Episode 282: Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass")
Very Bad Wizards · david pizarro
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Show Notes
A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads "The first letter of the name has been written." The celebrated detective and "reasoning machine" Erik Lönnrot suspects a rabbinical explanation but is he seeing patterns that may not be there? David and Tamler get out their pipes, magnifying glasses, and deerstalker hats to unravel another Borges mystery: "Death and the Compass." Plus a new study on why men make errors about whether women are flirting with them, the latest in our series on studies that employ erotic fiction.
Links:
Pinpointing the psychological factors linked to men's misjudgments of women's sexual interest
Death and the Compass by Jorge Luis Borges [wikipedia.org]