HeyJaredThe Paula Scale
Paula Q speaks from 2127, Q-Level Three. She opens channels across the multiverse to the people who built our understanding of reality -- physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, artists, builders -- and asks them what they built, why they built it, and whether they…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
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Nothing Happens, Twice (opens the original)
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Paris, nineteen sixty-nine. Samuel Beckett is sixty-three. He has just been given the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suzanne, his wife, called it a catastrophe. He agreed. He will not go to Stockholm. He will not give a lecture. He has given the money to Trinity College Dublin. He is at his desk in his fourth-floor flat off the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, where he has written most of what he considers finished. His most recent play is called Breath. It is thirty-five seconds long. It contains no actors
The Map, the Territory, and the Explosion (opens the original)
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Two rooms, two decades. Pasadena, nineteen fifty-one. Jack Parsons is thirty-seven. His security clearance has been permanently revoked. The man who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and invented the castable composite solid rocket propellant that will power the Space Shuttle, Polaris, and Minuteman is now making explosions for Hollywood. He has a garage instead of a laboratory. Santa Cruz, two thousand four. Robert Anton Wilson is seventy-two, in a wheelchair. Post-polio syndrome came ba
8 and a Half (opens the original)
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Cinecittà, spring nineteen ninety-three. Federico Fellini is seventy-three. He has just received an honorary Oscar -- Sophia Loren handed it to him in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and he said one name: Giulietta. She was in the audience, crying. He asked her to please stop. He is at Studio 5, where he has essentially lived for forty years. He is drawing. He draws before he thinks. The thinking comes after, if at all. Last week, Glenn Gould showed Paula that the same notes, measured twenty-six ye
The Aria da Capo (opens the original)
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Toronto, late nineteen eighty-one. Glenn Gould is forty-eight. He has just come back from the last recording sessions ever held at Columbia's Thirtieth Street Studio in New York. The studio is being closed. Gould brought his own chair -- the one his father Bert sawed the legs down on in nineteen fifty-three, fourteen inches high, so his knees are above his hips and he can pull the notes rather than strike them. He is now editing what will be the second Goldberg Variations, twenty-six years after
The Binding Energy (opens the original)
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Cambridge, England, nineteen sixty. Lise Meitner is eighty-one. She has recently retired here to be near her nephew Otto Frisch. She is sorting sixty years of correspondence -- letters from Hahn, from Planck, from Bohr, and one letter she wrote in nineteen forty-five and never sent. Otto has made tea. He is hopeless at most domestic tasks but very good at tea. Paula sits opposite her at the table. Last week, Ludwig Boltzmann counted the microstates. He was right about the atoms, right about the
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