Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts ask Dr. Linda Alcoff just how close to the edge of the bed is the United States sleeping?A year and a half ago, as an angry, armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building in what was, thankfully, an unsuccessful insurrection attempt, many of us watching the event unfold on television asked ourselves: is democracy itself in peril? This is, of course, a question we should have been asking for many years prior to Jan 6, 2021. And it is a question we should still be asking. At the federal level, an activist and regressive Supreme Court is aggressively chipping away at the rights of citizens, and an almost perpetually-stalemated Congress refuses to act on real existential threats (like climate change, COVID, and income inequality). At the state level, more than half of the legislatures have restricted voting rights, gun regulation, and protections for BIPOC, women, LGBTQ people, and the poor. States’ legislatures are busy gerrymandering districts, under-funding public education, over-funding police, and extending corporate welfare tax benefits carte blanche, while at the same time refusing to raise the minimum wage for workers, mitigate the affordable housing crisis, repair crumbling infrastructure, or exhibit even the most minimally-decent concern for the good of their citizens. Meanwhile, the average U.S. citizen is sick, indebted, demoralized, underinformed (or misinformed), and disillusioned. Why vote? Why care? What has democracy done for me lately? Today, we’re going to be talking about the peril(s) that democracy is facing, how we should think about them, and what, if anything, we can do about them.We are honored to be joined by Linda Martin Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. Prof. Alcoff is the author, most recently of Rape and Resistence: Understanding the Compoexities of Sexual Violation and The Future of Whiteness.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-70-democracy-in-peril-with-linda-alcoff-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts wonder whether the call is coming from inside the house.Fear is a one of the most complex of human affects. It is both physical and psychological. It can be intensely private or shared by entire communities. It is sometimes paralyzing and other times exciting. Fear often seizes us without warning, but we can also "think ourselves into" being afraid. What, if anything, distinguishes fear from dread or anxiety? How are fears managed or overcome? Why do so many people share similar phobias? Is there a logic to fear?This week, we dig into the deepest, darkest corners of our own fears, and try to make some sense of why we never want to be there when something goes bump in the night.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-69-fear-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts chat with Caleb Cain about his experience being radicalized by the Alt-Right internet.In June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled "The Making of a YouTube Radical.” That piece was meant to highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which has been proven many times over to promote what (in internet slang) is called “red-pilling”—that is, the conversion of users to far-right beliefs. Today, we’re talking to Caleb Cain, a person who has been down the alt-right rabbit hole and somehow found his way back out of it, and we want to introduce our listeners to a first-person account of how right-wing radicalization actually happens on the internet, how it is sustained, and how it might be combatted.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-68-youtubes-alt-right-rabbit-hole-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts talk with Dr. Joel Michael Reynolds about what bodies are afforded and denied. As we come to recognize more and more the occlusions that occur in, and often constitute, philosophy and its history, attention to an ableist presupposition in philosophy has come to the fore. Much as with feminist theory or queer theory or race theory, disability theory not only works to expose the ableist presuppositions of philosophy but also to alter philosophy for the better by the inclusion of the formerly excluded. Why are affordances-- social, political, moral, and physical-- made for some types of bodies, but denied to others? Have we yet grasped what different types of bodies can really do? What is the difference between a "disability" and an "impairment"? To what degree is our category "disability" more philosophical than it is corporeal?Our guest for this episode, Dr. Joel Reynolds, is the perfect person with whom to talk about these questions and issues! Dr. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center, Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press. In 2022, he published The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality.You can read/download a transcript of this episode at this link. Full episode notes are available at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-67-rethinking-disability-with-joel-michael-reynolds-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Kate Devlin to talk about social relationships between humans and machines.When most people think about our future with robots, they tend to ask the following three questions: (1) Will robots take my job?. (2) Will they kill us?, and (3) Can I have sex with them?This week, the HBS hosts are joined by Dr. Kate Devlin, Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London and the  author of Turned On: Science, Sex, and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018).  We talk to Dr. Devlin about the many variations of ethical, social, and sometimes sexual  relationships we have with machines. What is the nature of our love, hate, desire, and envy of our robot companions? Why are we so often "creeped out" by them? And what might our para-social relationships with robots tell us about our own moral dispositions?Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-66-sex-robots-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

 The HBS hosts ask Dr. Charles Hughes for water, and he gives them gasoline. According to co-host Charles Peterson, the blues is "as American as apple pie and as Black as the Funky Chicken." The blues is a genre of music, to be sure, but it's also an emotion, perhaps even an existential bearing. What makes blues music distinctive? What does it mean to have "the blues"? Can everyone have or play the blues? Should everyone?In this episode, the HBS co-hosts discuss these questions (and more!) with Dr. Charles L. Hughes, Director of the The Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center | Rhodes College, where he designs courses, programs, and partnerships. His acclaimed first book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South was named one of the Best Music Books of 2015 by Rolling Stone and No Depression, one of Paste Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, and one of Slate’s “Overlooked Books” of 2015. He has published essays and given numerous talks in front of a range of audiences, including featured engagements at the Center for Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives. He is currently working on a book about the history of African-Americans and professional wrestling in the United States, as well as several articles. He is a voter for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a participant in the Nashville Scene’s Year-End Country Music Poll. His most recent book is Why Bushwick Bill Matters.BONUS: this episode comes with its own Spotify playlist!Full episode notes available at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-65-the-blues/------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts try to go viral with Andrew Baron, creator of KnowYourMeme. Memes: if you get them, you get them... and if you don't, you don't. But how is a meme created? How does it spread? And how does it die? In this episode, we dig into the complex dynamics of memes-- on Dawkins' account, the most rudimentary units of social information-- to see how they do (and don't) imitate so-called "natural" processes in their generation, mutation, adaptation, and replication. With our special guest, Andrew Baron (creator of Rocketboom and KnowYourMeme), we also investigate what, if anything, distinguishes an "internet meme" from other kinds of memes, and how internet memes may provide a unique insight into social operations and cultural formations.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-64-memes------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts investigate the limits of Reason alone and, more importantly, in real human history.Many, rightly, understand the discipline of Philosophy as primarily defined by its commitment to Reason. But, what is “Reason”? Is it universal? Is it some kind of fundamental human capacity that transcends class, culture, politics, religion, or any other iteration of human difference? What do we make of the fact that, since the 17th C., inheritors of “European Enlightenment” thinkers unilaterally dictated the scope and limits of Reason for a broad swath of the world’s inhabitants? Because, let’s be honest, the legacy of “European Enlightenment thinkers” is a complex and often ugly one.In this episode, the HBS hosts try, at once, to both defend the privileged place that Reason has been afforded in Western Philosophy and to critique the capitalist / imperialist / colonialist logics to which that legacy has been put to use. Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-63-reason------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts attempt to measure the real stakes of cheating. According to a recent study, almost 60% of college/university students in the United States admit to having cheated at least once during their studies. Around 15% of U.S. students admit to plagiarizing intentionally and, of those, less than 1 in 5 is caught or punished for academic dishonesty. Professors regularly report that cheating and plagiarism is on the rise; many blame remote learning for what feels like a "plagiarism pandemic."Meanwhile, plagiarism detection software has become BIG business, coercing academics to spend almost as much time surveilling and policing as they do researching and teaching. Who does this new, more martial and antagonistic focus on plagiarism help? And who does it hurt?In this episode, we get to the root of higher education's commitment to academic integrity and its increasingly pathological obsession with cheating.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-62-the-plagiarism-pandemic------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. to talk about what constitutes a "public intellectual."Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnel Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University, and one of America's leading public intellectuals. He is also on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays. Combining a scholar's knowledge of history, a political commentator's take on the latest events, and an activist's passion for social justice, Glaude challenges all of us to examine our collective American conscience. This week, the HBS hosts chat with Dr. Glaude about the role and the history of the public intellectual in America, the difference between the public intellectual and the "thought-leader" or "influencer," and what it takes to be a public intellectual in the 21st Century.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-61-the-public-intellectual------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★