Memento Morbid

What happens when the project that defined your life suddenly no longer belongs to you?This week, Joanna Ebenstein is joined by her longtime friend Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura, to explore wonder, grief, creativity, and what it means to let go of the work that has shaped your identity.Long before algorithms and influencers transformed the internet, Joanna and Dylan were part of a small community of writers, artists and explorers driven by nothing more than curiosity. Together they revisit that extraordinary era of blogs, hidden museums, and strange discoveries, tracing how those shared passions eventually grew into Atlas Obscura and Morbid Anatomy.This conversation is also about endings. Dylan reflects on losing the company he helped build, describing the peculiar grief of becoming estranged from a project that occupied "an enormous part of your self, your soul." Together, he and Joanna consider why creative lives inevitably involve cycles of death and rebirth, and why stepping into uncertainty may be the only way something genuinely new can emerge.Along the way they discuss spiritual curiosity, the limits of materialism, the strange beauty of mortality, and why the modern pursuit of immortality may reveal more about our fear of death than our passion for life.Dylan answers Memento Morbid's closing question with an unforgettable reflection on eternal life, arguing that death is not simply life's ending, but the very thing that gives it urgency, meaning and wonder.A thoughtful conversation about making things, losing them, and discovering what comes next. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production & Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice JardineExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Lee Unkrich—director of Coco, Toy Story 3, and longtime Pixar creative—joins Joanna Ebenstein for a deeply personal conversation about collecting, mortality, and the unexpected ways art can reshape our relationship with loss.Long before Coco brought Día de Muertos to a vast global audience, Lee was fascinated by cemeteries, ghost stories, and the uncanny. In this interview, he reflects on how childhood fears, a life-long obsession with The Shining, and a passion for collecting taxidermy, anatomical models, and unusual artefacts all became part of a creative practice rooted in curiosity rather than fear.The conversation explores the extraordinary research behind Coco, the responsibility of telling a story grounded in another culture, and how immersing himself in Mexican traditions fundamentally transformed his understanding of death. Lee shares why creating an annual ofrenda has become an essential ritual in his own family, opening up about the recent loss of his beloved dachshund, Waffles, and the comfort that remembrance can bring.Along the way, Joanna and Lee discuss collecting as a form of storytelling, preserving fleeting moments through archives, and the enduring mystery of The Shining."The Shining isn't just a horror film—it's about what refuses to stay buried." Warm, thoughtful, and quietly profound, this episode is an invitation to consider how creativity, ritual and remembrance help us carry the dead with us—not as shadows of the past, but as continuing presences in our lives.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production & Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice JardineExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeley substack.com/@mementomorbid

What happens when a lifelong fascination with mortality leads you into crypts, catacombs, pet cemeteries, and skull festivals across the world?Photographer, writer, and art historian Paul Koudounaris joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging conversation about death, beauty, human remains, and the stories we tell through the dead. Best known for his acclaimed books Empire of Death, Heavenly Bodies, Memento Mori, A Cat’s Tale, and Faithful Unto Death, Paul has spent decades documenting extraordinary death traditions and sacred remains around the globe.Together, Paul and Joanna explore why some people are drawn to mortality from an early age, the role death has played in shaping Paul's creative life, and what it means to spend years in the company of thousands of skeletons. Paul reflects on his journey from art historian to author and photographer, revealing the painstaking process behind some of his most iconic images, including the jeweled skeleton saints of Heavenly Bodies.The conversation journeys from Baroque-era relics and bone churches to pet cemeteries, famous feline heroes, and the surprising story of how Paul's cat Baba became the star of her own bestselling history book. Along the way, Paul shares stories from his travels through Peru and Bolivia, where communities maintain living relationships with ancestral skulls, blurring the boundaries between remembrance, devotion, and daily life.With characteristic humour and warmth, Paul reflects on mortality, creativity, and the profound equality found in death.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468🖤 Enjoying Memento Morbid? Explore our collection of apparel and accessories in the Memento Morbid shop: mementomorbidmerch.dashery.com 💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid

Is Reality Stranger Than We’re Willing to Admit? Religious scholar and author Jeffrey J. Kripal joins Joanna Ebenstein for an engrossing conversation exploring mysticism, sexuality, death, and the edges of what we call “real.”Kripal reflects on his early years in a Catholic seminary, where fasting, faith, anorexia, and psychoanalysis shaped his understanding of religion as far stranger and more psychologically complex than it first appears.He discusses his argument that mystical traditions often encode forms of queerness and fluidity that resist fixed identity, and suggests that paranormal phenomena—UFOs, abductions, synchronicities—belong to the same instability in reality.He also recounts an unexplainable experience in Calcutta during Kali Puja, which reshaped his intellectual life and thinking about death as an opening onto “larger reality.”Together, Joanna and Jeff explore what it means to take the impossible seriously—not as metaphor, but as part of reality itself.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid

What happens when a lifetime spent studying death collides with personal loss?Death scholar, writer, and educator John Troyer joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about mortality, grief, funeral culture, and the sometimes uneasy relationship between intellectual understanding and lived experience.Best known for his book Technologies of the Human Corpse and his work with the Centre for Death and Society, Troyer reflects on growing up around the American funeral industry, where encounters with death were part of everyday life from an early age. Together, he and Joanna explore the cultural history of deathcare, and the strange ways modern societies simultaneously hide from and obsess over death.The conversation moves through death studies as an academic discipline, the enduring influence of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, and how conversations about mortality can offer clarity, intimacy, and meaning in everyday life. Troyer also speaks candidly about the deaths of his sister and parents, and the profound realization that even decades spent thinking and writing about death cannot truly prepare us for grief when it arrives personally.Joanna and John reflect on why people are instinctively drawn to conversations about mortality, how pre-death planning can become an act of care, and what it means to live fully while knowing life is finite. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid

What does it mean to live well, knowing our time is finite?Author Oliver Burkeman joins Joanna Ebenstein for a conversation about time, mortality, and what it means to live well inside finite lives.Best known for Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman reflects on his shift from scepticism about self-help and productivity culture to a deeper engagement with anxiety, limitation, and acceptance. Together, they explore why the drive to “do everything” so often leaves us more overwhelmed—and what changes when we stop treating finitude as a problem to solve.The conversation moves through Stoicism, Zen Buddhism, medieval imagery of death, Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality, and the enduring mystery of consciousness. Burkeman speaks openly about fear—of loss, impermanence, and non-existence—while Joanna reflects on how death contemplation can reshape a life’s trajectory and our ideas of what is important.At the centre of the episode is a shared idea: meaning doesn’t arise in spite of limits, but because of them. Death, rather than diminishing life, provides it with meaning, poignancy, and value.Together, they ask what becomes possible when we stop trying to outrun time—and start living within it.📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid

What Does It Mean to Become Someone Else?Award-winning actor and producer Paul Giamatti joins Joanna Ebenstein for a wide-ranging, eerie, and often amusing conversation about monsters, performance, and the porous boundary between life and death.From childhood fascinations with werewolves and classic horror to the uncanny psychological states accessed through acting, Giamatti reflects on a lifelong obsession with transformation—of bodies, identities, and consciousness. He recounts a genuinely unsettling ghostly moment during a production of Hamlet, explores the idea of acting as a form of possession, and considers why theatre can feel more spiritually charged than film.The conversation weaves through late-night radio and the hypnotic voice of Art Bell, Giamatti’s cult television series Lodge 49, esoteric book collecting, and the strange intimacy of voices in the dark.Thoughtful, curious, and quietly uncanny, this episode asks what it really means to inhabit other lives—and what those experiences might reveal. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillProduction Coordinator: Janice Jardine Executive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeleysubstack.com/@mementomorbid

Memento MorbidFascinating, poignant, and surprisingly life-affirming conversations about death, the human condition, and life’s great mysteries.Join Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, for Memento Morbid, a series of surprisingly life-affirming conversations around topics that tend to be deemed morbid. Meet a wide range of fascinating individuals including death workers, artists, New York Times bestselling authors, a practicing witch, Hollywood actors, and a former crematorium worker- all exploring the rituals, stories, and delightfully strange ways humans confront the unknowable. Each episode is curious, insightful, and often striking, revealing the beauty, humor, and meaning we can find in life by confronting death head on. 📢Listeners! You are invited to share your own offerings: voice notes on death, dying, ritual and the beauty of finitude. Include your first name and location if you want them shared- you might be featured in an upcoming episode. Send your offering via WhatsApp to +44 2921 690468.💀 Memento Morbid is produced by Overcoat Media in partnership with Morbid Anatomy.Host: Joanna EbensteinSeries Producer: Jess GunasekaraStudio Engineer: Fernando Velazco VargasAdditional Production and Sound Design: Katie HillExecutive Producer: Steven RajamArtwork: Lauren Seeley