Nora Lange, author of Us Fools (2024), discusses her new collection of short stories, Day Care, with Erin Beeghly (Department of Philosophy). Their conversation touches on female desire, motherhood, mischief, and the strange pressures of contemporary life. They discuss the surreal charge of stories like “Hot Spot,” the autofictional elements of the title story, and Lange’s “careening” prose style, which moves through play, surprise, and sudden transformation without losing emotional depth.

Along the way, they talk about siblings, marriage, daycare, deadlines, and the elastic feeling of time in parenting, as well as Lange’s interest in genre, from realism to the snow-globe science fiction of “Dog Star.”

Episode art: Detail from Joris Hoefnagel, Seven Snails (c.1575/1590s), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.

In anticipation of our symposium on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on April 10, Marcie Young-Cancio, Robert Carson, and Scott Black discuss the show from a humanities perspective, examining its treatment of faith, femininity, Utah culture, entrepreneurship, fan loyalty, and camp sensibility.

Marcie Young-Cancio is Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Founder and Executive Director of Amplify Utah.

See also:

• Receipts, Proof, Timeline: How We Watch the RHOSLC symposium program
• Heather L. King, “Tanner Humanities Center presents a scholarly deep dive into ‘The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’” @ the U
• Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.

In this episode, Matt Potolsky (Professor of English) talks with writer and activist Cory Doctorow about digital privacy, platform decay, and the politics of monopoly.

Drawing on his recent book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow argues that the erosion of privacy is inseparable from the rise of unchecked commercial surveillance, and that many people care deeply about privacy without recognizing it as such.

They also discuss

• the three-stage collapse of digital platforms
• Robert Bork and the Chicago School’s influence on antitrust law
• the IBM antitrust case
• Yanis Varoufakis’s theory of techno-feudalism
• algorithmic wage discrimination
• effective altruism and longtermism
• AI as a fantasy of boss-without-workers
• the surprising global resurgence of anti-monopoly politics as a source of hope.

Cory Doctorow is a journalist, blogger, and the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. He is a longtime contributor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and blogs at pluralistic.net.

Episode edited by Ethan Rauschkolb. Named after our seminar room, The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Views expressed on The Virtual Jewel Box do not represent the official views of the Center or University.