Memento Morbid

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