Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

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Tonight we celebrate words and worlds without end, from streams of consciousness and fiction to the end of the universe.

We discuss the changing ideas of apocalypse.

Author Sarah Wheeler explores second acts in a new world in her book on the 19th century

British women who found new lives and purpose in America, and how the most prominent outsiders

in modern America, Muslims, are forging a new identity through comedy.

When I board an airplane, I don't have to look suspiciously in both directions before I put my

luggage in the overhead compartment, but I do. I don't have to count my steps from my seat to the

bathroom in a Middle Eastern accent. But first, Samuel Beckett once said of James Joyce's Finnegan's wake,

It is not to be read, or rather it is not only to be read, it is to be looked at and listened to.

His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.

And one of Biddy's beads went bobbing till it rounded up lost history with a marigold and a cobbler's candle.

In a side strain of a main drain of a man's in a hurry's off bachelor's walk,

but all there is left to the loss of the Mars in the loop of the years prefixed in between

is one knee buckle and two hooks in the front.

Dear, tell me that now.

Joyce himself reading from Finnegan's wake.

It took him 17 years to write this experimental and difficult last work.

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