Summer Reading List 2023
Jun 25, 2023What books should thoughtful people read this summer? Josh and Ray talk to the authors and editors of new and recent books as they comp...
Summer Reading Uncut
Devon Strolovitch
25 June 2023
Your friendly neighborhood Senior Prodcuer here, once again stepping out from behind the mixing board to bring you some bonus content from this week's 17th (!) annual Summer Reading special. Naturally we're most eager for you to listen to the edited broadcast and podcast, but there's always good stuff from each of the conversations we record for these multi-guest episodes that had to be left on the cutting-room floor.
This year's program actually begins on TV. Josh and Ken had previously talked about The Good Place on our 2018 episode, The New Golden Age of Television, with one the philosophers consulted by the show's producers, Pamela Hieronymi from UCLA. This year Josh and Ray went straight to the source and spoke to the show's creator, Michael Schur, about his own new book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. [Spoiler alert: there is not one correct answer to every moral question.]
For the next book on their list, the hosts revisited the topic of an epiosde from last year, Effective Altruism—a moral theory about doing the most good you can. Our guest for that program, Theron Pummer from the University of St. Andrews, had just written a book and was enthusiastic about the subject. But the theory has also been tied to some high-profile financial scandals and questionable pronouncements over the past year, so Josh and Ray were eager to talk to one of the editors of a new volume of essays critiquing Effective Altruism, old friend of the show Lori Gruen from Welseyan University.
And then for something completely different... Our final summer reading selection is Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran, Josh's colleague in the Stanford Division of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures (and current Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Arts). The book looks at how middle-class Russian writers began trying to represent the "voice of the people" in their novels—an issue with surprising resonances today.
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Related Shows
Summer Reading List 2023
Jun 25, 2023What books should thoughtful people read this summer? Josh and Ray talk to the authors and editors of new and recent books as they comp...
Effective Altruism
Aug 28, 2022Most people agree that it's good to help others, but philosophers disagree about how much good we need to do, and for whom.
The New Golden Age of Television
Sep 30, 2018They called it a “vast wasteland” in the 1960s, but TV is very different today. Freedom from the broadcast schedule means TV makers can...
Summer Reading List: Banned Books Edition
Jul 10, 2022The American Library Association reports that last year 1,597 books were challenged or removed from libraries, schools, and universities, a record high number (compared to 273 books in 2020).
Summer Reading List 2021
Jun 20, 2021As some parts of our lives return to a kind of normal, Josh and Ray ask authors and philosophers about what's been on their summer reading lists.
Blog Archive
Why do some people have a strange desire to do weird things for no (good) reason? There's something fascinating about kids who eat laundry soap as part of a “challenge,” or people who deliberately... Read more
Making a better world would be a great thing—but do we need philosophers to help us do that? Famously (or infamously), not all philosophers have been such great people. So are they the folks we... Read more
In her time—the 4th century CE—Hypatia was one of the most famous philosophers in Alexandria, and indeed in the ancient world. She studied and taught mathematics,... Read more
Mexican philosophy is full of fascinating ideas, from Mexica ("Aztec") and Mayan thought to Sor Juana’s feminism and Emilio Uranga’s existentialism... Read more
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Gender is a controversial topic these days. To some, gender is an oppressive system designed to keep women down: people go around saying "girls are made of sugar and spice and boys are made of... Read more
Fascism is on the rise, new infectious diseases keep cropping up, and we’re on the verge of environmental collapse: how on earth could art possibly save us? The arts are may be nice distraction,... Read more
Some say the world is full of contradictions, like “parting is such sweet sorrow.” Parting is sweet, but parting is also sad; and sweetness and sadness are opposites. But logicians would say that... Read more
Our minds are amazing prediction machines—and sometimes they can even make their predictions come true!
Does reading that strike you as something out of The Secret—like if you... Read more
Derek Parfit was a really interesting thinker when it came to identity and the self. He had a particularly cool thought experiment involving tele-transportation.
Suppose you’re on your... Read more
When philosophers talk about perception, they tend to focus on what we see and hear, and rarely on what we smell. But olfaction is a strange sense that deserves greater philosophical scrutiny. For... Read more
A caller in this week's episode nominated "Women Talking" for a Dionysus Award. Guest co-host Jeremy Sabol takes that as a springboard to blog about movies and... Read more
This week we’re thinking about Cancel Culture, which some consider a real problem: people losing their jobs, being harassed online, their home addresses being shared—all because they said... Read more
This week we’re asking why we should trust science—which may sound like a weird question. After all, why would we doubt the method that helps us build bridges and skyscrapers, formulate life... Read more
Following up on last year's not-so-new experiment, here's a little behind-the-scenes look into the brief audio montages (produced... Read more
This week we’re asking what it’s... Read more
This essay also appears at the website of Oxford University Press, publisher of Josh's new book,
"The World According to Proust."
... Read more
This week we’re thinking about how to create a world in which our leaders are not just effective legislators, but also good people.
Some might think there are not enough leaders like that... Read more
This week we're thinking about the British Liberal tradition and its relationship to colonialism and self-government. Classical Liberal thinkers, like John Locke and John Stuart Mill, held that... Read more
This week we’re thinking about Collective Action and Climate Change. With floods and fires getting more frequent and intense, and with the summer just ended shattering heat records around the... Read more
This week we’re thinking about cultural appropriation and asking who owns culture—which may be a weird way of thinking about it. It's easy to see how somebody can own the rights to a song they... Read more
This week we’re questioning Effective Altruism. That’s Peter Singer’s idea that you should do the most good you can, and you should figure out what that is by doing your homework and choosing the... Read more
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Comments (3)
alinabella
Monday, August 21, 2023 -- 7:24 AM
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lisanguyen
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