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
Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Bey...
You have a number.
Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more...
For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources.
Have you ever dreamed something true?
What does it mean to say amen?
The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washingt...
What makes you countable?
You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay.
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...
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