Alex Merose extols the virtues of lazy action and calls on us to embrace Duchamp into our hearts through discussion of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Maurizio Lazzarato’s essay “Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work.” We explore themes of conformity, work, resistance, lazy action, and whether or not Duchamp was right that “language was a mistake.”

Shout out to Maxime Lenormand for production assistance!

Many show notes!

• Alex Merose’s website
• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
• Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio Lazzarato
• Coffee Mill - Marcel Duchamp’s 1911 painting at the Tate
• Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation
• Vaporwave
• Heraclitus the obscure
• David Reich on the Dwarkesh Podcast - discussing genetics and human history, including some theories about the emergence of language
• If on a winter’s night a traveler
• Opening keynote from CNG Conference 2025

Many thanks to Alex for sending these references:

• How Food Played a Role in the Rise of Patriarchy
• Nagarjuna (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Alex’s photos of Art by and inspired by Marcel Duchamp from the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul
• Alex’s photos of Duchamp’s works mentioned in the Lazzarato paper from the Museum of Modern Art in NYC
• Work: A Deep History by James Suzman
• Work podcast on Spotify