That Thing That Eats Your Name: A Story for Halloween
The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch in her gardening clothes, dirt still under her fingernails from planting the tulips we'd all watched her plant an hour before. Her husband assumed it was a stroke. The doctors found nothing. Brain scans perfect. Blood work pristine. Patricia simply no longer knew she was Patricia. Within a week, three more people on Millbrook Road forgot themselves. Not amnesia where everything disappears. Something more precise. They remembered their children's names, their job skills, how to drive, what they had for breakfast. They just didn't remember being themselves. Marcus Chen could still perform surgery but couldn't recognize his own hands doing it. Sarah Thompson could recite every case she'd ever tried in court but insisted someone else must have tried them. They lived in their own homes as guests, polite strangers wearing their own faces.
-------- Â
11:00
--------
11:00
Boodle Boy: A Brief History of Time
When we invoke the Boodle Boy, we're also invoking a kind of professional shamanism. The shaman moves between worlds, bringing back knowledge from spaces others can't access. The Boodle Boy moves between disciplines, between technologies, between ways of knowing. He speaks theater to programmers and code to dramatists. He finds the musical structure in a business plan and the corporate logic in a symphony. This isn't interdisciplinary work in the academic sense; it's transdisciplinary in the most radical sense, refusing to acknowledge the borders between different forms of knowledge.
-------- Â
13:25
--------
13:25
The Last Human Memory
Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone about it. Just hold it in your mind. Try to recall it tomorrow, next week, next month. Watch how it changes. Notice how it connects to other memories, how it grows or fades, how it becomes less about what happened and more about what it meant. Because here's what cognitive scientists are discovering: the difference between remembering and retrieving data isn't just technical, it's existential. When you remember something, you're not just accessing information. You're reconstituting yourself. The memory changes you as you change it. This recursive loop between the rememberer and the remembered? That's consciousness itself.
-------- Â
20:00
--------
20:00
Black Pill: Meaning, History, and Cultural Fallout
"Taking the black pill" names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men's forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on the pills in The Matrix, but where the "red pill" claims to reveal hard truths, the black pill says those truths are terminal and change is pointless. In its most specific and consequential register, it is tied to the incel subculture that coalesced online in the early 2010s. Encyclopædia Britannica traces the phrase's popularization to the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt and records a further radicalization after May 23, 2014, when some forum users glorified Elliot Rodger's Isla Vista murders with talk of "going ER," a dark shorthand for destruction and loss of hope.Â
-------- Â
16:24
--------
16:24
Galileo Test: Why Today's AI Still Can't Invent the Future
Consider a thought experiment: one intelligence is trained exclusively on everything known about apples. Another is trained only on oranges. They are allowed to communicate but are strictly forbidden from discussing the specifics of their respective fruits. Would the apple expert learn about oranges, and vice versa? Surprisingly, the answer is almost certainly yes. Information inevitably leaks through the structure of communication itself. While their specific knowledge is specialized, they share a common linguistic framework. They both understand concepts like color, shape, growth, and climate.
This Human Meme podcast is the inflection point for what it means to live a life of knowing. We are in the critical moment of human induction. David Boles is a writer, publisher, teacher, lyricist and author living and working in New York City. He has dedicated his life to founding the irrevocable aesthetic. Be a Human Meme!
South Africa