You need a bank loan to survive, and the bank is happy to help, provided you can prove you do not need the loan. That inescapable loop is the subject of this deep dive into the anatomy of the Catch-22, a phrase that escaped Joseph Heller's 1961 World War II novel to become the defining term for bureaucratic nightmares. The hosts start with bombardier John Yossarian and flight surgeon Doc Daneeka: any pilot willing to fly deadly missions must be insane, but any pilot who asks to be grounded shows rational self-concern and is therefore sane and must fly. Like a password reset link sent to the account you are locked out of, the system guarantees no one is ever excused.

From there the episode tours Heller's ecosystem of closed loops: the woman who will not marry a crazy man and considers any man who would marry her to be crazy, the soldier who  ...