From the Jill Schwartz Memorial Library here in Sultry, Savannah, this is obscure season four in American tragedy.

I'm your host, your friend, your ear lover, and literary mansplainer in chief Michael Ian Black. How's everybody doing? Terrible?

Yeah, me too. I mean, you know, again, like I never know when people are going to be listening.

This podcast can exist all through the ages, or at least until humanity obliterates itself. But at the moment,

things are going very, very badly here in these United States of America. And isn't it great

that we have literature? Isn't it great that we have art? Not so much to take our minds off things, although that's

certainly a perfectly viable use of art, but to examine things in different lights from

different perspectives, in different contexts, in different times and places through different

cultures, fabulous. You know, art is probably one of the better in different contexts, in different times and places through different cultures. Fabulous.

You know, art is probably one of the better things humanity invented. And I'm not even sure

that we invented art. And I say that just because I'm thinking about certain animals that I think

do things for purely decorative or ceremonial or aesthetic purposes.

You're probably going to say which animals, Michael, and to that I will say, I have no idea.

But I'm pretty sure that that is a thing that exists in the world.

But humanity's expression of art or the creation of art, I'm just going to take a moment and say,

thanks humanity, thanks for art.

You know, it probably ranks right up there with the toaster in terms of things that we got right.

And honestly, now that I think of it, toasters actually aren't that great.

And it seems to me that there's probably a world in which somebody invents a better

toaster.

I know we've tried all kinds of things, all kinds of shapes, all kinds of designs and accoutreement.

But the problem with toasters, as far as I can tell, is they tend to toast unevenly,

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