Episode 203 – Distant Early Warnings: A Return to Marshall McLuhan’s ’Book of Probes’

2025-12-10

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Back in episode 112, Phil and JF devised a gimmick for a show: randomly select one of the many aphorisms in The Book of Probes, a compendium of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic quips designed by David Carson, and see what happens. It proved lively enough that they’re trying it again nearly a hundred episodes later. The resulting conversation touches the weird across a range of themes: tourism, the two kinds of truth, advertising, Kubrick’s marketing savvy, technology, orality versus literacy, and much more. A fitting feast for the mind as the year draws to a close. From all of us at W...

Back in episode 112, Phil and JF devised a gimmick for a show: randomly select one of the many aphorisms in The Book of Probes, a compendium of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic quips designed by David Carson, and see what happens. It proved lively enough that they’re trying it again nearly a hundred episodes later. The resulting conversation touches the weird across a range of themes: tourism, the two kinds of truth, advertising, Kubrick’s marketing savvy, technology, orality versus literacy, and much more. A fitting feast for the mind as the year draws to a close.

From all of us at Weird Studies, happy holidays.

• Sign up for JF Martel and Erik Davis's upcoming course on Moby-Dick.

• For dates, venues, and the full slate of Weird Academia events in Bloomington this January, visit the Centre for Possible Minds website.

• To participate in the Weird Academia Colloquium, email organizers Emma Stamm and Michael Garfield at elfthoughts@gmail.com

Header Image: NASA.

REFERENCES

Marshall McLuhan, Distant Early Warning Deck

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Plato, The Seventh Letter

Marshall McLuhan, The Book of Probes

Toronto School of Communication Theory

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy