Very Bad Wizards

In this episode, Tamler and David discuss The Odyssey Books 15 & 16, in which father and son (and father figure and son) are reunited, and in which the Odysseus and Telemachus start planning their revenge against the suitors.

Tamler and David discuss Books 13 & 14 of The Odyssey. Odysseus finally makes it to Ithaca and meets up with Athena, gets a disguise, and has a chat with his most loyal slave Eumaeus.

Why do baseball players have so many superstitious rituals compared to athletes in other sports? How does this relate to the magic rituals of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia? We dive into Bronisław Malinowski's classic 1925 paper "Magic, Science, and Religion" along with George Gmelch's "Baseball Magic," two articles that explore the role of religion and superstition as a response to the absence of control. And speaking of losing control, we do a conceptual analysis of "crashing out" in the opening segment- analytic philosophy at its finest.
Malinowski, B. (1925). Magic, science and religion. In J. Needham (Ed.), Science, religion and reality (pp. 19–84). The Macmillan Company. [link to our Amazon S3 so everyone can find it easily]
Gmelch, G. (2012). Baseball magic. In J. Spradley, D. W. McCurdy, & R. Shandy (Eds.), Conformity and conflict: Readings in cultural anthropology (14th ed., pp. 266–274). Pearson. (Original work published 1971).

David and Tamler discuss The Odyssey's iconic books 11 & 12, in which our hero visits the ghosts of the dead, hears the call of the sirens, and survives a no-win situation.

Tamler and David discuss the action-packed books 9 & 10 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus makes some questionable choices, the crew encounters cannibal giants, and Circe casts her porcine spells.