<p>Wake Island is back. It’s been a long hiatus, a lot of life changes and transitions... the usual upheavals that seem to have hit everyone over the last year or so.</p><p>We’re kicking things off with <a href="https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/wake-island/episodes/Exaltations-in-the-Dead-of-Night-with-Jason-Bahbak-Mohaghegh-Part-I-e29sa4l" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">past guest of the show</a>, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, a philosopher, writer, and teacher, and a vector for a lot of the ideas that shape the tone and approach of Wake Island. What I love about listening to Jason is that he comes at things from the perspective of the avant-garde, whether it’s the after-dark, mania, or the apocalyptic imagination, he brings a level of sophistication to these ideas that I admire.</p><p>This episode we’re talking about his latest book, <a href="https://scarletimprint.com/publications/p/evil" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>Evil: A Study of Lost Techniques</em></a> from Scarlet Press. Jason doesn’t moralize evil in the ways we’re accustomed to. He treats it as a set of techniques that operate below the threshold of cognition, things that bypass your defenses, in the same way a lullaby ushers a child out of consciousness into the realm of sleep, or doomscrolling steals hours of your life before you realize they’re gone. It’s less a study of bad behavior than a diagrammatic map of how evil reclaims the world.</p><p>Also thank you to Matti Bye and <a href="https://oonarecordings.bandcamp.com/album/mambo-noir-trio" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Mambo Noir Trio</a> &amp; OONA Recordings for letting us use “Noir” to close out the episode. </p><p><br></p>