Episode 255: Beloved Child of the House (Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi")
Explicit content warning
02/28/23 • 103 min
1 Listener
David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke’s "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and even Parfit. The first part of our conversation is spoiler-free so you can listen to that section if you haven’t read it yet. (But seriously read this book! We both read it in a few days.)
Plus, watch out ladies - Sydney the Bing chatbot is coming to steal your man.
Sponsored By:
- BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Links:
- Why a Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York Times
- Kevin Roose’s Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot: Full Transcript - The New York Times
- From Bing to Sydney – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke [amazon.com affiliate link]
- Piranesi (novel) - Wikipedia
- The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi - Vox — Carla Baricz’s reading of Piranesi through the Romantics, at Ploughshares
- Piranesi’s Disenchanted World
- Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors | The New Yorker
David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke’s "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and even Parfit. The first part of our conversation is spoiler-free so you can listen to that section if you haven’t read it yet. (But seriously read this book! We both read it in a few days.)
Plus, watch out ladies - Sydney the Bing chatbot is coming to steal your man.
Sponsored By:
- BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Links:
- Why a Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York Times
- Kevin Roose’s Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot: Full Transcript - The New York Times
- From Bing to Sydney – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke [amazon.com affiliate link]
- Piranesi (novel) - Wikipedia
- The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi - Vox — Carla Baricz’s reading of Piranesi through the Romantics, at Ploughshares
- Piranesi’s Disenchanted World
- Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors | The New Yorker
Previous Episode
Episode 254: Nobody's Parfit
Tamler’s earlier self committed to doing an episode on Parfit, and David holds his current self to that promise, which shows how unconvinced David was by Parfit’s skepticism about personal identity. Or something like that. We argue about the value of Parfit’s sci-fi thought experiments and the implications of believing there’s no clear sense of “me.” Plus, we talk about a recent article on aphantasia – the inability to conjure images in your mind – and the question that pops into everyone’s head when they hear about this condition.
Sponsored By:
- BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Links:
- Aphantasia - Wikipedia
- Can't See Pictures in Your Mind? You're Not Alone. - The New York Times
- The Vividness Of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (the “aphantasia Test”)
- Break Music | Backslide by peez
- How To Be Good | The New Yorker (Profile on Derek Parfit by Larissa MacFarquar)
- Parfit, D. (1971) Personal Identity, The Philosophical Review, 80, 3-27.
Next Episode
Episode 256: The Right to Punish?
Here’s an episode with something for both of us – a healthy serving of Kantian rationalism for David with a dollop of Marxist criminology for Tamler. We discuss and then argue about Jeffrie Murphy’s 1971 paper “Marxism and Retribution.” For Murphy, utilitarianism is non-starter as a theory of punishment because it can’t justify the right of the state to inflict suffering on criminals. Retributivism respects the autonomy of individuals so it can justify punishment in principle – but not in practice, at least not in a capitalist system. So it ends up offering a transcendental sanction of the status quo. We debate the merits of Murphy’s attack on Rawls and social contract theory under capitalism, along with the Marxist analysis of the roots of criminal behavior.
Plus – the headline says it all: Blame The Brain, Not Bolsonaro, For Brazil’s Riots.
Sponsored By:
- BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
- ReThinking with Adam Grant
Links:
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