9 episodes

Into the Zone Pushkin Industries

- Philosophy
- 4.8 • 340 Ratings

Into the Zone is a podcast about opposites, and how borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist’s eye for the unexpected, host Hari Kunzru takes the listener around the world, meeting philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, to investigate the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more.

- OCT 15, 2020
Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive

Life’s final border might not be so final after all. From tardigrades to viruses, some things are both dead and alive. Or neither. How do we draw the line between the living and the dead? And how does that line blur in places like in a time capsule buried in ice, or a library on the moon?
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- 51 min
- OCT 8, 2020
When We Were Cyber

When We Were Cyber

Cyborgs, cyberspace, mind-melting techno. In the mid-’90s, the future had arrived. To find out what happened to it, Hari pays a visit to philosopher Manuel DeLanda, and to the legendary artist ORLAN, who he first encountered at an academic conference like no other.
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- 48 min
- OCT 1, 2020
The Ghost in the Codec

The Ghost in the Codec

At the dawn of the digital era, a group of engineers tasked with audio compression had to decide what information to keep, and what to leave behind. What was signal, and what was noise? Fast forward two decades, to our much noisier world. Hari finds a writer and a musician who’ve discovered their own ways to find a voice within the static.
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- 44 min
- SEP 24, 2020
Never Mind the Stasi

Never Mind the Stasi

East Berlin, 1983. A teenage punk rocker finds himself in a Stasi interrogation cell. The choice is simple: inform on his friends, or go to prison. Hari travels to Berlin to meet the punks and spies whose cat and mouse game in the last years of the GDR predicted the privacy wars of today.
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- 54 min
- SEP 17, 2020
It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic

It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic

Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to complain about.
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- 52 min
- SEP 10, 2020
The Guru of Ojai

The Guru of Ojai

In the 1920s, a messianic visitor to Hari's family home unveils the connection between Indian Independence movement and the astral plane. Nearly a century later, Hari travels to the orange groves of Southern California, where the guru made his home, to examine the globetrotting legacy of New Age spirituality.
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- 52 min

4.8 out of 5

340 Ratings

For POC obsessed w subcultures

Been trying to articulate exactly what makes this podcast so special to me, personally and I think it’s that, as an Asian American woman w a longstanding fascination w subcultures, cults, and conspiracy theories, it’s so refreshing to hear these topics explored by someone whose experiences more closely mirror mine. It’s both validating and eye-opening to get a non-Euro or US-centric POV on things like country music and theosophy. Kind of like Lovecraft Country...if you’re a fan of the show, you’ll love this podcast. Also reminds me of a smarter, more incisive and reflective version of the web series (?) All Gas No Brakes. The research is so thorough—the product of someone who gets truly obsessed and immersed in a subject—but not to the point of it being academic or cold. The storytelling is grounded while being far-reaching and expansive—a hard thing to accomplish! One of my absolute favorite podcasts; binged the entirety of it in a weekend.

Beautiful, thought provoking and deeply entertaining

This whole season is so great. If you like other shows on Pushkin then you’ll like this one. It’s smart and bingeworthy. The end of the season is beautiful.