Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchNicholson Baker Finds a Likeness
We’re taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Baker—yes, the multifarious writers’ writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the pacifist historian of World War II in his book Human Smoke; h…
Published on 1 year, 4 months ago
Campus Uproar
We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for …
Published on 1 year, 5 months ago
American Disorder
The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all that we’re in a 40-year cultur…
Published on 1 year, 5 months ago
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Sta…
Published on 1 year, 5 months ago
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but she’s more than a poet, or a…
Published on 1 year, 6 months ago
Of Melville and Marriage
We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dante—though he fled the writing of prose for the…
Published on 1 year, 6 months ago
Against Despair
The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project is…
Published on 1 year, 7 months ago
The Rebel’s Clinic
Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as a soldier to hel…
Published on 1 year, 7 months ago
Algorithmic Anxiety
The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book Filterworld: “how algorithms flattened culture…
Published on 1 year, 8 months ago
The Humbling of Harvard
Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a big game it didn’t…
Published on 1 year, 8 months ago