Shows
Four Books a FortnightEP5: Sex, Drugs, and Arctic TernsWe shake it up this week with a philosophical text and some YA, plus a favorite backlist title of Hannah's that Sam experiences for the first time! Also, we get a treatise on the difference between a romance and a love story. This fortnight, we read: "The Rest of our Lives," by Ben Markovits "On Drugs," by Justin Smith-Ruiu "Red as Royal Blood," by Elizabeth Hart "Migrations," by Charlotte McConaghy What sound effects did we give each of these books? You'll just have to listen and find out!
2026-01-0136 min
STARGIRLEp. 86: Metal Season [TEASER]This week, I share my observations on the dominant cultural patterns of Fall 2025, most of which can be traced back to the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) craze sweeping through New York and hot girl Internet circles (think: breakfast soup, seasonality, heightened Lunar awareness, lymph and fascia care, etc.). Also discussed: the grifter energy of the online healer community, leaning into political grayness with health-related interests/intuition, some recent mainstream criticism of GLP-1s and SSRIs, and reflections/intentions after my birthday last week
2025-12-1114 min
The World in Time / Lapham’s QuarterlyEpisode 6: Justin Smith-Ruiu and Rachel Richardson“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, and you have people, at least going back to the Paleolithic, consuming these. But you don’t have the system of commodities that makes drugs a particularly modern phenomenon. And what happens as they are co...
2025-07-111h 19
The Grateful Podcast with Jack WagonerPhilosophy in the Age of Algorithms – Justin Smith Ruiu on Truth, Tech & the Self | 77Send us a textThe Grateful Podcast with Jack WagonerEpisode 77Guesting Professor Justin Smith RuiuIn this mind-expanding episode of The Grateful Podcast, Jack Wagoner sits down with philosopher and historian of ideas Justin E.H. Smith—author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is and creator of The Hinternet Substack.Together, they dive into: • Why philosophy has been exiled from everyday life • How the internet distorts identity and consciousness • Whether AI can replicate human thought • What we lose when we let machines think for us
2025-06-041h 08
Out of the WildBill Deresiewicz on Eros, Incels, the Not Left, and the Death of the ArtistBill Deresiewicz is a writer and cultural critic. He’s written popular essays such as “Solitude and Leadership,” and books including Excellent Sheep, a critique of elite education; the The Death of the Artist, which explores the precarious lives of creative workers; and The End of Solitude—a collection of Bill’s greatest essays. We discuss…Subscribe now Is Portland still the Portland of Portlandia? Is Boston the angriest town in the U.S.? Bill’s essay in Salmagundi about the “Not Left.” Is Bernie Sanders’s movement over or dormant? Are the woke responsible for knee-capping Sanders...
2025-05-2658 min
Eminent AmericansJustin Smith-Ruiu Is Not Who You Think He IsThis is the first episode of Eminent Americans where I’ve had the pleasure of talking to both the subject of a published profile and the profile writer at the same time. Kevin LaTorre, a return guest on the show, recently wrote “The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu,” a long piece about philosopher and metafictionist Justin Smith-Ruiu. Or maybe Justin wrote it himself, appropriating Kevin’s name and likeness as another one of his authorial alter-egos. Maybe “Kevin” doesn’t even exist. I mean, I think he does, since I’ve talked to him before on zoom, and perused his digi...
2025-04-151h 13
Clearer Thinking with Spencer GreenbergDo technological innovations yield net gains in the long run? (with Justin Smith-Ruiu) Read the full transcript here. What are the limits of tech solutionism? Do technological innovations create as many problems as they solve? Or, in other words, do technological innovations improve the world on average over time? Are humans living in the 21st century actually worse off than those that lived in the 11th century? What's the difference between "art" and "content"? If image-generating AIs just produce images that are stylistic averages across all of their training data, then is it even theoretically possible for such models to create art that's edgy, avant-garde, or off the beaten path...
2023-10-261h 26
The American VandalThe Golden Age of The Working CriticThe premiere of a new series, "Criticism LTD," on the contemporary state of criticism. This episode covers proclamations of crisis from legacy media earlier this year, demands for a cosmopolitan turn in literary studies (11:15), an alleged golden age of popular criticism (28:00), and the role of para-academic publications like the Los Angeles Review of Books (54:30).
Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, John Guillory, Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Justin Smith-Ruiu, Ryan Ruby, Michelle Chihara
For episode bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/GoldenAge, or subscribe to our newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.SubStack.com, where you will also receive episode transcripts.
2023-08-071h 20
The Gray Area with Sean IllingA philosopher's psychedelic encounter with realityWhy don't more philosophers take psychedelic drugs seriously as a means of examining reality? Sean Illing talks with Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy, whose recent essay "This Is a Philosopher on Drugs" tells of how experimenting with psilocybin and other substances led to a radical reevaluation of nearly everything in his life — including his views on the nature of reality. They discuss the roots of an alternative worldview in the thought of German polymath G.W. Leibniz, what it means to say — as Socrates does — that philosophy is "preparation for death," and why psychedelics aren't more often explored in contem...
2023-05-0451 min
Unlock: This Powerful Full Audiobook For Story Seekers.Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin Smith-RuiuPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/369211to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
Author: Justin Smith-Ruiu
Narrator: Jeff Harding
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 13 hours 35 minutes
Release date: April 2, 2019
Genres: Lessons in Philosophy
Publisher's Summary:
This audiobook narrated by Jeff Harding reveals the surprising ways the pursuit of rationality leads to an explosion of irrationality It's a story we can't stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of...
2019-04-021h 35