Hosted by DJ Scruggs, a kinda sorta tech bro who is worried about how political rhetoric in the United States has become ever more apocalyptic since his first presidential vote in 1988. In my lifetime, apocalyptic political rhetoric was mostly a right wing phenomenon driven by fundamentalist Christian ideas of prophecy. In the last 10…
Join writer Patricia Hurducas from The Flâneurs Project in this IRL salon to dive into a conversation about the places that we long for. What are the places that we cannot stop thinking about? Where do we want to live next, or where do we want to set off on a big adventure? Join us to…
Want to better appreciate Greta Gerwig’s highbrow screenwriting, or been wanting to read some philosophy but need a bubblegum pink excuse? Join philosopher Ryan Miller for eleven weeks as we read and discuss classic philosophical texts in conjunction with brief scenes from Barbie. 'Is that a mirror in your pocket?' Does gender reflect biological sex, or stand on…
Legitimacy, cooption, retaliation: the three pillars of power are never more up for debate than in a year when a country elects its new leaders, when it exerts its democratic force to make the one who represents the majority best its chief executive. Mass media, educational institutions, and communities of worship all play important roles…
Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, joins Interintellect founder Anna Gát to discuss the future of America and the interplay between government and entrepreneurship that he believes will define the next century. Is America on decline? Far from that! Drawing on historical examples and contemporary economic data, Packy McCormick argues that despite political and institutional…
Join sociologist and writer Musa al-Gharbi in conversation with novelist and theologian Tara Isabella Burton about his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. In We Have Never Been Woke, al-Gharbi argues that “wokeness” can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of an increasingly dominant class of elites: symbolic…
How are you here? You’re like an idea. A great idea. Sasha assumes, like most of us, that ideas are impoverished abstractions of material reality. Plato, however, held the opposite…
Are you striving to live someone else's definition of a good life? When you've got an atypical brain, you got to have atypical ambitions. Too often we unintentionally inherit an idea of a good life from our parents, cultural background, peers, and institutions. But it is always possible to reconnect with what would be most…
About Robin Hanson's book Elephant In the Brain (co-written by Kevin Simler): "Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains are therefore designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to get ahead socially, often by devious means. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The…
In 2023, Kiubon Kokko was awarded a $100,000 fellowship grant by O'Shaughnessy Ventures to create a feature documentary about his father's 10-12 hour swim from communist China to Hong Kong in 1973. In this salon, Kiubon will talk about what led to him undertake this project: the challenges he and his family faced in the…
Join us for an in-person Interintellect gathering where curiosity leads the way! As fall settles in and the seasons change, it’s the perfect time to come together in beautiful Old Town Alexandria. We’ll kick things off by exploring the themes of seasonality, friendships, and community, but as always, the conversation can go anywhere—from philosophy and…
Writer Henry Oliver continues the Western Canon Book Club series with a salon about the birth of Romanticism. Turgenev's greatest novel is one of the greatest Russian novels of the nineteenth century. A response to the new generation of nihilists, who saw the world very differently from their liberal fathers, this is a very resonant…
