…
continue reading
1
64 Brahmin Left 4: Adaner and John wrap up with Elizabeth
32:49
32:49
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
32:49
Our Summer series on the Brahmin Left, winding down as Fall approaches, was inspired by our bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. It starts from the assumption that a major realignment (or, rather, a “dealignment”) from the class-based politics of the mid-20th century is underway all over Europe and North America–and perhaps worldwi…
…
continue reading
1
63 Brahmin Left 3: Arlie Hochschild (AU, JP)
33:26
33:26
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
33:26
Our Brahmin Left investigation was inspired by Adaner and John’s eye-opening interview with Thomas Piketty. Piketty maintains that Left parties have abandoned the working-class for an increasingly highly educated voter-base. This has turned (or perhaps only threatens to turn) Left parties all over the developed world from champions of egalitarianis…
…
continue reading
1
62 Brahmin Left 2: Jan-Werner Müller (AU, JP)
48:16
48:16
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
48:16
This new series on the Brahmin Left was inspired by Adaner and John’s bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. Piketty maintains that Left parties have abandoned the working-class for an increasingly highly educated voter-base. This has turned (or perhaps only threatens to turn) Left parties all over the developed World (US, Western Eu…
…
continue reading
1
61 Brahmin Left 1: Matt Karp on class dealignment (AU, JP)
37:56
37:56
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
37:56
This new series on the Brahmin Left was inspired by our bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. So what even is the Brahmin Left? There seems to be little disagreement that a major realignment (or, rather, a “dealignment”) from the class-based politics of the mid-20th century is underway all over Europe and North America–and perhaps w…
…
continue reading
1
60 Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time (EF, EB)
37:13
37:13
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
37:13
Elizabeth is joined by Elizabeth Bradfield, poet, naturalist and professor of poetry at Brandeis, in a conversation with the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014). Sean read his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archiv…
…
continue reading
1
59 Recall This B-Side #4: Pardis Dabashi on “My Uncle Napoleon” (JP)
14:04
14:04
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
14:04
Iraj Pezeshkzad‘s My Uncle Napoleon is a slapstick and at times goofy love story, but it is also in the best tradition of sly anti-imperial satire. Scholar Pardis Dabashi came to it late, but she has all the convert’s zeal as she links it to a literary tradition that’s highly theoretical, but also delightfully far-flung. Plus, it makes her parents …
…
continue reading
1
58 Recall this B-Side #3: Caleb Crain on Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters” (JP)
11:56
11:56
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
11:56
John’s favorite avocation is editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers resurrect beloved but neglected books. Now comes a book that collects 40 of these columns (the Washington Post review was a big thumbs-up, and John talked about the B-side concept on Five Books). This week’s B-Sider is celebrated American novelist Caleb Cr…
…
continue reading
1
57 Recall this B-side #2: Elizabeth Ferry on “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley'” (JP)
12:27
12:27
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
12:27
Given this podcast’s love of neglected books, you won’t be shocked to know that John has a side-hustle–in which Elizabeth plays a significant part. He edits a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers like Namwali Serpell and Ursula Le Guin sing praises to a beloved but neglected book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these col…
…
continue reading
1
56 Recall This B-Side #1: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
13:38
13:38
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
13:38
RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that co…
…
continue reading
1
55 David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld
43:15
43:15
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
43:15
Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us. David Ferry, “Resemblance” The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from time to time, especially from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their …
…
continue reading
1
54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)
48:53
48:53
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
48:53
Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitche…
…
continue reading
1
53 Crossover Month #2: Novel Dialogue (Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Robbins, JP)
38:36
38:36
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
38:36
Crossover Month continues with something completely different, and only a little bit incestuous. Novel Dialogue is a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. John and Aarthi serve as the third wheel (or if you prefer the social lubricant) for a scholar and a novelist who sit down each week to explore the making of n…
…
continue reading
1
52 Crossover Month #1: “High Theory” and the Pastoral (Kim, Saronik, JP)
44:58
44:58
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
44:58
Kim Adams and Saronik Bosu share an office at the English department of NYU–and now they also share High Theory a podcast where you can “get high on the substance of theory.” Their lovable podcast always identifies a single manageable topic and asks three magic questions (what is your quest? is not one of them). Today that topic is “the pastoral”; …
…
continue reading
1
51 Recall This Buck 3: Thomas Piketty on Inequality and Ideology (Adaner, JP)
47:05
47:05
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
47:05
Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Powe…
…
continue reading
1
50 Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy; or, Why Words Matter
30:30
30:30
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
30:30
Continuing our conversation on the events at the Capitol and the end of the Trump era, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is forthcoming from Cambridge. His historical and h…
…
continue reading
1
49 The Capitol Insurrection and Asymmetrical Policing: David Cunningham (EF, JP)
28:35
28:35
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
28:35
We first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, he came back for an extended conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening …
…
continue reading
1
48 Transform, Not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation (PW, EF)
27:11
27:11
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
27:11
The eternal challenge (obsession) of translation: “how not to get lost in translation”. However, the award-winning translator and literary scholar at Emory University Lisa Dillman suggests that we may be missing the truly challenging and exhilarating part of translation in this endless and “elitist” obsession. In fact, not “losing” original meaning…
…
continue reading
1
47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization (GT, JP)
33:37
33:37
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
33:37
What’s a picture worth? How about the picture that allows scientists to grasp what’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring …
…
continue reading
1
46 Leah Price on Children’s Books: Turning Back the Clock on “Adulting” (EF, JP)
29:50
29:50
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
29:50
What do children love most about books? Leaving their mark on inviting white spaces? Or that enchanting feeling when a book marks them as its own, taking them off to where the wild things are? To understand childhood reading past and present, Elizabeth and John talk with the illustrious and illuminating book historian Leah Price. They explore the t…
…
continue reading
1
45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence
38:53
38:53
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
38:53
In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John speak with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about his 2020 book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series…
…
continue reading
1
44 Adaner Usmani: Racism as idea, Racism as power relation (EF, JP)
30:59
30:59
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
30:59
Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial …
…
continue reading
1
43 Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation (JP)
37:56
37:56
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
37:56
“My subject was not my inward self, but…the worlds within me.” Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar, has written a marvelous new book about that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys. Krishnan sees the “Contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early an…
…
continue reading
1
42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)
46:14
46:14
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
46:14
Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter…
…
continue reading
1
41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science (JP)
29:41
29:41
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
29:41
In this final episode of Books in Dark Times, John chews the bibliographic fat with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her 2007 Objec…
…
continue reading
1
40 Global Policing 1: Hayal Akarsu on Turkish Community Policing (EF, JP)
28:20
28:20
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
28:20
The Black Lives Matter movement and the policing-related deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others have struck a nerve worldwide. Our “Global Policing” series aims to capture the protests over systemic racism and policing in their various national forms. Picture taken from journalist Zeynep Kuray’s Twitter account. In Turkey,…
…
continue reading
1
39 RTB Books in Dark Times 12: Carlo Rotella (JP)
21:34
21:34
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
21:34
Carlo Rotella of Boston College is author of six books, among them the amazing Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (University of California Press, 2002) and most recently The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (University of Chicago Press, 2019). What …
…
continue reading
1
38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today (JP)
25:40
25:40
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
25:40
Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). Learn how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the…
…
continue reading
1
37 RTB Books In Dark Times 11: Elizabeth Bradfield (JP)
27:37
27:37
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
27:37
Elizabeth Bradfied is editor of Broadsided Press, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer–and most of all an amazing poet (“Touchy” for example just appeared in The Atlantic). Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to gu…
…
continue reading
1
36 Policing and White Power: (EF, JP) Global Policing Series
33:30
33:30
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
33:30
Black lives matter. Yet for decades or centuries in America that basic truth has been ignored, denied, violently suppressed. Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Bla…
…
continue reading
1
35 RTB Books In Dark Times 10: Martin Puchner
18:44
18:44
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
18:44
RTB listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. You may even know he has a family memoir coming out soon, The Language of Thieves. But it took Books in Dark Times to uncover his secret hankering for tales of the British aristocracy, and f…
…
continue reading
1
34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown (EF, JP)
41:47
41:47
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
41:47
Simon’s March, September 1760, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, A Cartographic Narrative” The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epide…
…
continue reading
1
33 RTB Books in Dark Times 9: Ben Fountain (JP)
23:03
23:03
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
23:03
Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie. What is consoling and engaging the author of the best novel about America’s dismal experience in Iraq? American novels, especially those about Americans abroad (J…
…
continue reading
1
32 RTB Books in Dark Times 8: Paul Saint-Amour (JP 5/20)
34:08
34:08
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
34:08
Who better to talk about Dark Times than the author of an unforgettable scholarly book about the grimness of the interwar years, Tense Future? Paul Saint-Amour, Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and author of various prizewinning books and brilliant articles, joins John to talk about realism, escapism and the glories of science fic…
…
continue reading
1
31 RTB Books in Dark Times 7: Vanessa Smith (JP)
19:40
19:40
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
19:40
U. Sydney professor Vanessa Smith–author of Intimate Strangers, and also of this lovely short piece about Marion Milner–joins John to discuss her pandemic reading. She praises a Milner (quasi)travel book, but she also makes the case for M F K Fisher and a book about the glories of hypochondria. Tasmanian selfie: John, Vanessa, mysterious mathematic…
…
continue reading
1
30 In Focus: Nir Eyal on (the deontology of) “Challenge Testing” a Covid Vaccine
29:11
29:11
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
29:11
On April 27, David D. Kirkpatrick reported in the N. Y. Times that Oxford’s Jenner Center is close to starting human trials on a potential Covid-19 vaccine. According to Kirkpatrick, “ethics rules, as a general principle, forbid seeking to infect human test participants with a serious disease. That means the only way to prove that a vaccine works i…
…
continue reading
1
29 RTB Books in Dark Times 6: Kim Stanley Robinson (JP)
22:07
22:07
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
22:07
Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and, most celebrated of all, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. His honors include many Locus, Hugo and Nebulae awards. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a di…
…
continue reading
1
28 RTB Books in Dark Times 5: Seeta Chaganti (JP)
28:52
28:52
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
28:52
Seeta Chaganti, medievalist extraordinaire (Strange Footing and The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary) joins John to discuss–wait for it–data visualization in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, philosopher, visionary and scholar. They go on to discuss past traditions that merge text and image in ways that foreshadow modern visualization practices, and c…
…
continue reading
1
27 RTB Books in Dark Times 4: David and John Plotz
19:43
19:43
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
19:43
Aside from being John’s (younger, brighter, handsomer–and definitely hirsuter) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and run the amazing travel website, Atlas Obscura. panda bad, horse good: David Plotz feeds a new friend So, …
…
continue reading
1
26 RTB Books in Dark Times 3: Plotz/Ferry
24:27
24:27
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
24:27
For the third installment of Books in Dark Times, inspired by our global moment, Elizabeth and John turned inward. We started with a book that you might not think would be so comforting, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London “during the last Great Visitation in 1665.” https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/educa…
…
continue reading
1
25 RTB Books in Dark Times 2: Stephen McCauley (JP)
23:08
23:08
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
23:08
On March 20th, John talked to Stephen McCauley, author of such brilliant comic novels as Object of My Affection (also a Jennifer Aniston movie) and most recently My Ex-Life. Steve brings light to dark corners in this the second installment of Books in Dark Times. He sings the praises of Charles Dickens, of Anthony Trollope (Elizabeth, offstage, chu…
…
continue reading
1
24 RTB Books in Dark Times 1: Alex Star (JP)
26:57
26:57
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
26:57
“Books In Dark Times” takes its inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, which proposes “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their live…
…
continue reading
1
23 Recall This Buck 1: Chris Desan on Making Money (EF, JP)
44:05
44:05
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
44:05
This is the first of several RTB episodes about the history of money. We are ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. Our idea is that forms matter, and matter in ways that those who profit from those forms often strive to keep hidden. Today, we begin by focusing on the rise …
…
continue reading
1
9* Women in Political Power, with Manduhai Buyandelger (Rebroadcast, in honor of Elizabeth Warren)
41:21
41:21
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
41:21
As we prepare our mini-season on the history of money (Recall This Buck) we dive back into the archives for our very first Rebroadcast. And our first asterisk, too: was that the right symbol to use? The egress of Elizabeth Warren from the race for the Democratic nomination saddened us: after all, we both belong to her broad-based coalition of kinde…
…
continue reading
1
22 Ajantha Subramanian: Meritocracy, Caste, and Class (EF, JP)
47:25
47:25
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
47:25
Ajantha Subramanian‘s new book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. John and Elizabeth speak with Ajantha about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race)…
…
continue reading
1
21 Silvia Bottinelli: Food, Art, Food Art!
36:31
36:31
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
36:31
Not long after Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to the wall, John and Elizabeth met with Silvia Bottinelli from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to talk about food as art and art as food. Silvia is a Modern and Contemporary Art historian in the Visual and Material Studies Department at SMFA and her interests range from post-war Italian art to …
…
continue reading
1
20 The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)
30:06
30:06
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
30:06
John sits down with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus to discuss her latest book, The Drama of Celebrity, a tour-de-force argument about how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans. They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting star making to…
…
continue reading
1
19 Scientists, collaboration, and groupthink with Albion Lawrence (EF, JP)
36:00
36:00
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
36:00
In this episode John and Elizabeth sit down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?” The conversation ranges from the merits of co…
…
continue reading
1
18 Fictional Empathy. Rita Felski and Namwali Serpell (with JP)
23:55
23:55
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
23:55
John travelled to Odense, Denmark for a conference called “Love Etc.” (RTB is for it…) and fell into this conversation about empathy, identification and “uncritical reading” with the novelist Namwali Serpell and literary theorist Rita Felski. Hannah Arendt’s distrust of too much feeling, not enough thinking loomed large; so did Zadie Smith’s recent…
…
continue reading
The British filmmaker Mike Leigh puts the move into movies: he never stops changing, never stops inventing. In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, he has ranged from comic portrayals of ordinary life amid the social breakdowns of Thatcher’s Britain (Life is Sweet, High Hopes) to gritty renditions of working-class constraint and bourgeois hypocrisy (Mean…
…
continue reading
1
16 de/industrialization with Christine Walley (EF and JP)
36:03
36:03
Afspil senere
Afspil senere
Lister
Like
Liked
36:03
On a blustery fall morning, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands of other steel workers, lost his job when the mills in Southeastern Chicago closed. The book is part of a multimodal project, including the documentary…
…
continue reading