Oct 28, 2025
David and Tamler transfer their libidinal energy to Freud’s 1917 article “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he tries to understand what's going on with depression, attempts to distinguish it from normal grief, and arrives at some ideas that laid the groundwork for his later theory of normal human development....
Oct 14, 2025
David and Tamler share some brief thoughts about Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterpiece One Battle After Another before going deep on his most underrated movie Inherent Vice. We explore the many connections between the two movies - Pynchon adaptations, shadowy forces, snitches who abandon their families, the blend...
Sep 30, 2025
What is the psychology of shame? Is the experience of shame a human universal? How can we investigate the nature of shame across cultures? David and Tamler dive into Richard Shweder’s “Towards a Deep Cultural Psychology of Shame.” We talk about the methodological challenges of studying shame in other contexts and...
Sep 16, 2025
David and Tamler go big game hunting and explore their first Hemingway short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” We dig into his characteristic themes of courage, cowardice, shifting power dynamics in marriages, and what it truly means to live a happy life. Plus, neuroscience may be complex, but can...
Sep 2, 2025
David and Tamler tackle the topic chosen by our beloved Patreon supporters in the first VBW madness tournament – Schopenhauer. We discuss his essays “On the Sufferings of the World” and “The Vanity of Existence,” their strikingly modern perspectives on human life and behavior and the influences Schopenhauer...