Hi, I'm David Barr-Curtley, author of the book Save Me Please and other stories, and welcome to episode 614 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Jonathan Kay, who also appeared back in episode 392 to discuss his books

your move about the history of board games and among among the truthers, about the psychology behind

conspiracy theories. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper's,

and he's currently a senior editor at Quillette. And in this interview, we'll be getting his

thoughts on the new Apple TV Plus series, Pluribus, about an alien virus that transforms most of humanity into

an extremely cheerful hive mind, and discussing his book Panics and Persecutions, which

explores some of the worst excesses of cancel culture. And this will include spoilers for season

one of Plyubis, so just be aware of that. And now here's her interview with Jonathan K.

All right. So we're here with Jonathan K. Welcome to the show. Hi. How are you?

Good, good. Okay. So I noticed that you recently changed your Twitter background to a scene from

Pluribus. So how'd that come about? Well, I started watching the show, obviously. And for anybody

who's seen the show, the first scene where it has nothing to do with the plot of the show,

but they're establishing character for the protagonist, this woman named Carol Sturka, it's like

one of the most brilliant openings to a series.

Again, it has nothing to do with the plot.

There's no like science fiction aspect to it.

But the protagonist is, she's an author.

And she's, she's appearing at some local, like, don't know it's a library or a community center where

Barnes and Noble there you go and there's all these women who are her fans she read genre fiction it's

like kind of steamy pot boiler pirate romance like romanticcy like romanticcy, like fantasy romance.

Yeah, yeah.

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