Human Meme
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
You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay.
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When we encounter disability, most of us have been trained to see deficiency. Something missing. Something wrong. A departure from the norm that requires correct...
Here is something I did not expect to discover while writing a textbook about American Sign Language. The shoulder knows things the hand cannot say.
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What does it mean to discover that you are kin to strangers? Not metaphorically kin, not spiritually connected, but genetically linked in ways that contradict everything you were taugh...
Your grandmother was frightened before you were born.
There is a forest in the Pacific Northwest that has been thinking for four thousand years.
There is a particular cruelty in forgetting. We dress it up in softer language. We call it moving on, healing, closure. We treat forgetting as the natural conclusion to grief, as thoug...
Martha's Vineyard. You know it now as a summer retreat for the wealthy, a place of pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. But between the late seventeenth cen...
Listen to your own voice the next time you tell the truth. Notice how it flows, uninterrupted, from thought to speech. Now pay attention when you're about to lie. Feel it? That hesitat...
Today, we are standing in the wings of the theater, looking out at the empty stage, asking ourselves a question about the ghosts that haunt the floorboards. We are talking about the "O...
Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you...
Right now, as you listen to this, your larynx is trying to kill you. This isn't metaphorical. Your voice box sits dangerously low in your throat, creating an intersection where food a...
Here's something that should stop you cold: humans are the only animals on Earth that cry emotional tears. Not tears to clean the eyes, not tears from irritation, but tears from joy, ...
The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch i...
Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone abo...
"Taking the black pill" names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men's forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on ...
Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, ...
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