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 Westborough Crusaders and the Boy Who Wrote It Down
02/22/2026
The Westborough Crusaders and the Boy Who Wrote It Down
In 1982, a sixteen-year-old boy in the Midwest sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series about teenagers running a school newspaper. The characters drank in darkrooms. They brought guns to school. They had bone cancer and absent fathers and substance abuse problems that no adult in the building knew how to address. One of them wore orange overalls and ordered a razor from a magazine that promised to scrape away the dead sensuality, uncovering your natural, animal instincts. The blades cost seventy-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents. The razor cost three dollars and eighty-seven cents. That detail is the kind of thing only a teenager would write, because only a teenager understands the specific economics of being cheated by the adult world before you are old enough to know the word for it. That boy was me. And for over four decades, those scripts sat in a drawer, and then in a file, and then in the particular purgatory of work that matters to its author but has not yet found its form. Today I want to talk about what happens when you go back.
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The Sign Above the Shelf: The God in the Wire
02/18/2026
The Sign Above the Shelf: The God in the Wire
In the book I describe what I call the Substitution Test. Three questions. What human good was this technology supposed to serve? What did it actually deliver instead? And who profited from the substitution? Those three questions govern every chapter. They are applied to the typewriter and the word processor. To the chalkboard and the learning management system. To the handwritten letter and the social media post. To the stethoscope and the electronic health record. And in every case, the answer reveals the same structural pattern: a genuine human need is identified, a technology is developed to address it, the technology achieves dominance, and during that dominance, something essential is lost. Not because the technology is evil, but because the technology is a tool being asked to be a god, and tools cannot be gods, no matter how sophisticated they become.
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The Story That Found Its Body: Cat Heads In Space!
02/15/2026
The Story That Found Its Body: Cat Heads In Space!
For twenty-eight episodes of this podcast, four cat heads floated through the universe looking for their bodies. Captain Whiskerfluff, gray-furred and philosophically inconvenient. Lieutenant Mittens, ginger, who told jokes the way the rest of us breathe. Cookie Kitty, calico, whose opinions about soup could be heard across three star systems. And Skeedootle, who was not a cat at all but a puppy, floppy-eared and enormous-eyed, adopted into a crew of felines because nobody could justify leaving a creature alone in the dark. They lived here. On this podcast. In this voice. In the space between my microphone and your earbuds. Twenty-eight times, we visited them. Twenty-eight times, they argued and wondered and searched and did not find what they were looking for, because the search was the point, and because finishing the search in a podcast that was also about consciousness and memory and what it means to be a living thing in a confusing universe would have felt premature. The Cat Heads existed as audio drama. They were performed. They were voiced. They were heard and then they were gone, living only in the archive, waiting for someone to press play again.
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The Architecture of Forgetting
02/13/2026
The Architecture of Forgetting
Aristotle said we become brave by doing brave things. The prairie understood this twenty-four centuries later when it built institutions that made brave things ordinary. Now, why does any of this belong on a podcast about consciousness and the human condition? Because what I am describing is not merely a sociological phenomenon. It is a crisis of awareness. We dismantled these technologies across two generations, between roughly 1960 and 2020, and we did it one reasonable decision at a time, and at no point did anyone stand up and say: we are removing the infrastructure that produces citizens. Nobody said it because nobody saw it. The forgetting was built into the process. Each individual replacement seemed logical. In aggregate, they amounted to an act of civilizational self-erasure. This is what makes the prairie such a powerful diagnostic instrument. In a city, civic life can sustain itself through sheer proximity. People bump into each other and institutions emerge from the friction. On the prairie, where the nearest neighbor might be a mile away and the nearest town twenty, every act of community is deliberate. The barn does not raise itself. The letter does not write itself. When deliberate acts cease, the absence is immediate and total. You do not fade from civic life on the prairie. You disappear from it. And because the land is flat and the light is honest, the disappearance is visible in a way that urban decline never is. You can count the closed schools. You can drive the abandoned roads. You can stand in the silence where a town used to be and understand, in your body rather than your mind, what it means when the infrastructure of mutual obligation collapses.
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The Loneliest Thing in the Universe
02/12/2026
The Loneliest Thing in the Universe
People sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in the structure. My years studying medicine are in the neurological precision of "The Limerick Ward" and the physics of "The Atomic Man." My time studying law is in the procedural architecture of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." My decades of teaching are in the conviction that a story should leave you knowing something you did not know before, not because the author lectured you, but because the character's experience rearranged something in your understanding. But the specific creative archaeology of this collection, the work of recognizing that these twelve pieces belonged together and then preparing them for publication, that involved a different kind of effort. It meant going back into stories I had written years ago, sometimes decades ago, and asking whether they still meant what I thought they meant. Some of them did. Some of them had grown into something larger while I wasn't looking, the way a tree you planted as a sapling has become something you cannot get your arms around. And some of them needed work, not because they were broken but because I was different, and the book they were joining was more demanding than any of them had been on their own.
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The Pharmacist's Bell: Introducing Beautiful Numbness
02/10/2026
The Pharmacist's Bell: Introducing Beautiful Numbness
I was ten years old the first time I understood what art does. Not what it says it does. Not what we teach that it does. What it actually does. The production was Hello, Dolly! at a community playhouse in a town where amateur theatre was both social ritual and minor act of civic pride. I was a child in the ensemble, old enough to have memorized my blocking and young enough to believe that what we were doing mattered in some way I could not yet name. The show went fine. The audience clapped politely. Nobody stood. Then the orchestra played the curtain call. An experienced actor standing next to me leaned toward another veteran and whispered five words that I have carried for more than half a century: "They can't help but stand."
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Beyond the Hands: Completion of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners Trilogy
02/05/2026
Beyond the Hands: Completion of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners Trilogy
Today we celebrate the completion of a project seven years in the making. The third volume of the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series, Beyond the Hands: Non-Manual Grammar, Discourse Structure, and Sentence Types in American Sign Language, co-authored with Janna Sweenie, is now available. This episode explores what the book is, why it matters, and what it reveals about language, embodiment, and the nature of human communication. Let me begin with a claim that may seem strange if your experience with language has been limited to speaking and listening: The face is grammar. Not expression. Not emotion. Not accompaniment. Grammar. In American Sign Language, the eyebrows mark the difference between a statement and a question. The mouth produces morphemes that modify meaning. The head nods and shakes with grammatical force. The eyes point to referents and track agreement across discourse. The body shifts to mark perspective and emphasis.
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Standard Deviation
02/04/2026
Standard Deviation
You have a number. Not your phone number. Not your social security number, though that one matters more than most of us like to think about. I mean another number, one that follows you through databases you will never see, aggregated from purchases you barely remember making, from the length of time you hovered over a photograph before scrolling past, from the route you took to work last Tuesday and whether you lingered outside that coffee shop or walked directly to the train. This number has a name in China. They call it a Social Credit Score. But the American version has no single name because it has no single keeper. It lives distributed across credit bureaus and insurance actuaries, across hiring algorithms and rental application systems, across the predictive models that decide whether you see an advertisement for a luxury watch or a payday loan. You did not consent to being numbered. But you are numbered nonetheless.
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Depicting Space: When Language Lives in the Hands
02/02/2026
Depicting Space: When Language Lives in the Hands
Let me start with a confession. Classifiers are hard. Not hard in the way vocabulary is hard, where you simply need more exposure, more repetition, more time. Classifiers are hard because they require signers to think spatially while signing temporally, to track multiple referents while producing new content, to select among productive options while maintaining discourse coherence. That mouthful of a sentence appears in the opening of Depicting Space, and I want to unpack it for you, because hidden inside that description is something important about human cognition. When you speak English, your words unfold in time. One after another. Linear. Sequential. The sentence has a beginning, a middle, an end. You cannot say two words simultaneously. The channel is narrow. But when you sign ASL, something different happens. Your hands can represent two entities at once. Your face carries grammatical information independent of your hands. Your body can shift to become a character while your hands continue to manipulate objects in observer space. The channel is wide. Parallel processing becomes possible.
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Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella
02/01/2026
Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella
For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources. The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for the afterlife. The structure of numbered propositions, posted to the institutional door, demanding accountability - that form echoes throughout this novella. There is a character who writes theses. The institution does not welcome them. The second source is Jefferson Davis's address to the Confederate Congress in 1861. This gave me the rhetorical DNA of exclusion dressed as protection. Davis spoke of voluntary participation, states' rights, procedural legitimacy - all while encoding slavery into the constitutional fabric of the Confederacy. The Civic Trust & Access Authority in my novella speaks in that register. It promises safety. It delivers sorting. The third source is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin from 1925 - specifically, his theoretical writings on dialectical montage. Eisenstein believed that meaning emerges from the collision of images, that the audience assembles truth from fragments. This novella works the same way. You receive documents out of sequence. You reconstruct causation. You become complicit in the interpretation. Three sources. Three different centuries. Three different forms of institutional power confronting individual resistance. And from their collision, a new story emerges - one that feels disturbingly contemporary.
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The Somnambulist's Prophecy
01/27/2026
The Somnambulist's Prophecy
Have you ever dreamed something true? Not metaphorically true. Not symbolically true. Actually true. You dreamed your phone would ring, and it rang. You dreamed someone was sick before anyone told you. You dreamed a door opening that hadn't opened yet. Most of us have had this experience at least once. We wake up unsettled, the dream still clinging, and then something happens that makes us pause. Makes us wonder. We shake it off. We tell ourselves it was coincidence, pattern-matching, the brain's talent for finding connections where none exist. We go on with our day. But what if you couldn't shake it off?
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The Corollary of Every Prayer
01/26/2026
The Corollary of Every Prayer
What does it mean to say amen? We say it reflexively. The minister concludes the prayer, and the congregation responds. Amen. So be it. Let it be done. The word carries the weight of assent, of agreement, of complicity in whatever petition has just been offered to the divine. But what happens when someone refuses to say it? I want to explore the larger project of what I've been calling Fractional Fiction. Because the two are inseparable. The methodology creates the meaning, and the meaning demands the methodology. Let me start with a scene.
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The Held Land: A Fractional Fiction
01/23/2026
The Held Land: A Fractional Fiction
The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He walks off the land he made productive with nothing but his discharge papers and disappears from the historical record.
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The Last Living American White Male: A Novel
01/21/2026
The Last Living American White Male: A Novel
What makes you countable? Not valuable. Not worthy. Not loved. Countable. What is it about you that allows a system to place you in a box, assign you a number, and track your existence across time? We live inside classification systems we did not choose and cannot see. Every form you have ever filled out asked you to sort yourself into categories invented by strangers. Race. Gender. Age. Income. Education. Marital status. Employment. Each checkbox a small act of self-definition performed for an audience that will never know your name. The systems do not care about you. They care about the categories. You are the instance; the category is the thing. And when the last instance of a category dies, the category closes, and the system moves on without mourning.
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Passage Land: The High Plains, the Long Roads, the People Who Remain
01/16/2026
Passage Land: The High Plains, the Long Roads, the People Who Remain
You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay. I want you to consider that statement before you dismiss it. Not a financial debt, not a mortgage or a student loan with your signature on the paperwork. Something older. Something that attached itself to your bloodline before you were born, before your parents were born, before anyone now living had any say in the matter. This is not metaphor. This is how land works in America. The house you grew up in, the town where you learned to read, the state whose history you memorized in school, all of it sits on ground that belonged to someone else first. The transfer was not clean. The transfer was never clean. And the people who were displaced did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, still remembering, still holding ledgers that no one on the other side wants to examine.
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The EleMenTs Trilogy
01/15/2026
The EleMenTs Trilogy
When we encounter disability, most of us have been trained to see deficiency. Something missing. Something wrong. A departure from the norm that requires correction, accommodation, or at minimum, sympathy. This is the meme of the broken body, and it has replicated through Western culture for centuries. The meme manifests in our language. We speak of people "suffering from" conditions rather than "living with" them. We describe someone as "wheelchair-bound" rather than "wheelchair-using," as though the chair were a prison rather than a tool. We praise disabled people for "overcoming" their disabilities, as if the goal of every disabled life should be to approximate able-bodied existence as closely as possible. The meme manifests in our narratives. Stories about disabled characters tend to follow predictable patterns. The disabled person exists to inspire the able-bodied protagonist. The disabled person must be cured by the story's end, their disability a problem to be solved. The disabled person is saintly and patient, bearing their burden with grace, teaching others valuable lessons about gratitude and perseverance. Or the disabled person is bitter and villainous, their disability the source or symbol of their moral corruption. Visit for trilogy details.
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Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse
01/13/2026
Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse
Here is something I did not expect to discover while writing a textbook about American Sign Language. The shoulder knows things the hand cannot say. That sentence sounds like metaphor. It is not. It is linguistics, documented and measurable, and it has been sitting in plain sight for as long as deaf people have been signing to each other. The position of the arm, the engagement of the shoulder, the extension or contraction of the elbow: these carry meaning. Not incidental meaning. Not decorative meaning. Semantic meaning that changes what a sign communicates even when the handshape stays exactly the same. Consider what this implies about how consciousness expresses itself through the body. We tend to think of language as something that happens in the head. Words form in the mind and then exit through the mouth, or through the fingers if we are typing, but the origin point is cognitive, neural, somewhere behind the eyes where the self is supposed to live. The body is just the delivery system. The meaning is elsewhere.
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The Kinship of Strangers: When Science Dissolves the Boundaries We Need
01/11/2026
The Kinship of Strangers: When Science Dissolves the Boundaries We Need
What does it mean to discover that you are kin to strangers? Not metaphorically kin, not spiritually connected, but genetically linked in ways that contradict everything you were taught about who your people are and who they are not? This is the question at the center of my new novel, "The Kinship of Strangers," the third book in the Fractional Fiction series. And it is a question that has no comfortable answer, which is precisely why I needed to write about it. We live in an age of genetic revelation. For less than a hundred dollars, you can spit into a tube and receive, six weeks later, a percentage breakdown of your ancestry. You can discover relatives you never knew existed. You can trace your maternal line back through mitochondrial DNA and your paternal line through Y-chromosome markers. The technology is remarkable. What we do with the information it provides is another matter entirely.
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The Inheritance and the Body's Archive
01/09/2026
The Inheritance and the Body's Archive
Your grandmother was frightened before you were born. Not in the ordinary way that people are frightened, the startle at a loud noise or the anxiety before a difficult conversation. I mean something more precise. Decades before your parents met, before you existed as even a possibility, your grandmother experienced something that changed her at the molecular level. Methyl groups attached themselves to specific locations on her DNA. Genes that had been active went quiet. Genes that had been quiet began to speak. And that alteration, that chemical annotation of experience, passed forward. You carry it now.
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The Dying Grove: Mind Beneath the Soil
01/07/2026
The Dying Grove: Mind Beneath the Soil
There is a forest in the Pacific Northwest that has been thinking for four thousand years. I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Not to dismiss it as metaphor, not to immediately qualify it with objections about anthropomorphization or the hard problem of consciousness. Just to consider: what would it mean if something could think without a brain? What would it mean if memory could persist across millennia without neurons, without synapses, without anything we recognize as architecture for thought? This is not speculation. This is what the science of mycorrhizal networks has been revealing for the past three decades. Underground, beneath every forest floor you have ever walked, fungal threads thinner than human hair connect trees into communication systems of staggering complexity. A single cubic inch of forest soil contains enough mycorrhizal threads to stretch for miles if laid end to end. These threads carry chemical signals, nutrients, water, and information. When one tree is attacked by insects, it sends chemical warnings through the network to other trees, which then begin producing defensive compounds before any pest has touched them. Mother trees preferentially channel resources to their offspring, recognizing kin through molecular signatures we are only beginning to decode.
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The Wound Remains Faithful: A Human Meme Podcast
01/03/2026
The Wound Remains Faithful: A Human Meme Podcast
There is a particular cruelty in forgetting. We dress it up in softer language. We call it moving on, healing, closure. We treat forgetting as the natural conclusion to grief, as though memory were a wound that needs to close rather than a responsibility that demands tending. But some wounds are not meant to close. Some wounds remain faithful precisely because closing them would constitute a second violence, an erasure layered upon the original harm. I have written a novel called "The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora." It took me more than fifty years to write it, though I did not know I was writing it for most of that time. The book concerns a seventeen-year-old girl named Nora who walks out her front door one August morning and never comes home. She writes poems in a notebook hidden under her mattress. She has never seen the ocean. She will never see it now. What follows in the novel is not an investigation in any conventional sense. There is no detective piecing together clues. There is no satisfying revelation in the final act. What follows instead is the aftermath: the weeks of silence, the months of waiting, the decades during which a family is destroyed by grief while a community learns, slowly and deliberately, to forget.
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Hand Against the Father
12/15/2025
Hand Against the Father
This is the particular tragedy of sons against fathers. The father does not see it coming. The father still thinks of the son as his child, as someone he made, as someone who carries his hopes. The father may have failed the son in a hundred ways. The father may have been imperious, neglectful, demanding, disappointed. But the father did not expect the blade. The father was still, in some part of himself, waiting for the reconciliation, for the return of the prodigal, for the moment when the son would finally understand. In the wake of the death of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son Nick, the knowledge before the act emerges as the cruelest part. The children saw what Nick was capable of. They felt the danger in their own bodies. And yet there was likely no mechanism available to them that could have stopped it. You cannot institutionalize someone for being frightening. You cannot compel treatment for an adult who refuses it. The law protects autonomy right up until the moment autonomy becomes lethal. So the children carry a specific kind of burden: not the guilt of ignorance but the guilt of accurate perception. They knew. They were right. And being right saved no one. That's a different weight than sudden, inexplicable loss. There's no refuge in "we never could have seen this coming." They saw it coming. They lived in the seeing for years, probably. And now they have to construct a life around the fact that their fear was prophecy, that their brother was exactly what they knew him to be, and that knowing changed nothing. Rob and his wife now lie in their graves, silent. The dead make no accusations. But they don't have to. The children will accuse themselves, asking forever whether there was some door they didn't try, some call they didn't make, some version of events where they acted differently and their parents lived. There almost certainly wasn't. But the mind doesn't accept that. It keeps searching for the moment where the story could have turned.
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Martha's Vineyard Sign Language
12/10/2025
Martha's Vineyard Sign Language
Martha's Vineyard. You know it now as a summer retreat for the wealthy, a place of pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. But between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the twentieth, something happened there that challenges everything we think we know about disability, about language, about what it means to belong. It began with a gene. Families from the Weald, a forested region in Kent, England, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s. They were Puritans seeking religious freedom, and they carried with them, unknowingly, a recessive genetic trait for congenital Deafness. In 1694, a carpenter and farmer named Jonathan Lambert arrived on Martha's Vineyard with his hearing wife. Two of their seven children would be born Deaf. They were the first, but they would not be the last.
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Pause Before the Lie
12/03/2025
Pause Before the Lie
Listen to your own voice the next time you tell the truth. Notice how it flows, uninterrupted, from thought to speech. Now pay attention when you're about to lie. Feel it? That hesitation, that gathering of alternate reality before you speak it into being. Scientists have measured this pause. They've quantified it, studied it, turned it into data points and probability curves. But they haven't explained what happens inside it. That's what we're after today. Not the lie itself, but the space before the lie, that fraction of a second where consciousness does something remarkable and terrible and utterly human.
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Wicked: The Bespoke Voice and the Echo of the Ghost
11/23/2025
Wicked: The Bespoke Voice and the Echo of the Ghost
Today, we are standing in the wings of the theater, looking out at the empty stage, asking ourselves a question about the ghosts that haunt the floorboards. We are talking about the "Original Cast Recording" and how that static document, that moment frozen in time, can become a trap for every artist who follows. We are looking specifically at Wicked, a show that has not only defined a generation of theatergoers but has arguably altered the way we think about the "rightness" of a role versus the "reality" of the performer. Let us look first at the pen of the creator. Stephen Schwartz, the legendary composer, has spoken openly about crafting the score of Wicked specifically for Idina Menzel. He wasn't just writing for a green witch; he was writing for Idina. He heard the unique architecture of her larynx, that specific, stratospheric "belt" that sits somewhere between a scream and a prayer, and he built the song "Defying Gravity" to live exactly in that pocket.
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How Long Is a Piece of String: Geometry of Uncertain Mercy
11/19/2025
How Long Is a Piece of String: Geometry of Uncertain Mercy
Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you hold something more precarious than you might realize. You're standing at the intersection of mathematics, psychology, and potentially someone's survival. How do you answer? More importantly, how do you act?
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Every Word Could Kill You
11/12/2025
Every Word Could Kill You
Right now, as you listen to this, your larynx is trying to kill you. This isn't metaphorical. Your voice box sits dangerously low in your throat, creating an intersection where food and air must cross paths every time you swallow. No other mammal has this problem. Horses can drink and breathe simultaneously. Newborn humans can nurse and breathe at the same time. But somewhere between three and six months old, your larynx descended, and you joined the only species on Earth that regularly dies from eating dinner.
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The Liquid Language Only Humans Speak
11/05/2025
The Liquid Language Only Humans Speak
Here's something that should stop you cold: humans are the only animals on Earth that cry emotional tears. Not tears to clean the eyes, not tears from irritation, but tears from joy, from grief, from being overwhelmed by beauty. Elephants mourn their dead without weeping. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors without crying at their own reflection. Your dog, who seems to love you completely, has never shed a single emotional tear. This is not speculation. This is measured fact. And nobody knows why.
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That Thing That Eats Your Name: A Story for Halloween
10/28/2025
That Thing That Eats Your Name: A Story for Halloween
The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch in her gardening clothes, dirt still under her fingernails from planting the tulips we'd all watched her plant an hour before. Her husband assumed it was a stroke. The doctors found nothing. Brain scans perfect. Blood work pristine. Patricia simply no longer knew she was Patricia. Within a week, three more people on Millbrook Road forgot themselves. Not amnesia where everything disappears. Something more precise. They remembered their children's names, their job skills, how to drive, what they had for breakfast. They just didn't remember being themselves. Marcus Chen could still perform surgery but couldn't recognize his own hands doing it. Sarah Thompson could recite every case she'd ever tried in court but insisted someone else must have tried them. They lived in their own homes as guests, polite strangers wearing their own faces.
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Boodle Boy: A Brief History of Time
10/22/2025
Boodle Boy: A Brief History of Time
When we invoke the Boodle Boy, we're also invoking a kind of professional shamanism. The shaman moves between worlds, bringing back knowledge from spaces others can't access. The Boodle Boy moves between disciplines, between technologies, between ways of knowing. He speaks theater to programmers and code to dramatists. He finds the musical structure in a business plan and the corporate logic in a symphony. This isn't interdisciplinary work in the academic sense; it's transdisciplinary in the most radical sense, refusing to acknowledge the borders between different forms of knowledge.
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