Episode 391
Deep Dive: Burning Capitals, Borges’ Labyrinths, and the Thinking Arms of Octopus - August 24, 2025
Thomas Golding and Alexander Wilson examine the 1814 burning of Washington, D.C., unpack Jorge Luis Borges’s inventive narrative structures and librarian influence, and explore how octopus arms exhibit decentralized ‘thinking’ and control.
August 24, 20258m 51s
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Show Notes
In this Deep Dive episode, our hosts discuss the burning of Washington in 1814, Jorge Luis Borges’s creative methods, and the autonomous processing of octopus arms.
- 📜 The hosts dissect the British attack on Washington, D.C. in 1814 — the deliberate burning of the White House and Capitol, its tactical and psychological impact on a young nation, and how targeting symbolic infrastructure disrupted communications, records, and administrative continuity.
- 🎂 A birthday spotlight on Jorge Luis Borges: conversation focuses on Borges’s role as an Argentine writer and librarian, how his experiences shaped Ficciones and The Aleph, and the engineering-like construction of his stories with nested structures, mirrors, labyrinths and conceptual paradoxes.
- 💡 Fact of the day — octopus arms can “think” for themselves: the hosts describe decentralized neural processing in octopus limbs, how autonomous arms function like independent control units, and the implications for coordination, parallel processing and biological control architectures.
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Topics
DeepDiveBurning of WashingtonWar of 1812White HouseCapitolsymbolic targetsnational moraleJorge Luis BorgesFiccionesThe Alephlabyrinthsnarrative structurelibrarian influenceoctopus armsdecentralized processingneurobiologyThomas GoldingAlexander Wilson