Hotel Bar Sessions
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Hotel Bar Sessions
A podcast where the real philosophy happens.
Недавне епизоде
264 епизода
The Q Word
At the beginning of April, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Ben Appel titled "I'm Gay, but That Doesn't Make Me Queer." On the last day...
Failure
We live in an age with a curiously cheerful relationship to failure. But that optimism was built for a world that no longer quite exists. For three g...
Multi/Race/Less/Ness (with Jon Ivan Gill)
Our guest for this episode, Jon Ivan Gill (Gustavus Adolphus College), argues in his recent book, Multi/Race/Less/Ness (Bloomsbury, 2025) that race is...
Trust
Surveys say we're living through a "trust crisis," and some version of that has been true since at least the '70s. Confidence in the press, in the cou...
The Right to Die
When Leigh's cat Sugar was dying of congestive heart failure, the vet's office offered her something almost no human being will ever be offered: the c...
Rules
What's the difference between a rule that describes the world and one that governs it? Leigh, Jen, and Bob start with a complaint about Robert's Rules...
Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense (with Nathan Widder)
Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even i...
Disorienting Cisgender (with Perry Zurn)
We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the...
Sports
Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same...
MINIBAR: Mythos, Fable, Farce (with Leigh M. Johnson)
In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it...
Minibar: Art and Phenomenology (with Bob Vallier)
We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what...
MINIBAR: Hanlon's Razor (with Jennifer Kling)
The HBS co-hosts are diligently at work prepping for Season 16 so, in the meantime, enjoy this "Minibar" episode from Jennifer Kling explaining the me...
REPLAY: Food (with Bob Valgenti)
While our co-hosts are on a short break between seasons, enjoy this REPLAY episode of one of our favorite conversations from Season 15 with Dr. Rober...
Foucault's "Panopticism"
What does it mean to say that visibility is a trap? Why does the simple awareness that we might be watched work on us so effectively that we end up po...
Goodhart's Law
Somewhere in the last forty years, quantification stopped being one tool of economic governance among others and became the whole operating system. In...
A**holes
So what exactly is an asshole? Is it a settled character type, or just a way of behaving that anyone might fall into on a bad day? Why does asshole be...
De-Skilling
What happens to a skill when you stop needing it? In this episode, we're talking about the quiet, subtle erosion that happens when technology simply t...
War Crimes
Few topics generate more heat and less light than war crimes — and few topics deserve more careful philosophical attention right now. When a sitting A...
Violence
Violence is everywhere right now... or is it?
When you press people to define "violence," you'll often find that their grasp on the concept is s...
Possible Worlds
Philosophy has always been drawn to the question of what's possible, what could be, what might have been, and what we might yet become. In a political...
Strange Bedfellows: Adorno and Strauss (with Jeffrey Bernstein)
The word "fascism" gets thrown around a lot these days, sometimes so freely that it starts to lose its edge. But what would it actually mean to develo...
Philosophy on Drugs (with Justin Smith-Ruiu)
We are living through a peculiar moment in the long, complicated history of humans and mind-altering substances. After decades of prohibition and stig...
Against the Future (with Simon Critchley)
Philosophers have had many conceptions of the future–metaphysical, eschatological, ontotheological, dialectical, fatalistic, idealist, materialist, an...
Family "No Contact" (with Kiran Bhardwaj)
There have been many reports in the last several years of a growing trend of estranged families in the United States. For those who make the decision...
Food (with Bob Valgenti)
This week, our co-hosts are joined at the bar by Dr. Robert T. Valgenti, philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America to talk about...
Anonymity
Anonymity is usually sold as a kind of freedom: the ability to speak without fear, to move through public space without being tracked, to test ideas a...
Catastrophic Philosophy
Catastrophe usually sounds like a synonym for disaster—but in this episode, it’s treated as a philosophical concept: a “downturn” that scrambles a wor...
Intelligence(s)
What do we mean when we talk about intelligence—and who, or what, gets counted as intelligent in the first place? In this episode of Hotel Bar Session...
MINIBAR: Algorithmic Nostalgia (with Leigh M. Johnson)
Why do AI's fabricated memories "feel" so true?
Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work research...
MINIBAR: Uncivil Obedience (with Jen Kling)
What happens when we follow the letter of the law, while refusing to cooperate with its spirit?
Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons...
MINIBAR: Pain (with Bob Vallier)
What can the body, in pain, teach us about the hilarity of our own finitude?
Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-ho...
Marilyn Frye's "Oppression"
How might "oppression" be best understood as a "cage"?
This week the HBS co-hosts take a deep dive into a true classic of feminist philosophy:...
Nostalgia
"Nostalgia" is a portmanteau coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, combining the Greek nostros (homecoming) and algos (pain, ache). Hofer was a medical s...
Sophistry
Bad arguments are nothing new, so why does it appear as if they have become so pervasive in public discourse?
When we watch so-called "debate"...
The Enshittification of... everything?
This week’s episode takes Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” and uses it as a diagnostic for late-capitalist life, not just for tech platforms bu...
Quiet Resistance (with Tamara Fakhoury)
Many of us think of resistance as "protest," communicative acts aimed at fighting injustice, and done with others in public. But what happens when tha...
Therapy
What does it mean to be “well-adjusted” in a society that might itself be profoundly unwell? And when we use therapy-speak to explain everything from...
Furious Minds (with Laura K. Field)
This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions brings political theorist Laura K. Field (author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right) into th...
Imagination (with Stephen T. Asma)
The imagination has regularly been subordinated to so-called "rational" or "scientific" models of thought. This week, we're joined by Stephen T. Asma...
Comedy
This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions on the topic of comedy is a gut buster, not least because one of your co-hosts pretends to be a stand-up co...