Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
Here’s a list of all the books mentioned in this episode, complete with an Amazon buy link and quotes from the episode.
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"I read Moby Dick for the first time at the age of 17. What was your impression on your first reading at 17 years old?"
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"I could not believe the book; if it were not for Moby Dick, whaling would be one of a series of interests, but because Moby Dick has loomed so large, I went all in on whaling then, huh?"
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Illustrated)
Buy on Amazon"In 1851, he published a novel called The Whale, later retitled Moby Dick or The Whale. At some point, you may have read Moby Dick or pretended to."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"In 1851, he published a novel called The Whale, later retitled Moby Dick or The Whale. At some point, you may have read Moby Dick or pretended to."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"But as much as I’d like to say that Moby Dick is a book about whaling, I mean, we have been doing this three-part series on the history and economics of whaling, Moby Dick isn't really about whaling."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"And what was life like on board the Pequod, the whaling ship in Moby Dick? After the break, we tried to get a feel for that."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"And how about the crew in Moby Dick? The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod. The crew of Moby Dick is probably more diverse than any historic whaling ship was."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"I'm laughing, especially because one of the very funny discourses on Twitter about Moby Dick is that there's a whole kind of subset of Moby Dick-obsessed Twitter, and one of the jokes is about what it means to hate a specific animal."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"Part of what makes Moby Dick funny in some ways is that there’s a hatred for a specific animal. Can you describe in just a few words what Moby Dick Twitter is like?"
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"Well, a lot of it is taking lines from Moby Dick and translating them into popular memes, and so that’s always amusing. Do you have a favorite or two?"
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"The distracted boyfriend meme is a common one where the original girlfriend is something like the plot of the novel, and the girl that is distracting the boyfriend—the boyfriend is Melville, and the girl distracting him can be something like minute details about whaling taxonomy. So that kind of meme."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"It's an outlier only in the sense that it remains widely read today, in part because by naming the whale Moby Dick, I mean, there are so many ways. Melville is like a deeply queer writer; all of his texts have scenes of mutual masturbation or various other queer subtexts."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"The challenge of reading Moby Dick is having a comfort in not knowing, being someone who can sit with dissatisfaction, or sit with inconclusiveness, sit with discomfort, sit with the idea that things will not be resolved necessarily in the timeframe or the way that you want them to. I don't think everybody's comfortable with that."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"So if you could go back to your 17-year-old self, and maybe when you first read it and fell in love with it, but then tack onto your 17-year-old self your current self with your deeper understanding of the book, how would you describe to your classmates who were not interested in reading Moby Dick, or maybe to the millions of people today, the billions of people today who remain uninterested in reading Moby Dick?"
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"Moby Dick is deeply weird and funny, and what it especially does for me, both the 17-year-old me and the 18- or 20-year-olds to whom I teach it now, and to my 50-year-old self who still reads it at least once a year, is that Moby Dick takes any sense that you might have that there is some transcendent, great, perfect work of genius or truth in the world and turns it into a mess."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"The idea that things can be messy is part of the form of Moby Dick's own messiness."
Moby Dick
Buy on Amazon"But the odds are you will have to seek it out, as Melville writes in Moby Dick: it is not down in any map; true places never are."