Human Meme

David Boles

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.

  1. 3 days ago

    The Mask in the Glass Case

    I want to tell you about a clay mask. It sits in a glass case at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian galleries. The mask is approximately three thousand eight hundred years old, made in southern Iraq during the Old Babylonian period. Its face was made to terrify. The hair tangles into serpentine coils across the brow. The grin is bared, with one tooth chipped on the left side. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness. Time has cracked the surface of the clay in seven places that I have counted. That mask was paid for. Someone took silver from a temple administrator's hand and walked it across the city to a workshop, where a craftsman took clay and pigment and several days of his working life and converted them into a monster. The monster was a job. The figure left the workshop on the back of a delivery cart, settled by an invoice that the temple's accountants logged in their cuneiform ledgers. We do not know who the patron was. The artisan is also anonymous to us. The tablets that recorded the rate structures of the Old Babylonian craft economy survive in archives in London and Chicago and Berlin, and those tablets establish that the transaction happened, even though the specific contract for this specific mask has not survived.

    9 min

  2. 3 days ago ·  Bonus

    You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

    Introducing Oprah and renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel on What We Really Want in a Relationship from The Oprah Podcast. Follow the show: The Oprah Podcast World-renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel returns to The Oprah Podcast to share her brilliant relationship insights with a live audience. Esther has incisive advice for Gen Z women who’ve given up on dating, a mother of five struggling to heal old wounds in her marriage and a single mom who put her dating life on hold to focus on raising her son. Plus, Esther reveals what she learned during her first-ever therapy session between a man and his AI chatbot girlfriend. She also reflects on the 20th anniversary of her groundbreaking book Mating in Captivity — and why, in today’s age of disconnection, its message is more crucial than ever. BUY THE BOOK! The 20th anniversary edition of Mating in Captivity, published by HarperCollins and written by Esther Perel, is available wherever books are sold. https://www.estherperel.com/mating-in-captivity 00:00:00 - Welcome Esther Perel 00:03:00 - Desire in long-term relationships 00:05:12 - Relationships in 2006 vs. 2026 00:08:45 - We’re more connected and less accessible 00:10:32 - 3 most common sex challenges today 00:13:00 - Esther’s dating advice 00:17:30 - One person can’t be everything 00:21:05 - The love myth we learned 00:22:50 - What to look for in a partner 00:25:30 - Relationship ambivalence 00:29:40 - Relationships with chatbots 00:36:36 - Chatbot relationships are here 00:37:57 - When couples therapy took off 00:39:00 - Healing from relationship ruptures 00:42:00 - Importance of repair 00:46:00 - How to date again 00:48:28 - Healing from heartbreak 00:54:50 - How Esther understands people Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to team@podroll.fm.

  3. 21 May

    Tomorrow as Tribute

    The simple argument is the trade. Across more than a dozen contemporary cases, voter populations have agreed to trade the material future of their political communities for the maintenance of a fantasy past. The trade is voluntary. The costs include dead soldiers, dismantled institutions, scientific apparatus lost across decades, and democratic procedures captured by movements that openly oppose them. Voters know the costs. They have decided that the costs are worth it. The difficult argument comes after that recognition. Once you accept that the trade is voluntary, you cannot organize around the assumption that the voters have been tricked. You also cannot organize around the assumption that better information will change their minds. The voters know what they are doing. They are participants in a transaction they understand at the level that matters to them. They are buying something. Today we ask what the something is, and what it would take to offer them a better deal.

    8 min

  4. 10 May

    What Was Kept From You

    There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it happened at thirty-four, going through a parent's papers after a funeral, when a folder you were not supposed to open contained a name you had never heard. Or you were fifty-eight, and a half-sister you did not know you had appeared in your DNA results. The detail varies from one person to the next. What stays constant is the texture of the moment. The room reorganizes itself. Around it, the faces of the people who had known reorganize along with the room. And then the realization arrives, that the world you had been living in was a smaller version of the world, edited for you, by people who had decided what you could be told and when. I want to talk right now about what it means to sit on the receiving end of a structural decision someone else has made about your knowledge. The decisions where a person, or a committee, or an institution, looks at another human being and decides that the truth would not serve them. That the truth will be administered later, in doses, on a schedule the person being administered to did not consent to and cannot see.

    9 min

  5. 5 May

    The River and the Trained Eye

    I keep walking past the same stretch of river. Most days I cross over it. Sometimes I stop. There is a place along the New Jersey side of the Hudson where you can stand and see the water moving in two directions at the same time, depending on where you fix your eyes. The surface goes one way. Beneath it, the deeper current is going the other way. The Mohican word for the river is Muhheakantuck. It means the waters that are never still. When you say the word, you have already been told what to look for. This is what I have been thinking about for the last several months, while finishing a book that came out this week. The book is called RelationShaping: Field Studies. It is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic, and it asks one question across ten different settings: what changes about a person when they become trained to see something the rest of us walk past? The book's working claim is that relational seeing is a competence. A real competence, the kind you acquire the way a child acquires reading. Reading is acquired somewhere in the practice. After several thousand hours of reading across genres, against difficulty, with attention, the capacity arrives. There is no moment to point to. Sentences just appear and you know what they say. Reading French is the same. The capacity arrives somewhere in the reading itself, after the exercise sets are done, after several thousand pages have crossed the eye against difficulty.

    7 min

  6. 1 May

    The Painters of 1839 and the Question of Now

    Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, stands at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He reads into the record the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process. The French state has acquired the rights from Daguerre and Isidore Niépce in exchange for life pensions of six thousand francs per year and four thousand francs per year. Sunlight, Arago tells the chamber, can now be made to draw its own pictures. Within weeks the satirical press of Paris is mocking photographers as mechanics, copyists, charlatans. Paul Delaroche, the academic history painter at the height of his reputation, is reported, perhaps apocryphally, to have said: from this day, painting is dead. Twenty years later Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement. He wants photography kept in its place. Useful for documenting monuments, useful for assisting the working artist, excluded from the category of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right.

    10 min

  7. 24 Apr

    UNDERWRITTEN

    I want to start with four seconds. If you watched public television anywhere in the United States between 1971 and January of this year, you know these four seconds. A human face in profile, rendered first in the three colors of mid-century corporate design, recast in 1984 as a trio of interlocking faces on a field of white. Six synthesizer notes descending, resolving to a sustained major ninth chord. A voice that said three words. This is PBS. The sequence took less than four seconds. Before it ran: documentaries, children's programming, nature films, dramatic adaptations of novels too difficult for commercial television to attempt. News came after it. Cooking instruction followed. Home-improvement demonstration, classical music, weather announcements on rural affiliates, local public-affairs segments, national programming from Omaha and Boise and Portland and Lincoln, Nebraska, all carrying the same four-second preamble.

    10 min

  8. 20 Apr

    The Apothecary Who Was Not Written

    Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text. Think about what that means for a moment. Romeo, banished to Mantua, walks into a shop and asks a starving man to sell him poison. The apothecary refuses. The apothecary cites the law. Mantua punishes the sale of such drugs with death. Romeo counters that the world affords no law to make him rich. Forty ducats change hands. A vial changes hands. Romeo leaves. Shakespeare's attention returns to Verona, to the tomb, to the reconciliation of the feuding houses. The apothecary remains in his shop. He has forty ducats on the counter. He has just committed a capital crime. Nobody has ever asked him what happened next.

    10 min
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    David Boles
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    859
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    Human Meme