Hotel Bar Sessions

Con men: From the sophists of ancient greece to the current grifter in chief, philosophy has been at odds with them for millennia, and given their success, it seems like it’s been a losing battle. Some of their success...

You are wearing an outfit right now. Maybe you chose it deliberately this morning, or maybe you grabbed it off the floor, but either way it is currently saying things about your class, your gender, your politics, your...

There are plenty of ready-to-hand moral sanctions for lies told and promises broken. We know how those wrongs work, we know what the apologies sound like, and we know, more or less, how to move on from them. Betrayal is...

At the beginning of April, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Ben Appel titled "I'm Gay, but That Doesn't Make Me Queer." On the last day of Pride Month 2026, the New York Times followed with an op-ed by...

We live in an age with a curiously cheerful relationship to failure. But that optimism was built for a world that no longer quite exists. For three generations now, doing everything right-- getting an education, holding...

Our guest for this episode, Jon Ivan Gill (Gustavus Adolphus College), argues in his recent book, Multi/Race/Less/Ness (Bloomsbury, 2025) that race is trauma. Not that race "causes" trauma, but rather that the...

Surveys say we're living through a "trust crisis," and some version of that has been true since at least the '70s. Confidence in the press, in the courts, in public health agencies, in elected officials, in one another...

When Leigh's cat Sugar was dying of congestive heart failure, the vet's office offered her something almost no human being will ever be offered: the chance to hold her, to tell her she was loved and thank her, and to be...

What's the difference between a rule that describes the world and one that governs it? Leigh, Jen, and Bob start with a complaint about Robert's Rules of Order and end up in the deep end: the categorical imperative, the...

Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature...

We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either...

Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same time. As the World Cup reminds us every four years, sports can build...

In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it down seventy-two hours later. That subsequent sequence of events...

We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what you think of it. But a tradition in contemporary art has spent the...

The HBS co-hosts are diligently at work prepping for Season 16 so, in the meantime, enjoy this "Minibar" episode from Jennifer Kling explaining the merits and demerits of employing Hanlon's Razor in our everyday lives...