The Armen Show

Welcome to episode 344 of the show with Professor Justin E. H. Smith, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, joining us on the program to discuss topics from his book. “An original deep history of the internet that tells the story of the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it—and explains why they have died today. Many think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology.” Justin Erik Halldór Smith is an American-Canadian professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. He has authored several books and is also a sometime contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, Slate, and Art in America. Smith is an editor-at-large of Cabinet Magazine. Since the fall of 2020, Smith has been publishing philosophical and critical essays on his Substack newsletter, Justin E. H. Smith’s Hinternet. Smith’s primary research interests include Leibniz, early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of biology, classical Indian philosophy, and the history and philosophy of anthropology.

Cities represent a place where wildlife once chose to be, and where we have come together with wildlife in the current moment. With wildlife thriving in cities, we have the opportunity to create vibrant urban ecosystems that serve both people and animals. The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Author and Professor Peter S. Alagona joins on episode 343 to cover topics from this recent book. After earning his PhD at UCLA in 2006, Professor Alagona completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Stanford universities. Since arriving at UCSB in 2009, he has received several awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER grant and the Harold J. Plous Award for the UCSB College of Letters and Science’s most outstanding junior faculty member. Alagona is the author of more than three-dozen publications in the areas of environmental history, geography, philosophy, and policy—including After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California. Peter Alagona’s research focuses on the histories of land use, natural resource management, environmental politics, and ecological science in the North American West and beyond. He has particular interests in endangered species and biological diversity, and he is developing a new research and teaching initiative on the history of ideas about environmental change.

Are you able to do one thing at a time with full presence or concentration? What are categories of life that we can look at to bring this full presence to? Self-improvement author and bibliophile Thatcher Wine joins us on episode 342 of the show to detail twelve such examples from his book The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing At A Time. Thatcher Wine is a Self-improvement author, professional book curator, bibliophile, and founder of Juniper Books. He is mostly known for designing and creating visually appealing custom curated book libraries. The Guardian and Town & Country have referred Wine as a “celebrity bibliophile”. Wine co-authored his first book Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library in 2019. The book is about curating and designing private libraries. Links: Personal Website | Instagram | Twitter | Juniper Books

When it comes to what we can learn about our senses from animals of the world, a lot is illuminated by Jackie Higgins, author of Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. She joins on episode 341, with an array of organisms to present, along with the senses that those organisms inform us about. “From the harlequin mantis shrimp with its ability to see a vast range of colors, to the bloodhound and its hundreds of millions of scent receptors; from the orb-weaving spider whose eyes recognize not only space but time, to the cheetah whose ears are responsible for its perfect agility, these astonishing animals hold the key to better understanding how we make sense of the world around us.” Jackie Higgins is a graduate of Oxford University with an MA in zoology and has worked for Oxford Scientific Films for over a decade, along with National Geographic, PBS Nova, and the Discovery Channel. She has also written, directed, and produced films at the BBC Science Department. She lives in London. Links: Sentient on Amazon | Twitter | Simon & Schuster

Following the great success of her first novel Le Tiers Temps, French novelist and producer Maylis Besserie has continued forward with her latest novel Les amours dispersées. She joins us from France on episode 340 of the show to discuss her novels, writing, themes from the content, and shares with us some of the elements of writing freedom that exist. Maylis works as a producer for the radio channel France Culture, and her novel Le Tiers Temps won the Goncourt for first novels. It serves as an homage to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, and was named after the retirement home where Beckett lived in the last year of his life. Links: Twitter | Wikipedia | Books on Amazon

Ethical questions can come up in many facets of our life. What we do in a scenario says a lot about what we value, how we think about others, and I would add that it relates to our long-term well-being. On episode 339, returning guest Dr. Susan Liautaud brings her years of experience in the ethical domain to discuss with me regarding a variety of thought-provoking ethical questions presented in her new book The Little Book of Big Ethical Questions. The book is divided into sections of ethics that one can focus on, from family and friends to technology or consumer choices. Each section has questions that come up in these categories, and the ethical items one would need to decide through in such scenarios. As I was reading, it was clear that these ethical questions and how we personally answer them relates to how we will feel about ourself years or decades from now. Dr. Susan Liautaud is the founder and managing director of Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited, which advises clients from global corporations to NGOs on complex ethics matters. Author of The Power of Ethics and The Little Book of Big Ethical Questions, she also teaches cutting-edge ethics courses at Stanford University and serves as chair of Council of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Liautaud is the founder of the nonprofit platform The Ethics Incubator and chairs a number of global nonprofit boards. She divides her time between Palo Alto, California, and London. It is a delight to have had Susan back on the show for her third appearance. You can check out her past episode as part of my panel on multiple topics including ethics, or our original episode on her prior book The Power of Ethics. The following are links to her content online: The Little Book of Big Ethical Questions | SusanLiautaud.com | Stanford Page

Improvisation has taken language a far distance from its origination, with what we make up as we go adjusting the language over time. A delightful discussion on this topic ensues here with both past guest Professor Nick Chater and new guest Professor Morten H. Christiansen, co-authors of The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World. I was glad to have both on episode 338 of the show for a group discussion on topics from the book. Morten H. Christiansen is a Danish cognitive scientist known for his work on the evolution of language, and connectionist modeling of human language acquisition. He is Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University as well Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs and Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University.His research has produced evidence for considering language to be a cultural system that is shaped by general-purpose cognitive and learning mechanisms, rather than from innate language-specific mental structures. Nick Chater is a cognitive psychologist who is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School and has held chairs in psychology at Warwick and at University College London. He has written over 250 publications, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as associate editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. His previous trade book, The Mind is Flat, won the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Best Book in Clinical Psychology, 2018, and was the topic of our previous discussion. Links: The Language Game | Morten’s Faculty Page | Nick’s Faculty Page

How important is language to the modernization of a nation? What did the modernization of Chinese have to do with making the country more modern? Professor Jing Tsu of Yale explores this topic in her latest book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, and she joins on episode 337 of The Armen Show to cover language, history, China, and more. Jing Tsu, a 2016 Guggenheim fellow, specializes in modern Chinese literature & culture and Sinophone studies, from the 19th century to the present. Her research spans literature, linguistics, science and technology, typewriting and digitalization, diaspora studies, migration, nationalism, and theories of globalization. At Yale she offers graduate seminars on sympathy, world Sinophone literature, and approaches to East Asian intellectual and literary history. From mainland China to Southeast Asia, her area of expertise covers the Sinophone world at large. She offers a regular interdisciplinary course, “China in the World,” which features six contemporary topics in historical time. Tsu has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton). After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao’s phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded. Links: Faculty Page | Twitter | Kingdom Of Characters

Can you rewire your soul and the parts of your mind that you want to work on? Fellow podcaster and content-creator Chris Boutte of The Rewired Soul Podcast joins us on episode 336 of the show to discuss the content he has made in recent years, along with his process. We have spoken with some of the same guests, and Chris has been prolific in his reading and guest episodes. Chris Boutté is a Las Vegas-based author and influencer. You may also know him as The Rewired Soul, his pseudonym on YouTube where has a growing community of 81K. He is the author of CANCELED: Inside YouTube Cancel Culture, multiple mental health books, and he often contributes to wellness publications such as Thrive Global and Tiny Buddha. Chris reads hundreds of non-fiction books each year and speaks with authors on a diverse range of subjects at The Rewired Soul Podcast. You can also find his expert quotes in publications such as VOX, INSIDER, and VICE. For the curious-minded, visit his Substack to read his whims and musings, and discover reading recommendations on mental health, psychology, philosophy, social issues, politics, and more. Links: The Rewired Soul Podcast | Twitter | Substack | Personal Site

What can we know about smartphones being in the hands of everyone, and always remaining on? Are there hopeful elements that relate with this, as well as elements to be worried about? After his 40 years as technology correspondent for the BBC, author Rory Cellan-Jones wrote about this topic in his latest book Always On: Hope and Fear in the Social Smartphone Era, and joins us on episode 335 of the show. Rory was the BBC’s expert on trends in new technology, and how the web is changing our lives. He became a Technology Correspondent after many years reporting on business for the BBC, and he sees it as his role to communicate the excitement and importance of the fast-changing digital world to a non-specialist audience. He is also the author of Dot Bomb, an account of the companies and characters behind Britain’s short-lived dot com bubble. In recent years he has investigated the role technology can play in improving the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease, having been diagnosed with the condition in 2019. In 2021 he was made an Honorary Fellow of The National Museum of Computing in recognition of his services to technology education. Since leaving the BBC, he has become an independent technology consultant, writer and broadcaster. He has also started a newsletter about health tech, one of his major interests. Links: Twitter | Always On | Wikipedia Page | BBC Postings