Hotel Bar Sessions

MINIBAR: Pain (with Bob Vallier)

What can the body, in pain, teach us about the hilarity of our own finitude?Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversations, only this time the co-host is stuck inside their hotel room with whatever is left in the minibar... and you are their only conversant!This week's Minibar episode features Bob Vallier's reflections on what he learned after a serious automobile-meets-bicycle accident in late-2024. (Bob was on the bike!). The pain, the trauma, the rehab-- and the friendships that showed up along the way to help manage it all-- turned out to be an unexpected lesson in not only what able-bodied people naively assume about their world, but also what  insights can be gleaned from the sudden interruption of those naive assumptions.Turns out, according to Bob, there's a lot more that's funny about our finitude than is immediately obvious in our pain!Tune in for the first episode of Season 15 on January 23, 2026!Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/minibar-pain---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Marilyn Frye's "Oppression"

How might "oppression" be best understood as a "cage"? This week the HBS co-hosts take a deep dive into a true classic of feminist philosophy: Marilyn Frye’s 1983 article “Oppression.” We unpack Frye’s understanding of oppression and argue about some of Frye’s more infamous examples, such as her claim that men holding doors open for women is sexist. Is she really correct that oppression can occur in the absence of the intent to oppress? Or do people have to know what they’re doing to commit oppression, or uphold the patriarchy?We also tackle academic philosophy’s tendency to want to clarify and draw clear lines around messy, difficult, urgent phenomena. Frye is seeking to delineate what constitutes oppression: but is that a helpful conceptual project in today’s world? Or should we be focused instead on how to get out of the cage? We worry that, given Frye’s analysis of oppression as an interlocking series of double binds, there seems to be no way out. Depressingly, if she’s right, we might still have agency, but we might always remain pressed down.Some of us are more cynical, some of us are more hopeful, but at the end of the day, we agree: Frye set the baseline for discussion in an enduring (if a bit dated!) way for feminists and feminist theory alike.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/marilyn-fryes-oppression---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Nostalgia

"Nostalgia" is a portmanteau coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, combining the Greek nostros (homecoming) and algos (pain, ache).  Hofer was a medical student, and he invented this term to describe a kind of melancholia, a somewhat depressive state–- and so, from its inception, "nostalgia" was viewed as a mood disorder.  For the Romantics, it was a sentimentality for the past, the good old days of yore, combining the sadness of loss with a joy that that loss is not complete or total.  Nostalgia is also paradoxical, because the past we long for and re-member is a past that was never present.  If it is a "homecoming," what one discovers in returning home, as Odysseus does, is that there is no "there" there.  That is, nostalgia is always unheimlich ("unhomely") or more accurately, "uncanny."  It always involves a manner of self-deception about what was by distorting or idealizing the past. This can often have negative, even dangerous consequences: individually, socially, and politically.  More than just a "mood," nostalgia is a vector of philosophical investigation par excellence that opens onto a wide range of themes: memory, time, the hermeneutics of personal identity, and even reality itself.   So, pour a drink, and let's see what might be problematic about what we "fondly remember"!Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/nostalgia---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Sophistry

Bad arguments are nothing new, so why does it appear as if they have become so pervasive in public discourse? When we watch so-called "debate" videos with titles like "Conservative professor DESTROYS woke student" or "Liberal pundit OWNS Conservative Senator," are we actually watching a rational debate? Is anyone learning anything in these exchanges? Or, as is most likely, are we watching the performance of a well-reasoned debate, absent any concern for the truth whatsoever?The ancient Greeks had a name for this: sophistry. It originally referred to the craft of paid expert-teaching-- especially training in rhetoric-- for success in public life. So, how did “expertise in persuasive argument” later become something more like “specious reasoning in service of persuasion rather than truth”?Are we actually harmed-- as individuals and as a society-- by bad reasoning, logical fallacies, and the robust critical thinking that might correct them? Pour yourself a drink and join us for this conversation about the historical and current iterations of sophistry.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/sophistry---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions Podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The Enshittification of... everything?

This week’s episode takes Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” and uses it as a diagnostic for late-capitalist life, not just for tech platforms but for democracy, higher education, and work more broadly. Our co-hosts unpack Doctorow’s three-stage model—platforms start out good to users, then pivot to serving business customers, and finally squeeze both users and customers to extract maximum value for shareholders—and argue about whether this is really a new “platform logic” or just old-school Marxist exploitation and alienation under a punchier name.We connect this logic to the attention economy and datafication (“we are the product”), then extend it to U.S. democracy, where voters are treated as performers in a hollowed-out system, and to universities, where administrative bloat, metrics, and “students as customers” have produced an enshittified version of higher education, while students are locked-in by massive student debt. What is left for us in terms of  resistance?We look at some real options: exiting platforms, Labor organizing and union drives, “quiet quitting” and malicious compliance (“Bartleby”-esque moves), creative sabotage, and maybe even  “enshittification from below.”Our co-hosts ultimately advocate for insisting on higher standards, rather than accepting the slow boil of lowered expectations. Join us for the shit-show! Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-everything/---------------------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★