Am I Having A White Thought Or An Indian Thought? With Sridhar Ramesh

Namedropping is back. It's been a while, so here's the gist: Samer and I use names as an entry point into conversations about social norms, religion, gender identity, linguistic taboos, mistaken identities, family dynamics, and life online. In Season 1, our guests dished on the perils of being a Karen, the process of renaming oneself, and life with the name Holden Holden. Because this is a Defector podcast, Rohan Nadkarni stopped by, too.

For Season 2, we're starting with comedian and mathematician Sridhar Ramesh. I've been a fan of Sridhar since he was posting uncommonly wise answers to math questions on the accursed platform Quora; I watched him smoothly transition into posting uncommonly good jokes on the accursed platform Twitter. In this episode, we discuss the feeling of being unable to pronounce your own name, Indian naming quirks, Kamala Harris's peculiar grandstanding, writing comedy versus writing math, and all the strangers who sincerely believe Sridhar's real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

The transcript for the episode can be found here.

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