT! No one will have any idea what you're saying, but they'll have no choice but to listen. That's the power of Old English. We've hit bedrock in our excavation of the history of English, which brings us to...

Mother nature is one of the most ancient pagan deities, and also one of the trendiest in modern times. What gives--why is a character whose name you can literally find carved into primitive rocks also being portrayed by Octavia Spencer in Apple PR campaigns? In this essay, I argue that Mother Earth or Mother Nature represents one of the most natural assumptions for humans to make about the world,...

I really enjoyed comparing notes with Johnathan Bi, whose journey in some ways mirrors my own: whereas I moved from a humanities background into an interest in science, Johnathan started in the science and tech world, then came to appreciate the importance of great literature. Together we discuss the rise of generalism, the promise and perils of the AI age, and what the canon has to teach us in ou...

Will we ever get to stop hearing about Dr. Fauci? Does anyone even remember COVID anymore? These are the sorts of profound questions that define our times. I will not be answering them. Instead, I want to tell you a Very Young Heretics story about how the pagan gods found their way into modern science--and why they might be finding their way back out again in the age of "The Science" (TM). Plus: i...

The prologue of The   Canterbury Tales used to be part of a standard-issue training set in English courses. Today I'm RETVRNing to tradition and rebooting the old practice of memorizing--or at least reciting--the first few lines of this defining English poem in Middle English. Plus: should whisky be spelled with an -ey, or a -y? The answer will show you just what a carnival the English language is...

Can Europe survive without its Christian spirit? Can the West? It's a question that's weighing on more and more intelligent people's minds, and Novalis helps us to grapple with it in a unique way. In this episode I look at three key areas--science, religion, and politics--where the secular spirit of Enlightenment humanism has exhausted itself and needs a new source of inspiration. Perhaps those so...

Are we on the brink of a return to Medieval wonder? A collapse into total warfare? Both? Bear with me while I present my Unified Field Theory of Human History in thirty minutes or less, by way of introduction to the mind-blowing essay "Christendom or Europe," by Novalis. He's the most important figure you've never heard of in Western literature, and now is the perfect time to get to know him, beca...

This week we're going still further back in time, and further north, to read some Middle English from the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight. It's a galloping adventure that's been translated by some of the greats--including J.R.R. Tolkien--and reading the original is a good chance to practice dipping your toe into the more obscure forms of English that make the past feel like another country. Pl...

So you want to defend the Western canon, huh? Why, exactly? In this episode I take a step back and ask why, outside of politics, we should care about books. Especially in the age of podcasts and digital media, with the publishing industry bleeding profits, it's easy to think of books as obsolete. But that might be exactly why we need them most--to hold ourselves together in a world of digital diss...

Have you ever thought about how weird it is that our oldest English literature is somehow...in another language? If you want to become a better communicator, understand your own history better, and just generally have an awesome time reading cool stories about knights and stuff, you could do no better than to read the great chivalric tales of the English past. But how to start? Today I'm embarking...