It’s a story about a music snob who works in a record store dealing with his live-in girlfriend dumping him for another guy—and an annoying guy at that. What kind of survival information can a story like this contain? It reminds us that we are not alone, that our troubles are small and common. It invites us to laugh at ourselves, and laughter is medicine.

https://www.riversidelocalschools.com/downloads/pedestrian%20short%20story.pdf

https://reactormag.com/the-plague/

Most of us know the story, either from reading it in high school or just absorbing it through culture. It’s about a man who embarks upon a long walk in very cold weather in Alaska. He makes some mistakes, starting with being there in the first place, and freezes to death. The climactic mistake is to built a fire under a snow laden pine tree. He gets the fire going, but then the tree dumps its snow on him and the fire, and from there on he’s doomed.

The survival information is simple, right? If you’re going to go traipsing around the frozen tundra, you’d better take that outdoor survival class first. But ignorance, carelessness, and incompetence aren’t really the man’s problem. He’s actually observant, fairly well provisioned, and basically prepared for cold weather. London does not hide his message. The narrator sums up the man’s problem on page two of my version:

The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings. Fifty degrees below zero meant 80 degrees of frost. Such facts told him that it was cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to consider his weaknesses as a creature affected by temperature. Nor did he think about man’s general weakness, able to live only within narrow limits of heat and cold. From there, it did not lead him to thoughts of heaven and the meaning of a man’s life. 50 degrees below zero meant a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear coverings, warm moccasins, and thick socks. 50 degrees below zero was to him nothing more than 50 degrees below zero. That it should be more important than that was a thought that never entered his head.

The survival tool this man lacks is imagination. Of course, a professional story teller will value imagination, but how is it crucial to our species’ survival? Well, we don’t have much else. No fur. We’re slow, soft, weak. Our teeth are blunt, our fingernails useless as weapons. And yet we rule the world. As I and others have said before, fiction is what society is built upon, and fiction is a product of imagination. I’ll define imagination here as the ability or tendency to build in our minds situations, stories, characters, settings, and play these situations out as simulations. This allows us to learn about ourselves and the world without having to directly experience everything. Direct experience is certainly a good teaching tool, but the problem is when the experience kills us, and which point, the lesson is over, and so is the game.

Stories That Matter are part of our collective imagination, passed down generation to generation, in the way that instincts are passed down to less imaginative animals, like London’s dog, who is able to survive its owner’s ineptitude by following its ancient intuitions. Human’s, however, meet too many variable problems to rely on instinct, so we have imagination.

The hardest thing to imagine is our own frailty. The default mode is to assume we are alive, we are doing fine, and so we will continue to be alive, continue to be fine. Twenty years ago I would have laughed if somehow had suggested we in the United States were in danger of losing our democracy, that a deranged autocrat might take over the government and systematically disassemble our democratic norms and institutions, all while robbing the public coffers in plain sight. The would-be dictator would turn the Department of Justice into his own personal legal attack dog to go after his domestic critics; he’d co-opt a branch of law enforcement to use as his own secret, masked police force. I would have laughed if somehow had told me just twenty years algo that what happened in Nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR or Maoist China could certainly happen here. And yet, here we are, well on our way. To fail to predict and defend against this possibility represents a failure of collective imagination.

I once heard a story on a history podcast about Hitler and his generals receiving various reports on its enemies’ industrial capacities. When the report on the USA came in, the numbers were stunning. The bean counters weren’t telling a story. They were just providing the data. It was at this point that a smart Germany would have reconsidered their game plan, drawn back their ambitions, and did whatever they could to make sure the US never entered the war. But Hitler was unable to imagine anything beyond his own vanity. He began to laugh, and his sycophantic generals also laughed. A couple of years later, Hitler shot himself in a bunker rather than be taken alive, where he would surely have been tried, convicted, and hung. We refuse to imagine our failure at our great peril.

Back to our man in the Yukon. He first was unable to imagine how cold it could really get, despite an old man he’d previously met’s warning. And even his doused fire was a failure of imagination. Had he pictured the fire under the pine tree, gamed it out in his head, he’d have caught the mistake before it cost him his life. At the very end of the story and end of his life, he finally imagines himself not as himself but as one of “the boys” at the camp finding his dead body later. He pictures the situation clearly, almost as a fiction writer would write the scene. He’s learned his lesson too late.

The Samurai code Bushido trains the warrior to imagine his own death, in vivid detail, before engaging in battle. That way he will be prepared for it. I’m not sure we need to go that far, but we should certainly be open to exploring futures where things awry and proceed accordingly. Anyone can daydream about how everything will work out exactly like we want, but it takes effort and practice to tell ourselves the opposite story, but that story just might save our lives someday.

Here’s the story: https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

To call the entire novel a “story” isn’t quite correct. It’s a collection of hundreds of stories. The form is called “picaresque,” which is a novel shaped like barbed wire, to my mind, a straight line of existence studded by pointy little clusters of conflict.

For those who have just landed on the planet, I’ll summarize the basic plot. A country gentleman named Alonso Quijada is addicted to reading fantasy stories about knights, dragons, wizards, maidens, and such. The fact that this genre is still wildly popular 500 years later says something about our need to dream, and no doubt these stories hold survival information, as Don Quixote proves, even as it critiques and satirizes the genre. Quijada is a kind of everyman, rich enough to not have to work, at least not much, but also a provincial nobody. His life is boring and fairly meaningless. Desperate, or just mentally ill, or most likely driven crazy by ennui, he decides he’s going to be a “knight errant,” just like the heroes he reads about, and changes his name to Don Quixote de la Mancha. That’s the plot. He outfits himself with a DIY knight kit--armor, horse, squire—and sets out looking for trouble. He finds it, everywhere, mainly in the form of his delusions colliding violently with reality. It’s really funny, and slyly touching. Above all, despite the fantastical conceit, it’s grounded in material reality, and the fun and interest come from the constant clash between the world and our higher ideals about it. The information in this sprawling novel, repeated in story after story, is crucial in two ways: 1. If we don’t find meaning in our lives, we will invent it, or perish. 2. We must always be reminded to not take ourselves so seriously. Life is a comedy, Don Quixote tells us, even as he imagines it as a tragedy.

While pretending to be a knight, Quixote’s goal is always the same: to protect the vulnerable. This is the role, the answer to my mind, for those of us who have enough surplus wealth and power to spare after taking care of our personal and family needs. When we fail to do this, to matter to other people, we fall into fantasy or despair. That’s how I read the novel at least.

The danger of finding meaning by helping others is that it almost inevitably leads to grandiose ideas about ourselves. This is when sanity must reassert itself, clear thinking. Every one of us is more Alonso Quijada than Don Quixote, and we’d do well to remember that. That thing on our head is not a helmet but a barber’s basin; the giant we just fought is a windmill. At the end of the novel, Quijada’s sanity completely returns. He renounces his life as Don Quixote and all those ridiculous books (as he seems them at the end), wills his belongings to his family and servants, and peacefully dies. Even so, a heroic verse is written on his tombstone, and nobody would wish he’d lived his entire life as a forgettable and frankly worthless country gentleman. His audacity, his madness, created meaning in his life, though reality kept humbling him, over and over. In the end, he’s at peace. He found the right balance.

I’ll close with a joke by George Carlin. He’s talking about U.S. state mottos, contrasting “Live Free or Die,” and “Famous Potatoes.” Somewhere between these, he said, lies the truth. And I get the feeling it’s closer to Famous Potatoes.

In the version I read, Butler provided an afterward, telling us two things she was going for. The first is that this is her “pregnant man story.” I’m not going to say anything about that except to say that yes, it’s horrifying, especially for us dudes out there, and it’s also interesting from a gender perspective. But her second point is the “crucial survival information” I’m after in this series. The story is about “paying the rent.” She means this more biologically than economically, in the sense that every living thing has to earn its right to survive, something folks in extremely wealthy societies have a tendency to forget.

The story is about a society of humans who somehow end up on another planet, where they are not the dominant species. The Tlic, giant centipede like creatures, intelligent and technologically advanced, rule the place, but somehow humans have survived. The story starts on a domestic scene, familiar until the 10 foot tall talking bug shows up. One question comes up quickly: why do these powerful creatures tolerate, even put energy into taking care of these late coming humans? The answer is, as in all nature, the humans are useful to the Tlic, and over the generations, the two species have settled into an uneasy symbiosis, where the humans provide a service in exchange for relatively comfortable lives. No problem, right? Until you learn what the service is, and I’ll let you discover that yourselves.

We learn that the relationship was not always so polite, and that generations before, humans were simply herded up like livestock and forced to do as the Tlic pleased. The humans were weak, but that’s not the same as powerless. It turns out that an intelligent animal can find all kinds of ways to gum up the system, and so it made sense for both parties to come to a consensus rather than one using brute force on the other. I’ll close this summary by saying that the compromise feels uncomfortably like marriage, especially marriage before the various waves of modern feminism. You’ve got a physically larger and materially and instructionally powerful individual taking on a smaller, weaker partner. He gets a companion, a sexual outlet, and offspring; she gets protection, a house, and if she’s “married well,” status and luxury. Hopefully she also likes the guy. In any event, this is totally transactional, sweetened up by a veneer of romance.

So why is this idea of paying the rent so important today? For most of human history, nobody had be reminded that they had to work for a living. Starvation, exposure to the element, and violent death were always at the doorstep. But in the wealthiest human society in history, we tend to take everything we’ve got for granted. Our ancestors paid the rent for us, so we forget that this is a recurring payment. Instead of being grateful for the house we live in, we complain bitterly about our two-car garage when the neighbor has a three-car garage. Everything feels unfair. Aren’t we owed more? Why isn’t the government, or some other higher power, solving our problems for us? We assume that we’ll always have the basics of food, shelter, and clothing, so we aim for status. We assume we’ll always live in a democracy—at least we used to assume that. Not long ago, we assumed no American president would ever refuse to concede his electoral loss, that no sitting president would ever encourage a violent mob to attack the seat of power in order to disrupt the certifying of votes. What happened in Germany, the USSR, Italy…that could never happen here. The worst thing in the world is that my life doesn’t compare favorably to the lives I see on Instagram. Where’s my yacht, my jet, my second, third, and fourth homes? At the very least, where’s my brand-new deluxe edition Ford F-250 with dual back wheels?

Only wealthy humans have fooled themselves into believing they are exempt from the rules that govern the rest of nature. When we fool ourselves into believing we are owed something, that everything we have is a kind of inevitable birthright, that we were put on this planet to have our desires granted, we’re in for a lifetime of disappointment. Some call this assumption entitlement, and it’s a recipe for unhappiness at the least. It’s also a good way to lose everything you’ve taken for granted, including our lives.

In this story that takes place on a fictional planet far away, Butler is reminding us of that most earthly fact: nobody owes us anything, and the price of life is struggle. The humblest flowering weed puts a ton of energy into the bright colors of its flower and into its nectar, because baby, nobody’s going to spread your pollen unless they get some sweet nectar in return. Nature is brutally transactional, and we, for better or worse, natural. Every predator, day after day, week after week, must hunt and either kill or die. Every prey is always looking over its shoulder. Every scavenger must be either the fastest or the strongest of all the other scavengers. Butler, in a fictional planet that never existed in real life, reminds us of that most earthly lesson: nobody owes us anything, and the price of life is struggle. The rent comes for everyone, and its due on the first.

The stories are short and fun to read. Here they are: https://rwwsoundings.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Three-Stories-by-Tobias-Wolff.pdf

The conflict of the story is that one of the gods decides, partly out of boredom, to buck the system and let the poor plebs advance. This sets off a great war among the gods, and that’s where the story takes place. I find it a little chilling that the only hope for regular humans at this point is if one of the tech lords decides to help them. No way the hero is coming from the plebs’ own ranks. Poor folk in this novel have zero agency.

So what can this possibly have to do with our world today? Surely our tech lords, Musk and company, most of whom have warned that AI poses existential risk to the human species, though that risk hasn’t stopped one of them from dropping out of the accelerated development of this stuff, surely they’ll be nice to us, once they rule the world, right? I mean, sure, they all have bunkers in New Zealand, and small armies of former Navy Seals to protect themselves, but they wouldn’t subjugate us, would they? I mean, they seem so nice on social media. Nothing to worry about, right?

https://www.are.na/block/23328715

https://sffremembrance.com/2025/10/21/short-story-review-bloodchild-by-octavia-e-butler/

This is the episode where Tyler returns to the Museum of Civilization, with a bone to pick with various parental units and the whole scheme in general. Kirsten's not so into being locked up, but the rest of the troupe are kind of cool with it, as long as they get warm water.

Old bearded dudes make out, which proves that gays aren't always young and hot. They can be old and hot for their ages too.

Daniels enjoys pointing out how Clarke goes full Lear while also being part Claudius (adding up to over 100% but whose counting, besides Jones?), and Smashmouth ties the whole thing together with a Christmas Train you'll have to listen to to understand. All to say you don't want to miss this almost penultimate episode.

Flashback warning: this one is about Kirsten hallucinating-remembering the bad old days while she's dying of poison in worse new days. (Don't worry, she survives.) If you were missing the whole thing about the months in Frank's apartment and why they left, well, here's the makeup exam. Tune in for Jones just kind of killing it in his textual analysis while Daniels goes damn son you're on fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Camioneta

Attendees were wowed by the wit and penetrating analysis. K & S were surprised and delighted by the engagement of this knowledgeable audience. All in all, a splendid time was had by all.

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/wild-swans-alice-munro

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/08/nx-s1-5032827/alice-munro-daughter-abuse-stepfather

Spoiler: same premise, minus the slapstick sketch comedy. Really, it would suck to be a clone. Also, the robot is the best character. Listen in for those and many more invaluable bytes of info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film)

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232469962-memorias-de-tierra-adentro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_P%C3%A1ramo

Thanks to the Orwell Foundation for making these essays free and accessible. Check out their website for a wealth of content.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/a-hanging/

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/

https://www.sarahkaingutowski.com/

https://www.christinesneed.com/

https://www.kimberlyannpriest.com/books

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/29/jeff-venice-geoff-dyer-review

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/books/review/Iyer-t.html

https://www.christianitytoday.com/1997/11/telling-america-its-nightmares/

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/20/reviews/970420.20wood2t.html

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/bear-and-his-daughter-by-robert-stone-book-of-a-lifetime-a6867281.html

Check out this entertaining and informative video two nice guys sent Dude One and Dude Two while recording at headquarters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlxEKOscu0M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Finale_(Seinfeld)

https://screenrant.com/seinfeld-finale-ending-explained-hated-good-reason/

https://www.netflix.com/title/70153373

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3512053/

https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-hitcher-1986/

From Slate:
Whose idea was it to turn Minority Report into a mushy declaration of humanism? It ends up as less of a warning about an Orwellian police state than a protest that Pre-Cogs are people, too. It's Dick-less.

Ebert's 4/4 star review: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/minority-report-2002

Also, Steve uses the episode to introduce the "Stevometer," which gives this classic work a 4/10, while challenging Professor Daniels to change his mind. Will the good doctor succeed? Does he even want to succeed? Find out in this spine tingler and ringadingler.

https://www.thefilmagazine.com/brazil-1985-a-cut-above-the-rest/

https://www.theparisreview.org/podcast/6040/missed-connections

https://www.theparisreview.org/podcast/6044/the-listening-forest

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2814/2814-h/2814-h.htm

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/claire-keegan/antarctica-2/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WCiBPjckTg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp3wTXYoCCg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUhE5KsJ5hk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qljs6phMy8o&rco=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOIaETfKMmY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3JaOAynaeE&rco=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6OOuPI5c0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bar3GOzDNzg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptWE8DAVl5E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VypaE6kKJ8

"A Game of Catch," Richard Wilbur: https://mrpastor.weebly.com/uploads/1/6/3/1/16317682/a_game_of_catch.pdf

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/11/14/work

https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-terrifying-car-crash-that-inspired-a-masterpiece

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas_(film)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/gonzo-journalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Zeta_Acosta

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/22/the-ministry-of-truth-by-dorian-lynskey-review-a-biography-of-george-orwells-1984

https://fernwehtun.com/2018/12/12/manuscripts-dont-burn/

Also, a pub crawl came wandering into the episode, so you might want to check this one out on YouTube.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview

http://myholidayinnorthkorea.com/

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-moon-under-water/id1559542527

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/when-hole-opened-on-alaska-flight-1282-a-mom-held-tight-to-her-son/

https://abcnews.go.com/International/2-passenger-planes-collide-japanese-airport/story?id=106405289

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

Here's a review from 2010, when the work was originally published. https://www.wired.com/2010/12/book-review-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects/

"Lifecycle" appears in Exhalation, a story collection. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/exhalation-stories_ted-chiang/19490073/item/44477200/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_high_vol_scarce_%2410_%2450&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA-bmsBhAGEiwAoaQNmu0Nhv88-89d4d8Nkh1TvNOVgjuT8fv1CPGHwiTvgRMYfHnO6zPaXBoCAKwQAvD_BwE#idiq=44477200&edition=24605302

Son of airline pilot Steve has some travel questions for backpacker Kelly, and vice versa. Tune in for dueling yarns o' the road.

Your homework:

Orwell's "The Sporting Spirit"

Arsenal vs. Dynamo Moscow Back in the Day

Full text of Joyce's Dubliners here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2814/2814-h/2814-h.htm

We found no free full text versions of this story online, but you can pay for it at the Paris Review, or, better yet, buy the terrific book.

https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/2032/beverly-home-denis-johnson

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/jesus-son-stories-by-denis-johnson/252346/#edition=2337359&idiq=1677294

Read the story here: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://mymission.lamission.edu/userdata/zaiensme/docs/Indian%20Camp%20by%20Ernest%20Hemingway.pdf

Read along here:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx3cGhzaXJwcm9qZWN0fGd4Ojc5ZTU1MTE2YzYxNThkMjY

"The Moon Under Water," by George Orwell: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-moon-under-water/