Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass")

Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass") is the 282nd episode of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, released on April 16, 2024. The opening segment is a discussion on . The main segment is a discussion on . The preroll contains the standard disclaimer and theme_music.

Opening Quote

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Show Notes

A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads "The first letter of the name has been written." The celebrated detective and "reasoning machine" Erik Lönnrot suspects a rabbinical explanation but is he seeing patterns that may not be there? David and Tamler get out their pipes, magnifying glasses, and deerstalker hats to unravel another Borges mystery: "Death and the Compass." Plus a new study on why men make errors about whether women are flirting with them, the latest in our series on studies that employ erotic fiction.

• A Dress Is Not a Yes: Towards an Indirect Mouse-Tracking Measure of Men's Overreliance on Global Cues in the Context of Sexual Flirting
  
• Pinpointing the psychological factors linked to men's misjudgments of women's sexual interest
  
• Death and the Compass by Jorge Luis Borges