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
This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today'...
So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, ...
In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed ...
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 ...
Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy,...
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 t...
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...
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: no...
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 b...
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...
I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum,...
The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material...
There was a moment in your life when you found out.
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I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a plac...
Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sci...
I want to start with four seconds.
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Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text.
1862.
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We talked once on this podcast about the pause before a lie. That episode, "Pause Before the Lie," examined...
I was seven years old, sitting on red shag carpeting in Nebraska, in front of a wood...
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