Hotel Bar Sessions

54:28

David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water"

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/10/02

For the final "deep dive" of Season 16, the HBS co-hosts have selected an unusual text to ground our conversation, namely, a commencement speech by novelist David Foster Wallace entitled "This is Water" (delivered at Kenyon College in 2005). In it, Wallace provides a uncannily accurate (if disheartening) description of the mundaneness of everyday "adult" life, then uses it as a springboard to issue his call for each of us to resist the exact manner of thoughtlessness it inspires. We have a

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54:57

Boredom

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/09/25

We've talked about the attention economy more than once on this podcast, and the diagnosis hasn't changed: nearly everything around us is built to capture our attention and then sell it. What we haven't asked is what all that scrambling is supposed to be rescuing us from. The answer, it turns out, is boredom. Nobody pays cash to be bored and no app is designed to deliver it, yet a small but noticeable number of young people are now trading smartphones for flip phones and forming "Luddite

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55:12

Sikh Ethics (wtih Keshav Singh)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/09/18

Over the past several decades, Anglophone philosophy has been trying to remember that it wasn't born in Athens. Syllabi now include Confucius and the Buddha, journals run special issues on Africana and Indigenous thought, and "global philosophy" has become a recognized field. Yet, one of the world's largest religious traditions, with a scripture that is entirely philosophical poetry meant to be sung, has been almost completely absent from that expanded conversation. Sikhism gets left out

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66:26

Confidence Men (with Landon Frim)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/09/11

Con men: From the sophists of ancient greece to the current grifter in chief, philosophy has been at odds with them for millennia, and given their success, it seems like it’s been a losing battle. Some of their success is because, as one famous grifter remarked, there’s a sucker born every minute. We’ve seen then in many guises–snake oil salesmen, televangelists, self-help gurus–but there are three today–Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and Andrew Tate–who’ve not only taken the grift to new

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55:23

Fashion

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/09/04

You are wearing an outfit right now. Maybe you chose it deliberately this morning, or maybe you grabbed it off the floor, but either way it is currently saying things about your class, your gender, your politics, your relationship to the very idea of caring how you look. Roland Barthes argued that this is what separates fashion from “mere clothing.” Fashion is clothing that has become a language, and the fashion industry is the institution that keeps everyone manufacturing new meanings each

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55:49

Betrayal

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/08/28

There are plenty of ready-to-hand moral sanctions for lies told and promises broken. We know how those wrongs work, we know what the apologies sound like, and we know, more or less, how to move on from them. Betrayal is different. Ask anyone who has been betrayed and they'll tell you: the apology did nothing, the explanation did nothing, and the well-meaning friend who said "you should have known better" only made it worse. Something more is wronged in a betrayal than any rule of the

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56:19

The Q Word

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/08/21

At the beginning of April, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Ben Appel titled "I'm Gay, but That Doesn't Make Me Queer." On the last day of Pride Month 2026, the New York Times followed with an op-ed by Matthew Vines titled "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters." Both were written by white, cisgender gay men, and both made the same argument: the hard-won gains of the gay rights movement are now endangered by queer people, queer politics, queer theory, and maybe even the word "queer"

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60:54

Failure

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/08/14

We live in an age with a curiously cheerful relationship to failure. But that optimism was built for a world that no longer quite exists. For three generations now, doing everything right-- getting an education, holding down a full-time job, following the sensible plan-- has stopped reliably buying a house or a secure retirement. When a single failure can be genuinely ruinous, the advice to dust yourself off and "fail fast, fail forward, fail better" starts to sound like a privilege

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56:25

Multi/Race/Less/Ness (with Jon Ivan Gill)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/08/07

Our guest for this episode, Jon Ivan Gill (Gustavus Adolphus College), argues in his recent book, Multi/Race/Less/Ness (Bloomsbury, 2025) that race is trauma. Not that race "causes" trauma, but rather that the assignment of metaphysically fixed and static racial categories to people is itself a trauma. Gill contends that we are coerced to accept the limitations imposed by racial categories, which not only severely restrict our life possibilities, but cause us to fundamentally misapprehend

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63:22

Trust

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/07/31

Surveys say we're living through a "trust crisis," and some version of that has been true since at least the '70s. Confidence in the press, in the courts, in public health agencies, in elected officials, in one another has been down, and still going down. At this point, mistrust reads as our default civic posture. And yet here we all are, getting through our days by handing out trust more or less constantly and mostly without noticing. We tell a friend something we'd rather nobody else

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61:13

The Right to Die

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/07/24

When Leigh's cat Sugar was dying of congestive heart failure, the vet's office offered her something almost no human being will ever be offered: the chance to hold her, to tell her she was loved and thank her, and to be present while a doctor helped her die without pain, without fear, and not alone. Afterward, Leigh's first thought was, I hope my death is this good. Most of us won't get one. We will die in a hospital bed, wired to machines, running up a bill somebody we love will inherit —

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57:57

Rules

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/07/17

What's the difference between a rule that describes the world and one that governs it? Leigh, Jen, and Bob start with a complaint about Robert's Rules of Order and end up in the deep end: the categorical imperative, the social contract, the rule of law, and what it would mean to live without any rules at all. Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/rules---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT

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61:04

Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense (with...

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/07/10

Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature. Most secondary works on him tend to approach him through one of his works on the canonical philosophers, arguing, for example, that Deleuze is and always was a Nietzschean or a Bergsonian or a Spinozist. But these seem to miss what it means to be properly “Deleuzian.”What

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56:40

Disorienting Cisgender (with Perry Zurn)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/07/03

We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either standard vocabulary on HR onboarding documents and medical intake forms or, depending on where you live and who holds power at the moment, possibly a slur, possibly banned from government buildings, possibly both at once. The word has been around for thirty years, but its

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58:10

Sports

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/06/26

Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same time. As the World Cup reminds us every four years, sports can build identities, drive economies, organize civic loyalties, and transform old geopolitical wounds into something that at least resembles a game. Whether you played Little League, follow your city's team with religious devotion, or find the whole spectacle baffling, sports have

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30:24

MINIBAR: Mythos, Fable, Farce (with Leigh M. Johnson)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/06/19

In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it down seventy-two hours later. That subsequent sequence of events, both strange and almost operatic in its timing, is the kind of thing we might genuinely call "unprecedented." It was also a crystalline illustration of something philosophers have been decrying for decades, namely, the difference between performing ethical responsibility and

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35:30

MINIBAR: Art and Phenomenology (with Bob Vallier)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/06/14

We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what you think of it. But a tradition in contemporary art has spent the better part of sixty years insisting that this picture is wrong. The artwork isn't the object. It's your body moving through the space it creates. In this minibar episode, Bob Vallier draws on his work in phenomenology to make the case that some of the stranger, more

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16:40

MINIBAR: Hanlon's Razor (with Jennifer Kling)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/06/06

The HBS co-hosts are diligently at work prepping for Season 16 so, in the meantime, enjoy this "Minibar" episode from Jennifer Kling explaining the merits and demerits of employing Hanlon's Razor in our everyday lives! Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/hanlons-razor---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations

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62:38

REPLAY: Food (with Bob Valgenti)

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/05/29

While our co-hosts are on a short break between seasons, enjoy this REPLAY episode of one of our favorite conversations from Season 15 with Dr. Robert T. Valgenti, philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America, who dropped by the hotel bar to chat with us about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human. Bon appétit! Full episode notes available at this

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58:29

Foucault's "Panopticism"

Hotel Bar Sessions ·

2026/05/22

What does it mean to say that visibility is a trap? Why does the simple awareness that we might be watched work on us so effectively that we end up policing ourselves better than any guard ever could? And if disciplinary power now operates through every camera in every pocket and every satellite overhead, is there anywhere left that isn't already inside the panopticon?For the final episode of Season 15, we close out the season with a deep dive into Michel Foucault's "Panopticism" from

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