PODCAST · society
Human Meme
by David Boles
The Human Meme podcast examines what separates human consciousness from mere biological existence. Each episode investigates the inherited behaviors, cultural transmissions, and cognitive patterns that replicate across generations, shaping how we think, grieve, speak, and remember. David Boles, a New York City writer, publisher, and teacher, hosts these conversations as mindfulness with teeth: no production music, no easy comfort, only the direct inquiry into what makes us recognizably human. Since 2016, the podcast has asked why we weep emotional tears, how language emerged from gesture, and whether memory constructs or reveals the self. The irrevocable aesthetic is the commitment to answers that, once understood, cannot be unknown. Be a Human Meme.
Episodes
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Standing at the Rail
For most of Western history, the word art meant something wider and harder than it means now. Ars in Latin, techne in Greek: a principled, teachable discipline of making and doing, judged by its work. The family album that held the painter also held the physician, the pilot, the general, and the...
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The Line in the Stone
January, in the year 897. A courtroom in Rome. In the defendant's chair sits a pope who has been dead for nine months. His name was Formosus. The reigning pope ordered the body pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, and propped upright for trial. Church law required that a defendant...
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The Direction of Hope
I want to start with a red pen. In August of 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman sat reviewing computer printouts from a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear. The telescope had been listening to the sky and printing what it heard as columns of numbers and letters, and most of every...
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Held Until Called For
A thousand years ago, the early English law, and the Germanic law behind it, had a word for settling a death. Wergild. Wer, meaning man. Geld, meaning payment. The man-price: a sum owed by the killer, or by the killer's kin, to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, and…
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The Animal We Blame
Somewhere in the last year, a group you belong to went looking for a villain. Maybe it was a workplace after a project collapsed. Perhaps it was a family after a holiday turned sour, or a whole country after a hard season of news. The group did not sit inside its own failure and ask what everyone...
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The Synthetic Cause
Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to whatever medium will carry it. By that measure the Lost Cause ranks among the most successful memes this country has produced. Confederate veterans engineered…
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Synalosis: The Shape That Closes
Two thousand years ago, on a hillside in eastern Gaul, a Roman army under Julius Caesar trapped a Gallic army inside a hill town called Alesia, and then did something stranger than a siege. Caesar built two walls, one facing inward at the men he had caught, to hold them in, the other facing…
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The Goldfish that Never Swam
This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The Eighteen-Minute Lie, and it is the biography of a statistic that was never true, followed…
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How a Country Chooses Its Fools
So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took him apart in front of the country. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed...
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Not My Thing
In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the…
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The Three Boxes
Picture a man in a bright room in a great house. In front of him sit three boxes. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He may open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open…
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The Sound of a Bought Room
Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices.…
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The Off Switch
Here is the idea at the center of it. Money has come in two families for about as long as we have had money. There is value that travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of anyone. And there is value that travels by permission: the tally, the ledger…
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The Nearest Hand
There is a coin in your pocket right now, and there is an identical coin in someone else's pocket across town, and those two coins are worth different amounts. Same metal, same stamp, same date. The difference between them comes from how each coin arrived. One of them was spent early, while…
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The Brittle Self
In the winter of 1393, the King of France gave his court an order that no one knew how to obey. He asked them not to touch him: not to brush against him in a corridor, not to take his arm on the stairs, not to embrace him on his name day. Charles the Sixth had become certain that his body was…
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Beyond the Burial Tree
In 1868 the office of the Surgeon General put out an order asking Army doctors to gather Native skulls so the size of them could be studied. A grief that any family on earth would know on sight was treated, on the other side of the counter, as a research opportunity. The dead became holdings. An...
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In My Mind I'm Standing Up
The subject is recantation: the coerced word, the public taking back of a belief by a person who has been given no real choice. We use the word recant without hearing what is buried inside it. It comes from the Latin for singing again. To recant is to sing your own song over, backward, in front…
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The Mask in the Glass Case
I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximately three thousand eight hundred years old, made in southern Iraq during the Old Babylonian period. Its face was made to terrify. The hair tangles into...
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Tomorrow as Tribute
The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material future of their political communities for the maintenance of a fantasy past. The trade is voluntary. The costs include dead soldiers, dismantled institutions,...
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What Was Kept From You
There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it happened at thirty-four, going through a parent's papers after a funeral, when a folder you were not supposed to open contained a name you had never heard. Or...
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The River and the Trained Eye
I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a place along the New Jersey side of the Hudson where you can stand and see the water moving in two directions at the same time, depending on where you fix your eyes. The surface goes one way....
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The Painters of 1839 and the Question of Now
Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, stands at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He reads into the record the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process. The...
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UNDERWRITTEN
I want to start with four seconds. If you watched public television anywhere in the United States between 1971 and January of this year, you know these four seconds. A human face in profile, rendered first in the three colors of mid-century corporate design, recast in 1984 as a trio of…
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The Apothecary Who Was Not Written
Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text. Think about what that means for a moment. Romeo, banished to Mantua, walks into a shop and asks a starving man to sell him poison. The apothecary refuses. The apothecary cites the law. Mantua punishes the sale…
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The Claimed Body
1862. That is the year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and…
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Carceral Nation: The Pause Before You Speak
We talked once on this podcast about the pause before a lie. That episode, "Pause Before the Lie," examined the 200-millisecond hesitation that researchers have measured in the human voice when a speaker is about to say something untrue. I argued that the pause was proof of consciousness caught...
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The Grammar of Want
I was seven years old, sitting on red shag carpeting in Nebraska, in front of a wood-grain television cabinet heavy enough that two adults would struggle to move it. It was a Saturday morning in October 1972. My mother was somewhere else in the house, or she was not home. Curtains were drawn. A...
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The Human Universal Beautiful
In the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak Carousel projector. Greek marble. Benin bronze. Mughal miniature. Japanese woodblock. The professor's argument was plain: these works endured because they…
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The Voice That Wasn't Yours
Three seconds. That is all it takes. Three seconds of your voice, captured from a public meeting, a conference call, a video posted to social media, and a machine can learn to speak as you. It can produce your cadence, your rhythm, the way you pause before a name, the way your pitch drops when…
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The Counterfeit Bargain
Twenty-one violinists walked into a hotel room in Indianapolis in 2010. They were experienced soloists, people who had spent decades training their ears. The room was dimly lit. They wore modified welding goggles so they could not see the instruments. And they were handed violins, some worth…
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Forty-One Houses and the Price of the Empty Seat
There are forty-one Broadway theatres. That number has been effectively frozen for nearly a century. The oldest of them opened in 1903. The newest was assembled in 1998 from the demolished remains of two older houses. Between those dates, the city tore down theatres, condemned theatres, converted...
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A Horror in Five Skins
I want to talk about a face. Specifically, I want to talk about the face you see when you look in the mirror and the face other people see when they look at you, and whether those two faces have ever been the same face, and what happens to a person who discovers, at the age of five, that the…
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From Genius to Joke
I want you to think about the last time you encountered an achievement that seemed too large for the person who produced it. Something that made you pause, narrow your eyes, and reach for the comfortable explanation. Maybe it was a historical figure whose story sounded exaggerated. Maybe it was a...
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"The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse" and The Question of Why We Bury What Fails
There is a street in Jersey City called Baldwin Avenue. If you drove down it today you would see nothing unusual. Asphalt. Cars. A fire hydrant. The usual negotiation between infrastructure and weather. But if you had been standing on that street in late September 2013, you would have seen...
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Go to Every Funeral
I want to tell you about something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago, and about the book that grew out of it, and about why it took me a quarter of a century to understand what I heard. I was teaching at the time. A colleague from my department was sitting...
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What the Light Carries: On Writing to the Future
The book is twenty-one letters. I use the word "letter" loosely. A surgical dictation is a letter. A cockpit voice recorder transcript is a letter. A recipe card annotated by three generations of the same family is a letter. A homestead deed from 1884 is a letter. A radio signal broadcasting…
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The Grammar of Leaving
I want to talk about a sentence. A very specific kind of sentence. The kind of sentence you hear every day, in every newscast, in every corporate press release, in every school board meeting and church bulletin and government report, and you never notice it, because the sentence was designed not…
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Miscast: The Body on Stage
When an actor walks onto a stage and says the words a playwright has written, whose body is it? Not legally. Legally the question is settled. The actor owns the body, the playwright owns the words, and an intricate web of union contracts and intellectual property law keeps the two from colliding…
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The Eighty-Five Percent
In 1970, a woman named Vera Rubin pointed a spectrograph at the Andromeda galaxy and found that it was wrong. Not the galaxy. The galaxy was doing what galaxies do. What was wrong was every prediction about how the galaxy should behave. The stars at the outer edge of Andromeda were moving too…
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The Westborough Crusaders and the Boy Who Wrote It Down
In 1982, a sixteen-year-old boy in the Midwest sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series about teenagers running a school newspaper. The characters drank in darkrooms. They brought guns to school. They had bone cancer and absent fathers and substance abuse problems that no adult in...
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The Sign Above the Shelf: The God in the Wire
In the book I describe what I call the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? And who profited from the substitution? Those three questions govern every chapter. They are applied to the typewriter and the…
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The Story That Found Its Body: Cat Heads In Space!
For twenty-eight episodes of this podcast, four cat heads floated through the universe looking for their bodies. Captain Whiskerfluff, gray-furred and philosophically inconvenient. Lieutenant Mittens, ginger, who told jokes the way the rest of us breathe. Cookie Kitty, calico, whose opinions…
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The Architecture of Forgetting
Aristotle said we become brave by doing brave things. The prairie understood this twenty-four centuries later when it built institutions that made brave things ordinary. Now, why does any of this belong on a podcast about consciousness and the human condition? Because what I am describing is not...
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The Loneliest Thing in the Universe
People sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in…
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The Pharmacist's Bell: Introducing Beautiful Numbness
I was ten years old the first time I understood what art does. Not what it says it does. Not what we teach that it does. What it actually does. The production was Hello, Dolly! at a community playhouse in a town where amateur theatre was both social ritual and minor act of civic pride. I was a...
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Beyond the Hands: Completion of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners Trilogy
Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands: Non-Manual Grammar, Discourse Structure, and Sentence Types in American Sign Language, co-authored with Janna Sweenie, is now available.…
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Standard Deviation
You have a number. Not your phone number. Not your social security number, though that one matters more than most of us like to think about. I mean another number, one that follows you through databases you will never see, aggregated from purchases you barely remember making, from the length of...
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Depicting Space: When Language Lives in the Hands
Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more exposure, more repetition, more time. Classifiers are hard because they require signers to think spatially while signing temporally, to track multiple referents while producing...
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Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella
For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources. The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for…
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The Somnambulist's Prophecy
Have you ever dreamed something true? Not metaphorically true. Not symbolically true. Actually true. You dreamed your phone would ring, and it rang. You dreamed someone was sick before anyone told you. You dreamed a door opening that hadn't opened yet. Most of us have had this experience at least...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Human Meme podcast examines what separates human consciousness from mere biological existence. Each episode investigates the inherited behaviors, cultural transmissions, and cognitive patterns that replicate across generations, shaping how we think, grieve, speak, and remember. David Boles, a New York City writer, publisher, and teacher, hosts these conversations as mindfulness with teeth: no production music, no easy comfort, only the direct inquiry into what makes us recognizably human. Since 2016, the podcast has asked why we weep emotional tears, how language emerged from gesture, and whether memory constructs or reveals the self. The irrevocable aesthetic is the commitment to answers that, once understood, cannot be unknown. Be a Human Meme.
HOSTED BY
David Boles
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Human Meme have?
Human Meme currently has 875 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Human Meme about?
The Human Meme podcast examines what separates human consciousness from mere biological existence. Each episode investigates the inherited behaviors, cultural transmissions, and cognitive patterns that replicate across generations, shaping how we think, grieve, speak, and remember. David Boles, a...
How often does Human Meme release new episodes?
Human Meme releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 875 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Human Meme?
You can listen to Human Meme on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Human Meme?
Human Meme is created and hosted by David Boles.
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