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. 4H AGO

    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.

    15 min
  2. You Might Also Like: The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

    4H AGO · BONUS

    You Might Also Like: The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

    Introducing 843: We Fancy with Jerrelle Guy and The Heart Shaped Tin with Bee Wilson from The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters. Follow the show: The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters This week, we’re all about mindfulness in our kitchens. First, we explore a whole new meaning of fancy with author and recipe developer Jerrelle Guy. She shares her unusual thinking and creative recipes that can transform your everyday eating. The little extras that can make a dish a bit more celebratory. Jerrelle Guy’s latest book is We Fancy: Simple Recipes to Make the Everyday Special, and she left us with her recipe for Olive Oil Brownie Pudding. Then we talk with Bee Wilson about the surprisingly sentimental nature of kitchen objects. In Bee’s latest memoir, The Heart Shaped Tin, she dives deep into the emotional relationships many people have with their kitchen tools, from a mother’s rice cooker to learning to eat off the best china rather than saving it. She shares her personal relationship to her most cherished kitchen items with stories of people who share the connection. Bee Wilson’s latest book is The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects. Broadcast dates for this episode: February 13, 2026 (originally aired) Subscribe to @TheSplendidTable on YouTube for full podcast episodes and full-length video interviews! Your support is a special ingredient in helping to make The Splendid Table. Donate today When you shop using our links, we earn a small commission. It’s a great way to support public media at no extra cost to you. 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. 2D AGO

    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.

    17 min

  4. 3D AGO

    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.

    13 min

  5. 5D AGO

    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."

    19 min

  6. FEB 5

    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.

    18 min

  7. FEB 4

    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.

    17 min

  8. FEB 2

    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.

    13 min
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3.7
out of 5
7 Ratings

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
    835
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    Human Meme

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