Nuclear Barbarians Emmet Penney

John and I continue our journey through Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity, this time we dig into Petrarch, Martin Luther, the underpinnings of enlightenment humanism, and more.


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John returns for the first installment of another reading series. This time we’re tackling Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity, a book that aims at getting to the root of some of the major questions we face today as products of both the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.
This is also the first in what John and I hope will be a longer project of delving into the history of the philosophy of science. After Gillespie we hope to explore works by Francis Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, Thomas Carlyle, David Hume, Edmund Husserl, and others.
We aim to conclude each author with a Q&A episode. So, if you have any questions, please leave a comment on the Substack—we’ll round them up and get to them at the end of each series.


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Rachael Zisk just launched a nuclear energy newsletter — Ignition — which is great. I brought her on to talk about her new venture, the challenges of covering highly technical topics, how the media landscape is changing, and more!
Subscribe to Ignition.
Subscribe to Payload.


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John and I finish up our discussion of the Machine in the Garden. We reflect on Leo Marx’s contribution—both its successes and failures. And we consider what opportunities there are to think about the American relationship with the Machine.


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Director Tyson Culver joined me to talk about his new docu-series with —Juice: Power, Politics, and the Grid. We talk about what Tyson learned while making documentaries with Robert about the grid and what’s currently going around with America’s electricity sector. Check it out!
You can watch it on YouTube here:
And you can watch their first documentary together here:


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John and I continue our series on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden.
In this episode, we talk about Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Hawthorne.
We recorded this one a bit before Christmas last year.


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