Philosopher-comedian Emily Levine talks (hilariously) about science, math, society and the way everything connects. She’s a brilliant trickster, poking holes in our fixed ideas and bringing hidden truths to light. Settle in and let her ping your brain.
“So you’re six years old, you’re reading ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,’ and it becomes rapidly obvious that there are only two kinds of men in the world: dwarves and Prince Charmings. And the odds are seven to one against your finding the prince.”
“I thought narcissism meant you loved yourself. Then someone told me there is a flip side to it, it’s actually drearier than self-love: It’s unrequited self-love.”
Who is Emily Levine?
Emily Levine is a humorist, writer and trickster who riffs on science and the human condition.
Emily Levine works a heady vein of humor, cerebral and thoughtful as well as very, very amusing. Oh, she’s got plenty of jokes. But her work, at its core, makes serious connections — between hard science and pop culture, between what we say and what we secretly assume … She plumbs the hidden oppositions, the untouchable not-quite-truths of the modern mind.
Her background in improv theater, with its requirement to always say “yes” to the other actor’s reality, has helped shape her worldview. Always suspicious of sharp either/or distinctions, she proposes “the quantum logic of and/and” — a thoroughly postmodern, scientifically informed take on life that allows for complicated states of being. Like the one we’re in right now.
