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.
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The Courtroom Goes Quiet
09/15/2026
The Courtroom Goes Quiet
Every oath, everywhere, started life as a conditional self-curse. And then, century by century, the curse got amputated. First the punisher went quiet. Then the punishment went silent. What stayed in the witness's mouth was the stump. But nothing that load-bearing just disappears. The punishment clause went looking for a new address. And the law, slowly, took the job over. In fifteen sixty-three, in the fifth year of Elizabeth, Parliament passed a statute whose title you can still read: An Act for the Punishment of such persons as shall procure or commit any willful Perjury. That's the birth of perjury as a crime.
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The Staircase Was Never There
09/13/2026
The Staircase Was Never There
In 2003, a laboratory asked the plainest question you can put to the night: when dreams draw on waking life, what do they take? Twenty-nine people kept logs for two weeks. The answer came back in two numbers. Two-thirds of everything these sleepers remembered dreaming drew identifiably on the days around it. And a whole day, replayed intact with its time and place still attached, showed up in one or two dreams in a hundred. The day gets in as parts. The day itself almost never arrives whole. And if you want the grimmest proof, it is on the record. After the eleventh of September, 2001, when the whole country watched the same footage on every screen, researchers went looking for the replay in the dream journals of forty-four Americans, eight hundred and eighty dreams across the date.
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The Four Words
09/08/2026
The Four Words
Here is a game. I am going to spend the next several minutes telling you about a book, and I will not say its name once. The name is four words. Two of them are the same word. If you follow the grammar, by the end of this episode you will say the name yourself, and you will know why it could not have been anything else. If you have listened to this show for a long time, you have heard the four words before: in 2020, and again last June. Today they get a whole episode, unsaid. The game starts on June eighth, 2016. At two thirty-seven that afternoon, a 723-word essay went up on my blog: an essay about Aristotelian politics in an age of unreason.
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Two Paperbacks
09/02/2026
Two Paperbacks
A friend of mine once cleared a bookshelf with one sentence. It took him a week to collect. I have spent twenty years understanding that afternoon, and the understanding became a book. Let me tell you the story first. The store was a Mormon bookstore, an independent, living on the trade of the wards around it. My friend belonged to that trade twice over, as a customer and as a lay officer of the church the store served. He worked in technology all week, and on Sundays he presided over a congregation. He was the bishop of his ward. That is an unpaid office, and a heavy one, and it mattered that day, because of the name it let him borrow. Understand what that borrowing did, because the whole book lives inside it. On his own name, my friend had an opinion about children's paperbacks, and the owner would have heard an opinion and sold the next copy.
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The Stopwatch Moralist
08/26/2026
The Stopwatch Moralist
Here is the shape of it. In 1955, American television had no memory. A play aired live, once, and it was gone: no rerun, no archive, no second pressing. Serling wrote a play called Patterns, and the country went so crazy for it that the critic at the New York Times closed his column with ten words that had no mechanism under them: "a repeat performance at an early date should be mandatory." There was no mandatory in 1955. So the network bought the play a second time and performed the identical play live again, because the only instrument the medium owned for showing a thing twice was human beings. That was the economy Serling worked in. And when he tried to tell the Emmett Till story in that economy, twice, in 1956 and 1958, the sponsors and the agencies and the network censors sanded his plays into other states, other decades, other people.
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Reading the World
08/21/2026
Reading the World
The telephone went to speaker at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday in August, and the voice that came out of it belonged to family, calling from a small town in Nebraska where it had been raining for days. The call carried two things at once, the way a plains telephone always has. A death in the family. And a storm inventory, item by item, in the flat voice the plains keep for damage. Trees down across the county. The grain silo wrecked. More than a hundred utility poles broken, thirty-four of them in a row on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. And the town held its festival anyway, in the middle of the ruins, because the festival had been running since 1901 and a storm was not going to be the thing that stopped it.
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The Book That Keeps Its Own Account
08/16/2026
The Book That Keeps Its Own Account
The Watermark is about a city that computes its poor as calories. And it is about the man who does the computing. His name is Anselm Wenger. He is thirty-one that winter. He is a clerk of the Relief Bureau, the best computer on the fourth floor of the Provident Building. By day he prices the poor in units of food. By night he sings in the cellars of the Quarter, and the Quarter sings back. And in his room over the baker's, he writes down what the tables could not hold. On slips. In a hand smaller than the Bureau's hand. The slips live in a tobacco tin. Two archives, then: the building's and the tin's. The year this book covers is the year those two accounts settle.
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The One-Way Drop
08/10/2026
The One-Way Drop
Somewhere in your kitchen there is a glass, and you trust it. You washed it, you shelved it, and if I dropped one bead of ink into it right now, you would never drink from it again. Not after a rinse. Not after ten rinses. One drop, and the glass is ruined in a place no sponge can reach. Hold that feeling. This episode is about the people who turned that feeling into law, and about the one room in the world where the feeling was finally told no. In 1986, in a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, a researcher named Paul Rozin dipped a dead cockroach into a glass of apple juice. The roach was sterilized. The subjects watched the sterilizing. They knew, as a matter of certified fact, that the juice was clean. Nobody drank it. In another test, people labeled a bottle of plain sugar with the word poison in their own handwriting, and then flinched at their own label. Nothing touched the sugar except a word. The word was enough.
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No One Dies Lying: Last Words on Trial
08/08/2026
No One Dies Lying: Last Words on Trial
Somewhere ahead of you, on a day no calendar has marked yet, someone you love is going to say a final sentence, and you may be the one who hears it. You will lean in. You will carry what they said for the rest of your life. And you will believe it, because nearly everything in you insists that a person at the end of everything has no reason left to lie. The law believes it too. There is a maxim behind that faith, old enough to arrive in Latin: nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri. No one about to die is presumed to lie. Out of that presumption the courts built one of the strangest doors in the law of evidence, the dying declaration. Hearsay, the secondhand report of what somebody said outside the courtroom, is generally barred at trial. The words of the dying walk through.
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Swimming the Author
08/04/2026
Swimming the Author
At two in the morning, somewhere in this country, a college student is hitting submit on an essay she wrote herself. Every word is hers. By breakfast, a piece of software will hand her professor a percentage saying a machine wrote it. No hearing, no cross-examination, no appeal. Just the number, and the number is confident, and confidence is the whole product. I have spent the past year writing a book about that number. It is called Swimming the Author. It is out now, in paperback and on Kindle, and the title comes from the oldest confidence machine on record. In the seventeenth century, when a woman in England was accused of witchcraft, one way to test her was water. They bound her, thumbs to toe, and lowered her into a pond. King James himself supplied the theory: the water, being pure, shall refuse to receive the guilty in her bosom. So if she floated, the water had rejected her, and she hanged. If she sank, she was innocent, and she drowned proving it. The pond could only convict. That is the machine. Everything since has been a redesign.
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Tidal Volume
07/31/2026
Tidal Volume
Did you know you have taken one breath since since you started reading this? Possibly two. None of them was a decision. Today will take roughly twenty thousand out of you, and eighty years will take something close to six hundred million, and that is the whole allocation. There is no mechanism anywhere in your body for adding to it. A brain deprived of oxygen begins taking damage within minutes of an interruption. What does it mean to say that something breathes? Because a cave does it. Wind Cave in South Dakota moves air in and out of a hole in the ground hard enough to take a hat off a man's head, in and out, on a rhythm you can stand beside and feel. A fire does it. Anyone who has watched a hearth has seen a flame draw and settle. A bellows does it, a bagpipe does it, and a machine at a bedside in an intensive care unit does it about fourteen times a minute for somebody who cannot. So which of those is breathing, and which is only a good impression of it? I wrote a book to find out. It is called Tidal Volume, and it is out now.
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The Occupied Space
07/25/2026
The Occupied Space
Let me set the scene the way the century set it. The year is 1968. A thin book appears, written by the most celebrated stage director alive, Peter Brook, and it opens with a sentence the theatre memorized like scripture: take any empty space and call it a bare stage; a man walks across that space while someone watches him, and that is all the theatre needs to be. Four essays follow, four names the field still teaches to every student: the Deadly Theatre, the Holy Theatre, the Rough Theatre, the Immediate Theatre. I read that book young. I taught it. And for fifty years I kept walking into the rooms it described and noticing the same stubborn fact. The floor was never bare. Somebody owns it, somebody polices it, and somebody pays for it. And the figure who crosses that floor can die while crossing it, and the room knows. That knowledge is the whole book.
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The Disposition
07/23/2026
The Disposition
Fractional Fiction, for those of you new to the series, is a discipline as much as a name. Every novel in it grows from a small fraction of documented reality, real texts, real law, real science, real ground, and the fiction rises around that fraction without ever falsifying it. Each book carries exactly one invention, one thing that does not exist, and the notes in the back declare it openly so you always know where the ground ends. Everything else holds. The permits in this book are real permits. A treaty really was signed on the sand at Point No Point in 1855. The six words are the real six words. And the three sources this novel is built on are named in the back matter like load-bearing walls. The first is a real book from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country by a writer named Emma-Lindsay Squier, with an introduction by Gene Stratton-Porter that carries an idea this novel takes as law: a wild thing that stops being afraid of us cannot go home. The second is the oldest family record in Greek literature, Hesiod's Theogony, a list of who was born to whom, in which every generation of gods, warned about its children, devours them, and is replaced anyway. And the third is Dante, read in the English Longfellow made in the years after his wife died, when translating the Inferno was the only room of his grief he could stand in. From Dante the book takes its shape, a teller walking a silent listener down through the rings, and it takes a plea. In the sixth canto, a shade stops the pilgrim and asks for the only afterlife that is real: when you are back in the sweet world, carry me into the minds of other people.
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The Word That Lets You Look
07/20/2026
The Word That Lets You Look
In 2002 a public health director in Newark asked me whether I knew the word nosocomial. I did not. Nor did any of the graduate students in the room I taught the following week. Nosocomial means hospital acquired. It names the illness a patient walks in without and walks out carrying, and medicine has owned the word for more than a century and worn it smooth. This episode is about what a word like that is built to do. Say hospital-acquired infection often enough and it becomes a line item. Call a death a mortality outcome and you have moved it into a spreadsheet, where it can be totaled and compared and discussed on a Tuesday afternoon without anybody's voice breaking. That is cultural code. It replicates, it gets taught, and every time it is spoken it lets decent people look straight at a horror and feel almost nothing. From there the episode goes to Vienna in 1847, to a basin of chlorinated lime, and to a doctor whose colleagues destroyed him for proving that they were the weapon. Then it follows the shape out of the hospital and into the prison, the asylum, the classroom, the parish, and the faith that promised to carry its people out of the world and kept that promise the only way it could. One note on the failed test in this episode. Failing my own rule made the finding harder on hospitals than my original claim was. If that portion of the infection rate is not an irreducible floor, then more of it can be prevented than I had credited, and the institutions have less cover than I gave them. The longer account is in the blog piece is available on BolesBlogs.com DO HARM: Nosocomial Disease and the Institutions That Manufacture the Harm They Promise to Cure is available now from David Boles Books in Kindle and paperback, with a free PDF edition to download. Facts matter.
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The Six Words
07/19/2026
The Six Words
Every rehearsal room I have ever loved kept two smells on staff: scorched coffee and radiator dust. In one of those rooms, years ago, an actor I call Curtis in the book crossed the floor toward me at the end of a long afternoon. He stepped over the spike tape, past the folding table with its script piles, and he stopped inside the working distance that theater people keep the way sailors keep respect for water. Then he said six words, "I want to be your friend." A grown man, saying a sincere and costly thing to another grown man. And I laughed. Two seconds of laugh. Then I answered him with five words of my own: "Haven't we always been friends?"
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The Only Luggage
07/14/2026
The Only Luggage
Twelve thirty-three in the afternoon. Monday, April 28, 2025. The electrical grid of the Iberian Peninsula loses fifteen gigawatts of generation in about five seconds. Spain and Portugal go dark together. Trains stop between stations, on viaducts, in tunnels. Airports fall back on diesel. The Madrid fire service alone logs a hundred and seventy-four elevator rescues. The national tax portal goes down and stays down until Wednesday. Police officers stand in dead intersections and run the traffic with their hands. The shopkeepers who stayed open made change the way their grandmothers had, out loud, coin by coin. Clerks did the arithmetic in their heads while the registers sat blank. Officers directed two capitals' worth of cars with a grammar of gesture older than the signal light. Everything rented from the wire stopped that afternoon. Everything carried kept working.
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Back to Willowbrook
07/12/2026
Back to Willowbrook
The book is history, and the book is news, and the seam between those two things is the subject. Here is the oldest voice in it. In May of 1881, the city of Chicago passed an ordinance declaring that any person "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed" could be fined for being seen on the public way. Being visible was the offense. The law rode the railroads west after that, and in 1889 it arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, which adopted the Chicago wording nearly letter for letter, down to the dollar fine and the commitment to the county poor farm. Omaha followed a year later. I grew up in Lincoln. I performed on television there as a teenager. Nobody told me my city had once made it a finable offense for certain bodies to stand where I stood. That silence is one of the reasons this book exists.
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Standing at the Rail
07/10/2026
Standing at the Rail
For most of Western history, the word art meant something wider and harder than it means now. Ars in Latin, techne in Greek: a principled, teachable discipline of making and doing, judged by its work. The family album that held the painter also held the physician, the pilot, the general, and the geometer. When Aristotle wrote the Poetics, the small treatise that barely survived antiquity through a cellar, a conqueror's cargo hold, and a chain of translators from Baghdad to Latin Europe, he pulled six working parts out of tragedy: plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle. Mythos, ethos, dianoia, lexis, melos, opsis. Six load-points where a made thing carries weight, and where it can be built sound or built rotten. Then, in the eighteenth century, a wall went up.
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The Line in the Stone
07/08/2026
The Line in the Stone
January, in the year 897. A courtroom in Rome. In the defendant's chair sits a pope who has been dead for nine months. His name was Formosus. The reigning pope ordered the body pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, and propped upright for trial. Church law required that a defendant answer, so the synod supplied a voice: a junior deacon stood beside the throne and replied to the prosecution on the dead man's behalf. The court convicted the corpse, stripped the vestments from it, cut the three blessing fingers from the right hand, and threw what remained into the Tiber. A monk fished the body from the reeds and kept it hidden until saner men could bury it again.
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The Direction of Hope
07/07/2026
The Direction of Hope
I want to start with a red pen. In August of 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman sat reviewing computer printouts from a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear. The telescope had been listening to the sky and printing what it heard as columns of numbers and letters, and most of every page was the quiet hiss of the galaxy. Then Ehman's eye caught a vertical run of six characters, seventy-two seconds of signal at more than thirty times the background of the universe: 6EQUJ5. He circled the sequence in red and wrote one word in the margin. Wow! The signal never repeated. The day after it reached Ohio, Elvis Presley was found unresponsive at Graceland, and the country turned to a different grief. Four days after that, a Titan rocket stood on a Florida launch pad carrying a machine named Voyager, and bolted to its side was a gold-plated phonograph record.
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Held Until Called For
07/06/2026
Held Until Called For
A thousand years ago, the early English law, and the Germanic law behind it, had a word for settling a death. Wergild. Wer, meaning man. Geld, meaning payment. The man-price: a sum owed by the killer, or by the killer's kin, to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, and once it was paid, the feud was closed. Grief became arithmetic so that grief would stop becoming graves. The same law kept a darker word beside it. Morð. The killing done in secret, by night, and left unacknowledged. The one killing the whole system could never settle, because a price cannot change hands until the killer has a name, and the debtor of a morð has none. Between those two words there is a gap a thousand years wide, and my new novel lives inside it. The book is called The Wergild. It is the tenth novel of Fractional Fiction, and today I want to tell you what it keeps.
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The Animal We Blame
07/02/2026
The Animal We Blame
Somewhere in the last year, a group you belong to went looking for a villain. Maybe it was a workplace after a project collapsed. Perhaps it was a family after a holiday turned sour, or a whole country after a hard season of news. The group did not sit inside its own failure and ask what everyone in the room had done to cause it. It scanned the faces, found the one person who fit the mood, and set the entire weight of the trouble onto that single back. You felt the air in the room change when it happened. You may have felt the change move through your own chest. The problem had a face now, and a face can be sent away. That move is old. It runs deeper than the workplace and the country, older than writing itself in most of the places where it still survives. And when human beings reach for a body to carry their fear out of the room, they keep reaching for the same shape. A horned animal, dark, a ram or a goat, walked to the edge of the settlement and driven off into the waste with the sickness riding on its skull.
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The Synthetic Cause
07/01/2026
The Synthetic Cause
Start with the word meme, the way Richard Dawkins meant it in 1976, a piece of culture that copies itself from mind to mind and adapts to whatever medium will carry it. By that measure the Lost Cause ranks among the most successful memes this country has produced. Confederate veterans engineered it after the war, men who had lost the fighting and refused to lose the meaning. Jubal Early and the people around him built a version of the war in which slavery was a sideshow, the South fought for high principle, and the enslaved stayed content until Northern armies disturbed them. That version was false when it was written. It won anyway.
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Synalosis: The Shape That Closes
06/28/2026
Synalosis: The Shape That Closes
Two thousand years ago, on a hillside in eastern Gaul, a Roman army under Julius Caesar trapped a Gallic army inside a hill town called Alesia, and then did something stranger than a siege. Caesar built two walls, one facing inward at the men he had caught, to hold them in, the other facing outward at the quarter of a million Gauls marching to break the ring, to keep them out. Miles of timber and ditch, raised in a few weeks, and the object of all that labor was a number: the count of futures still open to the men inside, which the walls drove down to one. The one left them, when the digging was done, was capture.
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The Goldfish that Never Swam
06/24/2026
The Goldfish that Never Swam
This show is about the ideas that copy themselves through us, the ones we carry and hand on without inspecting them, and today's idea is a number. My new book reaches the world this week. It is called The Eighteen-Minute Lie, and it is the biography of a statistic that was never true, followed from the hour someone forged it to the moment it convinced a civilization that it had lost its mind. I spent two years on it, in part because I owed the work. I helped carry the lie. You have heard the louder version of my number, the one that beat mine and traveled the world. The human attention span, it says, has fallen to eight seconds, one tick shorter than a goldfish's. You have met it in a TED talk, on a morning show, inside a slide deck built to sell you the software that will rescue the same focus the previous slide told you that you had lost. It is one of the most repeated figures of the age.
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How a Country Chooses Its Fools
06/22/2026
How a Country Chooses Its Fools
So how did the cartoon win? In the summer of 1925, in a hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan agreed to defend a law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and took him apart in front of the country. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed dispatches that turned the old orator into a national figure of fun, and the dispatches were funnier than they were fair. Then Bryan died, five days later, and Mencken wrote an obituary that buried the man before the grave was dug. The prose was brilliant. It was also a kind of murder, a reputation killed while the body was still warm. A play came along a generation on, Inherit the Wind, and finished the job. The meme was sealed, and it has been copying itself ever since.
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Not My Thing
06/19/2026
Not My Thing
In the spring of 1973, in a public school in Lincoln, Nebraska, a teacher handed me a paper armband and told me to wear it for the rest of the day. Mine was blue, and it carried a single printed letter, an "S." The children with brown eyes wore brown bands lettered "M". No one explained the letters to a room of eight-year-olds. I have spent the rest of my life arriving at what they meant. "M" for Master. "S" for Slave. The next morning the roles reversed, and the children who had ruled became the ruled. No one in that room was Black. The teacher said the lesson was empathy. I want to talk today about the book I built out of that morning, and out of fifty years of watching that morning return in new costumes. It is called Not My Thing: How We Teach Cruelty to Cure It, from the Armband to the Diversity Seminar. That armband was one early specimen of a method that has since grown into an industry.
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The Three Boxes
06/16/2026
The Three Boxes
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 open exactly one of them. Open the right box and he marries the cleverest and richest woman in the room and clears the debt closing around his friend's neck. Open either of the others and he leaves forever, sworn never to court another woman as long as he lives. The woman who waits for him loves him, and by the terms of her dead father's will she is forbidden to give him the smallest hint. Music plays. He reads the words cut into the three lids, he talks for a while about the gap between how things look and what they are, and he lays his hand on the dullest of the three, the lead, and wins her. That is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it may be the most rigged fair contest in the English language. Shakespeare wrote it in the fifteen-nineties. It never closed. You walked through a version of it this morning, and you will walk through another one before you sleep tonight.
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The Sound of a Bought Room
06/15/2026
The Sound of a Bought Room
Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices. Polite appreciation cost little. Insistence cost more. Down at the luxury end, for a wild ovation at any cost, the price became a sum to be arranged. A psychologist named Robert Cialdini reprinted that tariff decades later in his study of social proof, where it sits among the laboratory findings like a fossil among X-rays, the same animal at two stages of preservation.Now move forward a hundred years. A company in West Palm Beach sold the same product from a drop-down menu, five hundred followers for ten dollars, more than two hundred million of them moved before a newspaper took the operation apart in 2018. The invoice was older than the empire that first printed it.
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The Off Switch
06/11/2026
The Off Switch
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 travels by possession: the coin, the note, the bill in your pocket that asks nothing of anyone. And there is value that travels by permission: the tally, the ledger, the account entry that moves only when a chain of institutions agrees to move it. Neither family is wicked. A healthy monetary world has always kept both, because each covers the other's failures. The story of our moment is that the first family is being retired, and the second family is being wired to a switch.
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