Weird Studies

Episode 208 – Unbridled Creation: On Kenneth Batcheldor's Theory of the Paranormal

11 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Kenneth Batcheldor was a British clinical psychologist who, during the final two decades of his life, investigated the paranormal through direct exper...

Episode 207 – Magic Mirror: On J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Fellowship of the Ring'

25 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This is the first of three episodes on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to be released in the course of the next several months. Focusing here o...

Episode 206 – On Ken Russell's 'Altered States': Live at Indiana University Bloomington

11 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This episode was recorded before a live audience at Indiana University Cinema as part of Weird Academia, a series of events that brought much high str...

Episode 205 – Discipline and Delight: On the Hierophant Card in the Tarot

28 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Weird Studies, we turn to the fifth Major Arcanum, the Hierophant, symbolizing tradition, instruction, and the exoteric aspect of s...

Episode 204 – The Perilous Realm: J.R.R. Tolkien's 'On Fairy Stories'

14 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

For Tolkien, fairy stories are not stories about fairies, but stories that take place in Faerie. And in doing so, they make Faerie present. They are n...

Holiday Bonus: Scavengers in the Ruins of Heaven

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

To tide us over as we prepare for a new season of Weird Studies, here is an "audio extra," originally recorded for our Patreon supporters, wherein we ...

Episode 203 – Distant Early Warnings: A Return to Marshall McLuhan's 'Book of Probes'

10 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Back in episode 112, Phil and JF devised a gimmick for a show: randomly select one of the many aphorisms in The Book of Probes, a compendium of Marsha...

Episode 202 – The Human is Two: On 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic classic, the tale that conjured the fog-shrouded London hellscape that has haun...

Episode 201 – On James Whale's 'Frankenstein' and 'Bride of Frankenstein,' with Peter Bebergal

12 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by independent scholar Peter Bebergal, author of Strange Frequencies, Season of the Witch, and other books on ...

Halloween Special: A Reading of Arthur Machen's "The White People"

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Originally released in 2018 but remixed for your listening pleasure, here's Phil reading Arthur Machen's classic weird tale, "The White People." Happy...

Episode 200 – On 'The Call of Cthulhu'

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For their 200th episode, JF and Phil turn their attention to H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” a story foundational not only to modern ho...

Episode 199 – On Michael Jackson, with Shannon Taggart

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Photographer and paranormal researcher Shannon Taggart joins JF and Phil to explore the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson. One of the most brilliant...

Episode 198 – Breaking the Frame: On the High Priestess in the Tarot

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since 2020, Phil and JF have been creating an on-again, off-again series on the major trumps, or "arcana," of the tarot. In this episode, they continu...

Episode 197 - Sounding the Otherworld: On Bryn Chainey's 'Rabbit Trap'

17 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a rare surfacing in the contemporary world, JF and Phil discuss a film that has just been released. Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap is psychological h...

Weird Studies Trailer

07 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mid-Break Bonus: On Trust

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We're breaking up our late-summer pause with an audio extra originally recorded for our Patreon supporters. This episode also includes an essay JF wro...

Episode 196 – Lost and Never Found: On 'The Blair Witch Project'

13 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Of all the flavors of horror, few are as dreadful as that of being lost in the wilderness. In this episode, JF and Phil revisit The Blair Witch Projec...

Episode 195 – On John Keel: Live at the Lily Dale Symposium, with Erik Davis

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This marks the third year that Weird Studies is honoured to open the Lily Dale Symposium, organized each summer by photographer Shannon Taggart in the...

Episode 194: Animal Songs, with Meredith Michael

23 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation abo...

Episode 193: On Conversion, or Arousing the Bodhi-Mind

09 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do you become religious? What is a conversion experience? Does it happen all at once or gradually? What's the point of religion, anyway? These are...

Episode 192 - A Dream of Landscape: On Walking

25 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Phil and JF first explored the mysteries of walking back in episode 59. That episode felt like a mere introduction—a tentative first step on a long ...

Special Episode: Theory, Philosophy, and Uranus

18 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This conversation was originally recorded in August 2024 and released for our Patreon supporters. Weird Studies will be back with a new episode on Jun...

Special Episode: Myth, History, and Form

04 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This special release is a Patreon extra we’re making available to all listeners, in lieu of the official episode originally scheduled for today. As ...

Episode 191 — The Acid Queen, with Susannah Cahalan

21 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary Woodruff was in fact a central figure in the psychedelic movement in her own right—a p...

Episode 190 – Here Be Shrubs: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows'

07 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, JF and Phil paddle into the marshlands of Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 masterpiece The Willows, a tale Lovecraft once called the fines...

Episode 189: Care of the Dead, with Jacob G. Foster

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe...

Episode 188: Pioneers of the Untimely: On the Hermit Card in the Tarot

09 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this continuation of their non-linear journey through the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the ninth Arcanum: the Hermit. Walking through darkness with h...

Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis

26 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and h...

Episode 186: Meeting at the Center: The Wedge, Part Two

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, JF and Phil continue their conversation on the wedge, their figure for the epistemological divide between approaching reality from th...

Episode 185: Intuition and Reality: The Wedge, Part One

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

"The Wedge" is a key concept for Phil and JF. When exploring weird phenomena—from artworks to ghosts, and everything in between—one tends to empha...

Special Release: Poltergeists, Fairies, Skeptics, and the Managerial Class

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Due to scheduling conflicts and a series of unforeseen events, JF and Phil have had to push the release of the next official episode of Weird Studies ...

Episode 184: On David Lynch

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have de...

Episode 183: On Hermann Hesse's 'Siddhartha'

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is one of the great novels of the twentieth century and a prime example of literature that transforms the deeply personal i...

Episode 182: Providence of Evil: On Robert Eggers' 'Nosferatu'

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, JF and Phil examine the myth of the vampire through the lens of Robert Eggers' latest film, Nosferatu, a reimagining of F. W. Murnau'...

Holiday Bonus: Waiting for the Next Sentence

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With the next flagship show set to drop on January 8, 2025, we thought we'd tide you over with this conversation on the art and craft and writing, ori...

Episode 181: On 'The X Files,' with Meredith Michael

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Chris Carter's The X-Files is weird on its face: a dramatic series that, from the start, presented itself as more than drama, an exploration of the re...

Episode 180: The Player: On the Magician Card in the Tarot

20 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itse...

Episode 179: The Final Frontier, with Lionel Snell

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

One of the great rewards of "weirding" the world is learning that boredom may be a kind of ethical transgression—the world is simply too strange to ...

Episode 178: Edge of Reality: On John Carpenter's 'In the Mouth of Madness'

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In ...

Episode 177: Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are als...

Episode 176: On Charles Burns' 'Black Hole' and the Medium of Comics

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of m...

Mid-Break Bonus: The Quiet Earth

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These e...

Episode 175: Don't Look Now: Live at Lily Dale

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Daphne du Maurier was a prolific English writer of novels, plays, and short stories resonant with what she termed "a sense of unreality." In this epis...

Episode 174: Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford

24 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Phil and JF are joined by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford – practicing magicians, podcasters, and co-authors of the newly released Baptist's Head C...

Episode 173: By Heart: On Memory, Poetry, and Form

10 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this computerized age, we tend to see memory as a purely cerebral faculty. To memorize is to store information away in the brain in such a way as t...

Episode 172: Head Over Heels: On the Hanged Man of the Tarot

26 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor foo...

Episode 171: The Beauty and the Horror

14 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional bea...

Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'

29 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest f...

Episode 169: On Free Expression

15 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression. S...

Episode 168: Visions of the Wasteland: On George Miller's 'Mad Max' Films

01 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There are artists who express the vision of a place, person, or thing so vividly and originally that it sets the bar for all future imaginings. With h...

Episode 167: The Hand of Ithell, with Amy Hale

17 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her ...

Episode 166: Make Believe: On the Power of Pretentiousness

03 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In culture and the arts, labeling something you don't like (or don't understand) "pretentious" is the easy way out. It's a conversation killer, implyi...

Episode 165: Tatters of the King: On Robert Chambers' 'The King in Yellow'

20 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign,"...

Episode 164: Towards a Weird Materialism: On Expressionism in Cinema

06 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one tha...

Episode 163: The Source of All Abysses: On the Devil Card in the Tarot

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"The Devil's finest ruse," Baudelaire wrote, "is to persuade you that he doesn't exist." In this episode, JF and Phil peer through a buzzing haze of l...

Episode 162: The Incarnation of Meaning: Greenwich Village After the War

07 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two wor...

Episode 161: Scene of the Crime: On Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's 'From Hell'

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Listener discretion advised: This episode delves into the disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and may not be suitable for all audie...

Mid-Hiatus Bonus: On Horror and the Retail Experience

10 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These e...

Episode 160: The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As a horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing seems to have it all: amazing practical effects, body horror, psychological drama, Kurt Russell ... Inde...

Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael

06 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences ...

Episode 158: As Above, So Below: On Plato's 'Timaeus'

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Weird Studies, we delve into the mysterious depths of Plato's Timaeus, one of the foundational texts of our civilization. In his ch...

Episode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

08 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"Death to Videodrome! Long live the New Flesh!" It was perhaps inevitable that the modern Weird, driven as it is to swallow all things, would sooner...

Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'

25 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pa...

Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'

11 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in,...

Episode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis

27 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is without a doubt one of the weirdest entries in the annals of weird fiction. Set in the earth's distant future...

Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

13 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Even learned commentators on the tarot are likely to point out at the fourteenth major arcana, Temperance, is a bit of a boring card. At least, it com...

Summer Bonus #2: Art and AI

08 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this bonus episode, originally released on July 26th on the Weird Studies Patreon, Phil and JF explore a few ways in which artificial intelligence ...

Summer Bonus: On Affectation, with a Special Announcement

15 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A bonus offering to break up the summer hiatus, this episode contains a conversation on the virtues of affectation originally available only to third-...

Episode 152: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale

01 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On the last week of July, 2023, Phil and JF were delighted to speak at Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium in Lily Dale, the nerve...

Episode 151: The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster

19 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson predicted the rise of a new form of knowledge building, a dir...

Episode 150: Sacramental Reality: On Arthur Machen's "A Fragment of Life"

05 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"A Fragement of Life" opens with Mr. Darnell waking up from a dream and going down to breakfast, where it is described that "before he sat down to his...

Episode 149: Song Swap: On Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' and Wilco's 'Jesus, Etc.'

21 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Occasionally, JF and Phil do a song swap. Each host chooses a song he loves and shares it with the other, and then they record an episode on it. This ...

Episode 148: Mythos of the Moment: On 'Twin Peaks,' Season 3

07 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks has been a touchstone of Weird Studies since the podcast's inception. Back in 2018, Phil and JF recorded Episo...

Episode 147: You Must Change Your Life

24 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" ends on a note that has puzzled and inspired readers for more than a century: "For there is no pla...

Episode 146: An Air of Great Power: On the Chariot in the Tarot

10 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Of the twenty-two figures that make up the major arcana of the tarot, the Chariot is probably the most commonplace. While the tenth arcanum is a wheel...

Episode 145: Waiting for the Miracle: On Vanessa Onwuemezi's "Dark Neighbourhood"

26 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Vanessa Onwuemezi's, "Dark Neighbourhood," a tale of scintillant darkness from her debut collection of the same n...

Episode 144: On Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' and 'The Hellbound Heart,' with Conner Habib

12 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1980s, Clive Barker burst onto the cultural scene with The Books of Blood, collections of unforgettable tales of horror, depravity, and decaden...

Episode 143: On UFOs

29 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1950s, Carl Jung expressed frustration at the impenetrability of the UFO mystery, the "strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature" of th...

Episode 142: The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men"

15 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of contemporary cinema's greatest score composers when he passed away in 2018 at the young age of 48. Last and First Men, ...

Episode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Ramsey Dukes, also known by his real name of Lionel Snell, may be one of the most important thinkers on magic since Aleister Crowley. In the impishly-...

Episode 140: That Ain't Plot: On Hayao Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away,' with Meredith Michael

15 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is one of those rare films that is both super popular and super weird. Rife with cinematic non sequiturs, unforgettable...

Episode 139: Sex, Money, and Power are YOURS with our SECRET Art-Power Formula!

01 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!" Tired of failure and self-loathing? Want to be rich and famous while having a good time all the time? Wondering how to ...

Episode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot

18 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What better way to ring in the New Year than with a freeranging discussion of the dreaded thirteenth arcanum of the tarot? Of all topics, surely death...

The Weird Studies Christmas Special

25 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We recorded this episode in early December for our Patreon subscribers, but as it's the closest thing to a Christmas special we're ever likely to make...

Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal'

14 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What Evil Dead 2 is to the Baroque, Sunn O))) is to Brutalism. Or more like: if the likening of Evil Dead 2 to the Baroque felt like a stretch in epis...

Episode 136: The Things That Were And Shall Be Again: On 'Evil Dead II'

30 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"We are the things that were and shall be again." So a demonic flesh puppet tells Ash and his allies in a memorable scene from the classic splatstick ...

Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson

16 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common enter...

Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic'

02 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we dev...

Episode 133: On Weirding, and the Virtues of Unknowing Everything

19 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

With the term "weird studies" gaining currency inside and outside academia, Phil and JF thought it was time to discuss the philosophical method they'v...

Episode 132: Art Is an Alien Technology: Live at the Supernormal Festival

05 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

With his 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog peeled away the veneer of familiarity on the Chauvet cave paintings, r...

Off-Week Bonus: On Worlds and Stories, with a Special Announcement

27 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this bonus episode, originally released for Listener's Tier Patreon supporters, a discussion of the books Phil and JF are reading leads to a debate...

Episode 131: Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

21 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The historian of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal writes, "The world is one, and the human is two." The line captures the riddle of reality. What is it with...

Episode 130: Holiday Memories

07 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In August, 2022, JF and Phil flew to the UK to attend the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) at the University of St. Andrews and the Super...

Episode 129: Luminous Miasma: On Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

03 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Edgar Allan Poe can be lauded as a major inspiration for many innovative artists, genres, and movements, from horror fiction to the music of Maurice R...

Episode 128: Demon Workshop: On Victoria Nelson's 'Neighbor George'

19 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The American writer and thinker Victoria Nelson is justly revered by afficionados of the Weird for The Secret Life of Puppets and its follow-up Gothic...

Episode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity"

06 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Like Caligula declaring war on Neptune and ordering his troops to charge into the Mediterranean Sea, our technological masters are designing neural ne...

Episode 126: The Daemon Speaks, with Matt Cardin

22 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Returning guest Matt Cardin is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose focus on numinous horror places him in the literary lineage as Arthur Machen a...

Episode 125: Strange Brews: Weird Studies Live at Illuminated Brew Works

08 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On May 23, 2022, Meredith Michael joined JF and Phil for a live recording at Illuminated Brew Works, a craft brewery in Chicago, Illinois.The occasion...

Episode 124: Dark Night Radio of the Soul, with Duncan Barford

25 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

For several episodes now, Phil and JF have been circling what St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul, that moment in the spiritual jo...

Episode 123: Off-Week Patreon Bonus: On Modern Miracles

18 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Every off-week, JF and Phil record a bonus episode for Patreon supporters. The conversations on that stream are shorter, less formal, and more improvi...