The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast
episode 252: A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs
I don’t usually begin interviews with the question “who the hell are you?” But, then again, not every guest is John Higgs.
I fell into Higgs’s work by accident. An offhand recommendation of his book on the KLF, a British band that burnt a million pounds but couldn’t explain why they did it. What’s unusual is that I’ve not quite been able to climb back out of it. Higgs’s work is reality-warping. Once you put on his lenses, it’s hard to take them back off.
At the center of Higgs’s strange, brilliant books — his heterodox history of the 20th century, his biography of Timothy Leary, his tour of “metamodernism” — is a single, urgent question: How do we understand the world around us even as advances in physics, psychology, art, pharmacology, and philosophy shatter our frames of reference?
This conversation takes some wild turns, but trying to describe it would do it a disservice. Just trust me on this one. It’s good to mess with your reality every once in awhile.
References:
John Higgs’s conversation with Alan Moore
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff
Book Recommendations:
The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent
Cosmic Trigger I by Robert Anton Wilson
From Hell by Alan Moore
Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com
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