Extended Summer Listening for Dangerous Times
Once again it’s that time of year when your local radio producer takes you behind the scenes of our Summer Reading special. This year’s edition was itself a bit special, not only because the episode is back after a hiatus in 2025, but because yours truly sat in as co-host. I’ve lent my voice to the program before in various Roving Philosophical Reports (including two stints as actual reporter), and I’ve been hosting a blues show on KALW for almost as long as I’ve been working at Philosophy Talk. But playing co-host here was arguably a step up for this lapsed linguist.
The theme for this year’s episode grew more or less organically out of the books we chose to spotlight, but the one that spoke to it most directly was How to Face the End of the World: An Ancient Guide for Apocalyptic Times, a volume of texts from classical writers like Seneca, Lucretius, and other doomscrollers of yore. It was edited and introduced by Christopher Star from Middlebury College, who described how the different kinds of end-times stories by these classical writers relate to our own fraught moment. Of course when I learned that Christopher was also a Bob Dylan fan and scholar, I couldn’t help but ask about that modern poet of apocalypse. You can listen to the unedited conversation below.
Moving from ancient apocalyptic thought to our current moment, the book that most directly addressed today’s headlines was The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World by Christian Miller from Wake Forest University. Lying, cheating, deepfaking—Christian sees a troubling increase in the ease and prevalence of multiple forms of dishonest behavior, almost all abetted by the rapid spread of AI. It can hard to find a silver lining, but the book is a great read and our conversation was encouraging.
For the final item on our list, we turned to an old friend of the show, Rebecca Goldstein, and her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. In this moment of “polycrisis,” one of the deepest dangers is many people feeling they no longer matter—that their projects have been blocked, their sources of value have disappeared. This “crisis of mattering” has led to all sorts of individual and social ills, even if in the large sweep of human history many of us are doing just fine. Rebecca’s book certainly spoke to my own moments of existential crisis.