Independent Study: Body Futurism by Toby Shorin (Essay)
A new experiment: I thought it would be fun to share audio versions of essays or writing from past or future Dialectic guests. Toby Shorin (ep. 7: The Shapes of Culture) recently published 'Body Futurism,' a piece based on a talk I heard him give in 2024 and that I loved. You can read this piece at https://writing.tobyshorin.com/body-futurism/. It is provocative and feels increasingly prescient. Toby suggests that we must return to the body—and not just bodies in theory but quite literally your, my, our physical bodies, as the starting point for how we think about what is good for how we live and how we design and improve our societies. It was published Feb 25, 2026. I'm calling this format Independent Study. You can think of it as curated audiobook versions of internet writing. We'll see if I do more of these, and feedback is welcome. But let me know what you think!
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Speaker A: Welcome to a new experiment from Dialectic. I've been thinking about ways that I can add things to the world of Dialectic, and one of the commonalities across many of the people I talk to is they are incredibly thoughtful in writing. I often expose that in the conversations. I often read little excerpts and have an exegetical type of conversation where we're going through various pieces. That said, with a number of people I've talked to in the past or may talk to in the future, I would strongly encourage people to go back and actually read their writing in full.
And so today I'm excited to try an experiment where I read a new essay from a past guest of the show, Toby Shorin, that he just published. It's actually a piece based on a talk he gave back at FWB Fest in 2024, and he has since added some things, concretized it, and published it as Body Futurism. Obviously, you can just go read the essay, uh, or listen to Toby's talk for that matter, but I thought it would be cool to bring a piece that I really loved and that I think is both provocative and inspiring to Dialectic listeners.
Maybe an audiobook for essays, if you will. I had a fun and multifaceted conversation with Toby all the way back on episode 7, where we briefly touched on some of these ideas and many more, and I would encourage you to go listen to that as well. With that, please sit back, relax, and enjoy Body Futurism from Toby Shorin. This was published on February 25th, 2026, and the logline for this essay is: as society turns toward the body, a new politics of the flesh is on the brink of eruption. Settle down, settle down.
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