The End of the World with Michael and Stu

This week we are covering the 1993 film, Alive, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton. A sort of apocalypse in miniature, the movie depicts the miraculous survival of sixteen members of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains in 1972. 

We talk about the film's reputation, which perhaps surpasses its dramatic merits, while also considering the choices one wo...

This week we are tackling The Odyssey, both the ancient Greek epic and the recent adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan. We go over the context of the poem's composition and dissemination, its significance to the Greeks, and give a broad outline of the major incidents in the poem. Fear not, Zeus's Law is mentioned!

We discuss how the film compresses the twenty-four book epic into a three hour movie, as well as Nolan's use of...

This week we have a two pronged episode. We open up discussing the suit four states have brought against Meta, alleging the company has knowingly caused irreparable damage to millions of teens in promoting its harmful and addictive products to them. 

The bulk of the episode then looks at a recent, brilliant essay by Mathias Fuelling from Cosmonaut magazine on three works of non-fiction, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Th...

We're going back to where it all began; that's right, it's aliens, this time those friendly aliens from Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We talk about the general optimism and lack of paranoia in the film, contrasting it with more recent "first contact" narratives. We also get into the grittiness of Spielberg's early films, a texture he seems to have mostly outgrown by his 1990s blockbuster era. While the movi...

In honor of America's 250th birthday we are covering one of the landmark events in the nation's history, namely the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. We discuss why the assassination was so significant, the context of the recently concluded Civil War, and the precise nature of the conspiracy led by famous actor John Wilkes Booth. We detail Booth's outrageous actions after shooting President Lincoln, his attempts to flee "to Mexico"...

This week we are using a novel format to explore recent Supreme Court decisions. Stu presents Michael with a brief sketch of the case, Michael decides how he would rule, and Stu then reveals the actual decision arrived at by the justices. Topics covered include: gun rights, pollution, temporary protected status, immigration, transgender athletes in school sports, birthright citizenship, and internet age verification. Is Michael in ...

This week we are discussing the recent New York congressional primaries which have announced Zohran Mamdani's arrival as a new political "kingmaker" in the Democratic Party. We discuss the three candidates, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, go over the politics, and then chart the response from the centrist wing of the party, as led by Hakeem Jeffries. Is this a sign of hope for a more progressive moment in...

This week we are talking about the so-called utopian promise of the internet, the "information superhighway" as it was once known, and how it has, over the last thirty years, transformed into an information superhighway...to HELL. 

We look at some predictions and early ideas about the internet from the 90s before considering the critiques brought by Astra Taylor in the 2010s regarding the way the internet had been subverted by ...

This week we are discussing the Challenger space shuttle disaster, looking at what caused the shuttle to explode and how the aftermath specifically affected the psyche of the United States in the late 1980s. We also share personal recollections from the disaster, both as it happened and as a feature of our lives growing up as elder millennials. 

Challenger: The Last Flight on Netflix

Major Malfunction: A Recap of the Challe...

This week we're discussing the April 28, 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union and its aftermath. We use the 2019 HBO mini-series Chernobyl as our guide, despite some of its historical inaccuracies and acts of dramatic compression. We note, in particular, how those very acts of dramatic compression in fact work as a metonymy for the residual Cold War ideology that animates much of the show...

We're back covering a film that is directly in our wheelhouse this week, namely 2020's ridiculous apocalypse movie, Greenland, a Gerard Butler vehicle that explores what it's like to negotiate the aftermath of infidelity as the world around you is literally destroyed by fragments of a murderous comet. We get into all the timely news broadcasts, the Hobbesian AND Rousseauvian responses different people have to the end of the wo...

This week we are going over some recent news, including word of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the hypothetical "end" of the Iran War, the Pope's powerful statement warning against the hazards of AI for human dignity, and China's minor interventions in Cuba as that country comes more squarely into the sights of the United States. 

New York Times on the Ebola Outbreak

New York Times on the Iran War "Ending...

We're concluding our coverage of The Leftovers, going over the final season in detail. We debate the series' ending, entertain the hypotheticals offered within the show itself (Michael didn't have to think of one this week), and consider the parallels between the "sudden departure" and its aftermath and Covid-19 and its impacts on contemporary society. 

This episode contains spoilers for all three seasons of The Lefto...

After a 111 episode break, we're finally returning to one of our favorite shows about the end of the world, that's right, it's The Leftovers Season Two. To celebrate, we have recorded our longest ever episode. There are so many themes to dissect, characters to consider, hypothetical questions to ask...we had to do our best to do this tremendous season of television justice!

As was just implied, the episode opens with a tri...

This week we are covering recent events in the news, including NBA playoff conspiracies, time travel conspiracies about the recent attempted shooting of President Trump, the "missing scientists" conspiracy (which maybe, just maybe, ties into the attempted shooting), and the Supreme Court decision that has gutted the Voting Rights Act. We go over a lot of "interesting" ground, including speculating about the nature of conspiracies a...

This week we travel to the Americas to consider the Aztec conception of the afterlife. Unlike many of the cultures we have covered, the Aztecs put a great weight on the manner of your death in determining the location of your eternal (or not so eternal) rest. We also give a brief overview of the practice of human sacrifice, and the episode once again opens with more of Michael's patented hypotheticals.

The theme music for this episo...

This week we are going to Ancient Greece and exploring their vision of the afterlife. We talk about the judges in hell, about Hades, about all of our favorite denizens of Hades, such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Ixion, and we even relate the stories of Orpheus and Heracles and their journeys into the underworld. It's all here!

We open the episode with one of Michael's brain-bending hypotheticals...this one...is perhaps the most outrag...

Our occasional series, "A Brief History of the Afterlife," is BACK. This week we are covering the Zoroastrian vision of the afterlife, including the Chinvat Bridge, the four layers of heaven, the four layers of hell, Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, the historicity of Zoroaster, all of your favorites. While we don't get into any "hypotheticals" in this episode, there are searching questions about what, so far, may be the most appealing c...

It is finally here: the cybernetics episode! We go over the origins and basic concepts of the 20th century science of cybernetics, looking specifically at the work of Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson. We  draw on Stu's 2025 article "Cybernetics or the Evolution of Philosophy" from Do Not Research. 

We open the episode discussing Donald Trump's continuing bewildering comments on the Iran War.

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