Jason here. This is the last of a series of episodes I'm calling Jason plays favorites,

where I'm picking some by no means all of my favorite episodes from the past five years

and playing them again. As I say early on in this one, I have been a fan of Neil Gaiman's for

many, many years.

What a life moment it was for me to sit down with him and discover what a present,

thoughtful, delightful person he was to talk to, and then to get the opportunity to talk about

Norse mythology, these ancient stories that inform so much of his work

and that have so much power and resonance for us all these centuries later. And I would say

that my favorite part of this episode might be the conversation about Loki, the trickster,

because I think that the artist is by nature a trickster and a shapeshifter,

and that we need the trickster in order to keep life surprising and interesting and to take us

to new places as much as we need stability and comfort and home.

Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a big think podcast. Adult life, with all its schedules and responsibilities, can turn into a kind of library of locked boxes.

The ones we open every day sit on a shelf at eye level, their keys clip to a carabiner at our

waist, set the alarm, pack a gym bag, pick up milk for the kids.

But on the lower shelves and in the dusty back rooms there's an ominous jumble of odd

shaped containers.

They hold the stories that don't

fit so neatly into the skin we've decided to live in. Maybe we've misplaced the keys, or maybe we've

deliberately lost them. My guest today keeps all the keys close at hand. In his stories and graphic

novels, worlds collide, and, as the fairy aerial puts it in Shakespeare's Tempest, they suffer a sea change into

something rich and strange. The walls of reality are permeable and dangerous magic is always

...