"The eternity I detect in Nature I predicate of myself also. How many springs I have had this same experience! I am encouraged, for I recognize this steady persistency and recovery of Nature as a quality of myself." —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1856 CABIN is a series from The Relentless Picnic. It's one story told over 11 episodes. It's a story about solitude and isolation, community and loss, Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski—and it's told through audio recorded throughout 2019, 2020,...

"In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. But alone in the distant woods or fields, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day." —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1855 This is the penultimate episode of CABIN, which will...

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord, i.e., than I import into it." —Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1856 Cabin is a series from The Relentless Picnic. It's one story told over 11 episodes. It's a story about solitude and isolation, community and loss,...

"So I agree with the anarcho-primitivists that the advent of civilization was a great disaster and that the Industrial Revolution was an even greater one. I further agree that a revolution against modernity, and against civilization in general, is necessary. But you can’t build an effective revolutionary movement out of soft-headed dreamers, lazies, and charlatans. You have to have tough-minded, realistic, practical people, and people of that kind don’t need the anarcho-primitivists’ mushy...

A brief update from Adam, Erikk, and Nick on three very important fronts. First, news on the upcoming conclusion to our CABIN series. Second, on relentlesspicnic.com/store Third, on the continued existence of patreon.com/relentlesspicnic, the live shows we've been doing for our Patreon supporters, and the show we've got coming up on Monday, December 6th, 2021. Register here: crowdcast.io/e/digupthehatchet We're not gone. And we're thankful for you.

“‘Oh!’ say the technophiles, ‘Science is going to fix all that! We will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody healthy and happy!’ Yeah, sure. The technophiles are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in their understanding of social problems. Thus it will take a long and difficult period of trial and error for the technophiles to work the bugs out of their Brave New World (if they ever do). In the mean time there will be great suffering.” —T. Kaczynski, Industrial...

“It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. But psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature...

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner...

“One writer says that Brown's peculiar monomania made him to be ‘dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.’ Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of divinity in him. They talk as if it were impossible that a man could be ‘divinely appointed’ in these days to do any work whatever; as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any man's daily work; as if the agent to...

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. . . . Some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live—that is, keep comfortably warm—and die in New England at last.” —H.D. Thoreau, Walden, “Economy,”...

“I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. After long watching around the sickbed of a friend, we, too, partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be identified with this state of things.” —H.D. Thoreau, Journal, 1859. Cabin is the new season from The Relentless Picnic....

Cabin is the new season from The Relentless Picnic. It's one story told over multiple episodes. It's a story about solitude and isolation, community and loss, Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski—and it's told through audio recorded throughout 2019 and 2020. New episodes weekly. Support us at patreon.com/relentlesspicnic for access to a ton of bonus content. Our web site is relentlesspicnic.com SOURCES (Ep. 1): - The journals of Henry David Thoreau (1837-1861): bit.ly/36Lxavm ; -...

A preview of CABIN: the upcoming season from The Relentless Picnic.

Are we further apart? Are we being fooled? This is an episode about our phantom selves, how we're doing right now, and the feeling that something important has gone wrong. SOURCES: - "Ep. 27: The Wreckage," The Relentless Picnic (Feb. '18): bit.ly/2GhA6CW ; - "How Do We Write Now?" by Patricia Lockwood, Tin House (Apr. '18): bit.ly/2Gfyj1p ; - "In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?" by Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker (Nov. '18): bit.ly/2zwnggK ; - "Brain-Eating Amoeba Lurk in...

The world is a snakepit of competing takes and diverging minds. How is anybody supposed to live? In this episode, we play a game called Passage Potluck to straighten it all out. We assembled a packet of short excerpted texts, and forced ourselves to connect dots between, through, and around them, at random. The passages we wound up discussing are assembled for listeners here: bit.ly/peoplespacket ; but the full packet we had in front of us is for our Patreon supporters here:...

The confidence we’ve always had as a people isn’t simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book we read just on the Fourth of July. In this episode we’re talking democracy and consumerism through those American specters John Dewey, the thirty-ninth President James Earl Carter, and the citizen-reviewers of Amazon dot com. SOURCES: - Jimmy Carter, Address to the Nation on Energy (Nov. 8, 1977): bit.ly/2R3bFNo ; - John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927): a.co/d/aRa9JvB ; ...

Let's talk about movies. How would you talk about a movie if it wants you to shut up? Climb aboard for a one-way trip down the river of striking images, dream-like sequences, and too many meaningful looks. From the ridiculous to the sacred, we examine the examinations of the unspeakable silence at the heart of life. SOURCES: - 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick (1968) ; - Plato, Republic (514a & ff.) ; - Song to Song, dir. Terence Malick (2017) ; - Paul Schraeder's review...

This week it’s fourteen conversations about one thing. We do a little research on the symptoms of fascism and begin to feel like an expendable character in the first act of a horror film. Plus: TED talks are blindfolds at the museum, why you must laminate the best parts of your body, and the moral arc of the universe bends toward destruction, but also hope? Q.E.D., friends. SOURCES: - Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism" (NYRB, June 1995): https://bit.ly/1mXBPS6 ; - Plato's Meno, 72a ; - "How we can...

It’s time to talk about America. We’re looking at ways to deal with what’s coming, from that bug-out bag full of spare magazines, to terrifying self-sacrifice on South Carolina’s spiritual battlefield, to Hollywood’s last-ditch play for immortality with the forces of global capital. Join us on the beach to watch the blood-dimmed tide roll in. BONUS SCENE for our patreon supporters: https://bit.ly/2v5yF8x ; SOURCES: - "In A Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke (1963): https://bit.ly/2wYW33A ; -...

How did this happen? What went wrong? We obsess over the brokenness and try to eyeball the true nature of intimacy: fading, faded, and yet-to-fade. ft. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jordan Catalano, Don Draper, the miserable modern self, someone you once genuinely loved, and other dangerous creatures of the heart. SOURCES: - "How Friendships Change Over Time" by Julie Beck in The Atlantic (June 2015): http://theatln.tc/2mDBQxK ; - "Mimi O'Donnell Reflects on the Loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman and...

Like I always say, if the markets are a-singin', you better know how to make 'em dance. Today on the program, it's a deep dive in the shallow pond that is NPR's Marketplace. We'll ask the question: are there Nazis in-studio forcing them to be like this? Or is there a more covert kind of fascism within the neoliberal soul? I'm Kai Ryssdal, and this sinking ship is called Marketplace. SOURCES: - "Buying 450 Million Ripple? - $1Billion Ripple XRP Buy - XRP Ripple CryptoCurrency," by the...

To die, to sleep — perchance to be judged no longer viable in society and sentenced to burn alive from within. Who is truly avenged by our cocktails of untested heartstoppers? Justices: why did we stop, then start, doing this again? Join us at the top of the scaffold of lies we tell ourselves, where we countenance barbarisms and watch the clock till it runs all the way out. SOURCES: - Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975): http://a.co/eerXzt2 ; - 60...