Recorded 11/18/2023

Website: www.orangesandlemonspodcast.com 
Email: orangesandlemonspodcast@gmail.com

Published five years before his infamous Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's third novel. It is written in his characteristic style of magical realism and explores the themes of shame, shamelessness, and violence in a fictitious country that is "not quite Pakistan." In this episode, Bird and Greg discuss the work, covering topics including the morality of body modification, religion in totalitarian regimes, the value of formal literary critique, the concepts of shame and shamelessness, pleasure and purity in the western world, and more.

Also referenced is Ayelet Ben-Yishai's essay The Dialectic of Shame: Representation in the MetaNarrative of Salman Rushdie's Shame (Modern Fiction Studies, 2002).

Before discussing the novel, Bird and Greg take a deep dive into season 4 episode 19 of Seinfeld, titled The Implant. If you are not interested in this segment, the book discussion begins at 0:34:05.

This conversation was recorded in February 2021.

Website: www.orangesandlemonspodcast.com 
Email: orangesandlemonspodcast@gmail.com

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at NYU best known for his contributions in the field of moral psychology. He has written three books, including the highly regarded The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, which presents his Moral Foundations Theory and its supporting research. In their discussion of the book, Greg and Bird cover topics including moral intuition vs. moral reasoning, the necessity of conversation for changing one's mind, the book's 6 foundations of morality, the guys' results on the MFQ and Big 5 (and what the results say about their politics), identifying with groups, experiences of transcendence and loss of self, religion (what a surprise) and its influence on society at large, the value of holding certain beliefs as sacred, the author's conclusions on moral philosophy and pluralism, and more.

The assessments discussed in the episode (the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Big 5 Personality Scale) can be found and taken for free here: yourmorals.org

This conversation was recorded in August 2020.

Website: www.orangesandlemonspodcast.com 
Email: orangesandlemonspodcast@gmail.com