Swan Lake

Easter Islands

Two islands, both alike in Easter. Sylvie and Dora stand before the faces of the chiefs at Easter Island and are chased by rabbits at Ōkunoshima, Japan’s viral Rabbit Island. Hunting for eggs, they turn up Édouard Glissant’s archipelago, kawaii, an island molestation scandal and a rabbit costume incest allegory. Many thanks to Abigail Morris for the visualisation exclusive <3

Confidential

This episode is strictly confidential. Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book meets Peter Thiel’s 2004 essay ‘The Straussian Moment’ at an undisclosed location. Sylvie and Dora pick over a heap of discarded documents. Among the detritus they find the scapegoat, the Antichrist and the Man from O.R.G.Y. All will be revealed in this, our 19th episode.

Swan Lake

A pas de deux, a podcast. Upon the lake of tears sit Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet, an experimental dancework conceived in pre-war Germany, and Truman Capote’s Swans, a group of high society women he befriended and betrayed. Pageantry, sorcery, Nazi characterology and robot ballerinas float by as Sylvie and Dora discuss what it means to be a swan. This episode's visualisation was donated by the renowned Biz Sherbert, whose generosity knows no bounds.

Epiphany

Sylvie and Dora confront Epiphany’s Janus face. The festive agitator Lord of Misrule parleys with William Holman Hunt’s sanctimonious painting ‘The Awakening Conscience’. Episode 17 is awash with mock legislature, fallen women and cosmological contrariety.

Sixteen

A female monarch, a boy writer, a podcast, numerologically united. In Purity & Danger’s sixteenth episode, Thomas Baty, alias Irene Clyde, dares to dream of gender utopia in Beatrice the Sixteenth’s desert dynasty, and a sixteen-year-old John Kennedy Toole begins The Neon Bible, his first work of fiction. Four to the power of two equals Tavi Gevinson’s internet juvenilia, teen pregnancy, an aristocratic third gender and the picaresque year of 2016.