Recall This Book (Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz)

John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution. Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America? He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation. On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books Discussed in this episode: The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick “The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!) A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 this 2020 conversation with John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Power Relation) to find out. Why did we invite him? John thinks nobody is better than Piketty at mapping and explaining the nature and origin of the glaring and growing inequality that everywhere defines wealth distribution in the 21st century—both between societies and within them. His recent magnum opus, Capital and Ideology. ask what sorts of stories societies (and individuals within those societies) tell themselves so as to tolerate such inequality—and the poverty and misery it produces. Or even to see that inequality as part of the natural order of things. Why did he accept our invitation? A mystery, but who are we to look a gift economist in the mouth? Mentioned in the Episode Philip Larkin, “Why aren’t they screaming?” (from the poem “The Old Fools”) Bonus: Here is John’s question about his favorite writer, the one Adaner teased him for not asking: “Mr. Piketty, you are interested in hinge points where people cease being captivated by one ideology and begin seeing differently (might one also say, begin being captivated by another ideology?) In 2014, Ursula le Guin said: ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.‘ Can I ask how that resonates with your argument about the rapid changeability of economic paradigms–and moral paradigms for justifying inequality–in Capital and Ideology? “ Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book on 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 and brilliant at noticing the unevenness with which the blessings and curses of modernity were distributed in the era of decolonization. Centrally, Naipaul realized and reckoned with the always complex and messy question of the minority within postcolonial societies. He talks with John about Naipaul’s early focus on postcolonial governments, and how unusual it was in the late 1950’s for colonial intellectuals to focus on “the discomfiting aspects of postcolonial life….and uneven consequences of the global transition into modernity.” Most generatively of all, Sanjay insists that the “troublesome aspect is what gives rise to what’s most positive in Naipaul.” Discussed in the Episode Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (2012) George Lamming, e.g. (In the Castle of My Skin, 1953) V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (1957) Miguel Street (1959) Area of Darkness (1964) The Mimic Men (1967) A Bend in the River (1979) V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (1971) Aya Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” Nobel Acceptance Speech Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (1989 theoretical work on postcolonialism) Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008) Marlon James (eg. The Book of Night Women, 2009) Beyonce, “Formation“ Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1961) Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966) Willa Cather “Two Friends” in Obscure Destinies  Read Here: 43 Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On a blustery fall morning back in 2019, 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 film, “Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story,” (with director Chris Boebel) and an NEH-funded digitization project of the Southeastern Chicago Historical Museum, a community-based archive of materials related to the neighborhood. How can academics begin conversations about class and deindustrialization with those most negatively affected by the precarious economic present? What is the secret to unpacking the great diversity hidden behind the phrase “white working class”? This episode’s signature RTB move (fleeing the present, only to discover echoes of its misery back in the past) takes us to Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, published in 1854 just as industrialization in the North of England was taking off. In Recallable Books, Elizabeth lingers in England’s North to recommend George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Chris points out how Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (though perhaps patronizing in some ways) shows us 19th century projects for combating the dislocation and suffering of deindustrialization. John goes against type by anteing up the most current of our recallable books, Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog. Mentioned in this episode: Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, Christine J. Walley The Jungle, Upton Sinclair Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson Chicago School of Sociology Suspended Dreams: the Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Album, Martha Langford Trump’s Election and the ‘White Working Class’: What We Missed, Christine J. Walley North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh Give a Man a Fish, James Ferguson The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane Addams The Dog, Joseph O’Neill Listen to the episode here: Walley Transcript Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable--and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic's "Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief" begins with his grief for the unexpected and early loss of his mother: "I stopped grieving or at least the grief diminished, yet the reason didn't really change. It's not like that my mother stopped mattering to me or that I stopped loving her, but still this change in grief somehow seemed reasonable." What are philosophers and the rest of us to make of this durable insight? John is lucky to be joined in this discussion of Beri's thoughts on grief by by his new Brandeis philosophy colleague, Katie Elliott. She is not afraid to complicate things further, proposing to Beri that we distinguish between the immediate affective intensity of the initial loss and persistent negative emotions towards the fact of the loss, even when that initial affective heat of loss has faded. Beri reponds that emotions are "thinking with feeling" and we maybe want to be skeptical about splitting the two. Beri sees two aspects of grief: "On the one hand, the vision of loss that is constituted by grief and on the other hand, a vision of grief from a empirical or as some philosophers, like to say, a creature construction perspective." It is wrong to make a pragmatist case for the sheerly functional advantages of getting over grief, and also a mistake to see (like Sigmund Freud) grief as a kind of work, a task, to detach oneself from the mourned object. John asks what it means that he personalizes his sensation of grief, focussing not on the lost beloved, but on the way the beloved, or the lost beloved, remains present to him, a loss felt inside himself. Beri invokes Iris Murdoch's warning against the "fat relentless ego" (The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, p 50) intruding itself--when what really should be at stake is the lost object of one's grief. Beri closes by suggesting that grief doesn't happen to us in the way digestion happens (purely involuntary). Sure, grief is not strictly controllable, and yet because it is reasons responsive rather than simply somatic, it is me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margaret Cohen joins John to discuss The Underwater Eye, which explores "How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy." Margaret's earlier prizewinning books include The Novel and the Sea and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, but this project brings her places even her frequent surfing forays hadn't yet reached. She charts the rise of "wet for wet" filming both in the ocean itself and in various surrogates, exploring the implications of entering a domain that humans can explore and come to know, but never master. She and John discuss the rarity of professional divers in early 19th century (Henri Edwards 1843) and Natasha Adamowsky on the abiding fear of the depths. Conversation also pivots towards such SF classics as Stanislas Lem Solaris (1961), featuring a sentient underwater being which controls the planetary tides, though this wrinkle disappears in the 1971 Tarkovsky film. Margaret wittily labels the unintended consequences of human agency the "dialectic of the anthropocene." Mentioned in the episode 1916 20,000 Leagues was Hollywood’s first great underwater filming project. Underwater scenes of a length and complexity not seen again until modern films like The Deep (1977). Man Ray The Starfish is proof of high art's shared investment (also in Jean Painleve's science and sexlife films) in the same oceanic aspects that thrilled popular filmmakers. Esther William's Jupiter's Darling may be the apotheosis of bathing beauty breath-holding. Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges as underwater beefcake. Luc Besson, The Big Blue  Recallable Books/Films Margaret chose Creature from the Black Lagoon 1954 which inspired Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (a "dry for wet" film, shot in studio rather than underwater) and was in its turn inspired by Gabriel Figueora, cinematographer of The Pearl. John favored a SF novel about space aliens who on landing seek out the oceanic depths, John Wyndham The Kraken Wakes (1953) Read a transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, British director Mike Leigh 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 (Meantime, Abigail’s Party, Hard Labour) to period films that reveal the “profoundly trivial” elements of artistic life even two centuries in the past (Topsy-Turvy, Mr. Turner). Leigh contains multitudes. What Roland Barthes says about the novels of Marcel Proust is true of Mike Leigh films as well: you notice different things every time you return to them. In this Columbus, Ohio conversation, Mike and John they discovered their shared love for a hometown boy made good: James Thurber. The conversation ranged from recording working-class voices in the 19th century to Method acting to the pointlessness of fetishizing closeups to the movies John had never seen and should have–and that’s only the first twenty minutes. It cries out for footnotes, but maybe the best result of all this talk would be simply your decision to go off and see a couple (or like John seven) of Mike Leigh films you’d never seen before. You won’t be sorry. Discussed in this episode: Peter Jackson (dir.), They Shall Not Grow Old John Osborne, Look Back in Anger Ingmar Bergman (dir.), The Seventh Seal Harold Pinter, The Caretaker Jean-Luc Godard (dir.), A bout de souffle John Cassavetes (dir.), Shadows and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie Sam Mendes (dir.), 1917 Alexander Sukorov (dir.), Russian Ark James Thurber, The 13 Clocks, “The Unicorn in the Garden” and “The Greatest Man in the World“ Norman Z. McLeod (dir.), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Stanley Davis (dir.), Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint and Exit Ghost Ermanno Olmi (dir.), The Tree of Wooden Clogs George Eliot, Middlemarch Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse“ H.G. Wells, The Time Machine  Transcript Available Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change. In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our partner Public Books) Stan and John start out with Stan’s emerging from the Grand Canyon into the pandemic moment of late March, 2020. Then they discuss Stan’s sense that SF is the realism of the day and his take on “cognitive estrangement.” Finally, they happen upon a shared admiration for the great epic SF poet, Frederick Turner. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a dissertation-turned-book on the novels of Phillip K. Dick. Mentioned in the Episode George Stewart, “Earth Abides“ Mary Shelley, “The Last Man“ M. P. Shiel, “The Purple Cloud“ John Clute, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (on “fantastika”) Frederick Turner, “Genesis” and “Apocalypse“ Ursula Le Guin, “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974; KSR praises such works as this for “power of poetry alone”) Darko Suvin, “Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre ” (1979; on cognitive estrangement) “The door dilated” a quote from Robert A. Heinlein in “Beyond This Horizon” Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone" says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem "Firestones" the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together. Firestones I was collecting rocks on the Cardiff coast, a testimony to centuries of silt left on the shore, of sediment pressed into stone: sandstone, shale, tufa, travertine, jasper, flint. There was the stone that knew the sadness of the sea, that saved its secrets. It was pock-marked with holes and lay half-buried in sand eager to save the ocean's spray, like tears, in its miniature pools. There was the stone that always rolled in place. It had rolled round and round with each wave, desperately trying to control the tide. The was the stone that shoe rings upon rings placed by the seas over the years, that kept time for the Pacific. There were stones that breathed sulfur, that sparked when they touched. Unremarkable in luster or shine, they were the lovers of the ocean, firestones whose sparks were not dampened by salty waves (but they only made sense in pairs). And there was this one, more white, more brilliant, more polished than any stone. But it was once upon a shell; it needed centuries to become stone. It was a counterfeit firestone: it did not breathe sulfur, it could not make sparks. I traced my steps back along the Cardiff coast and the stones I returned to the sands. The ocean's secrets would be well-kept by the stones: its tears would be stored in pools, its tides kept in check, its years measured in rungs. But love itself I could not leave on the beach. I kept the firestones. Discussing this poem with Sassan, we touched on Scholar's stones came up and also Gerard Manley Hopkins's journals full of words/names. From here we moved to other poems and poems and Sassan's work in different languages (Persian, English), poetic traditions (haiku, Sufi poetry, ghazal) and activities (writing, translation, teaching). His dissertation on Persian poet Rudaki is mentioned. His "messy" practice across these many boundaries expresses a kind of playful profusion, ultimately rooted in sound, word, and the music of the lines. *Qazal* As a boy, I waited for the smile to appear in you. Listened for echoes of the sigh I could hear in you. You are the mirror where I have sought the beloved: Her hyacinth curls, a nod, a wink. a tear, in you. In the marketplace you can learn your future for a price. They are merchants of fate; I see the seer in you. What had been buried under the scriupture's weight, Its truth, without words or incense, becomes clear in you. They who bind you on the altar of sacrifice Hide behind masks; don’t let them smell the fear in you. As I approach the house lit by dawn's blue light, Step by step, I lose myself, I disappear in you. We closed out our talk with a reading of Sassan's translation of David Ferry's "Resemblance" (also featured in episode 55), with the Persian and English stanzas alternating. Sassan's book Ferry to Malta will be out in April, and you can hear him read and discuss his work April 27th at Brookline Booksmith. Read the transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration. He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth had the marvelous fortune to talk with George Kalogeris about his new book Winthropos (LSU Press, 2021). The title comes from the "Greek-ified" name that George's father gave to their town, Winthrop, MA. George's poems are soaked in memories and tacit, deep affection, communicated through the language of the lines and especially through certain Janus-faced words that reflect the old country and the new at once. George reads and discusses three poems from his new book in the course of the conversation. If you want to read along as you listen to him, click here. You can read a transcript of the interview here. Upcoming episodes: As you know, we always have a new episode for your delectation on the first Thursday of the month, and on the second Thursday an essay by a young scholar connected to the episode. Following on the success of our November reissue of a 2019 conversation with Martin Puchner, we are dedicating the third week of the month to an "archival treasure." So on February 17th, we think you'll be pleased with an older poetical conversation, also starring Elizabeth. In March, a change of pace: we tackle the legacy of settler colonialism in "land grant" universities with a scholar who has been documenting the ways that stolen Native land funded the growth of America's higher education complex. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race. They discuss the founding years of UNESCO and how it came to be that Jews were defined as the most plastic of races, and “Blackness” came to be seen as a stubbornly un-plastic category. The discussion ranges to include entwinement and interconnectedness, and Edward Said's notion of the "contrapuntal" analysis of the mutual implication of seemingly unrelated historical developments. Sonali's "Recallable Book" shines a spotlight on Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism--revised in 1955 to reflect ongoing debates about race and plasticity. Mentioned in the episode: Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977) Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" (1954) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought ( "the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming" ) Franz Boas, "Commencement Address at Atlanta University," May 31, 1906 (this is where he says the bit about "the line of cleavage" Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Final Report, immigration COmmission (1911) W.E.B. Du Bois, "Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace," (1945) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination IHRA definition of Antisemitism. Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (1952) Natasha Levinson, "The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness," in Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. by Mordechai Gordon (2001) Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (on the contrapuntal) Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1950 Statement on Race UNESCO, 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (on the methodological nationalism of postcolonial studies and new approaches that challenge it) Recallable books: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950, 1955 rev. ed.) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) Read and Listen to the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK. The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technologies. The trio discuss the growth of Hindutva in the US and UK since the 1990s and its further consolidation. Social media has been key to Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism, with simultaneous messaging across national borders producing a globally dispersed audience for Hindutva. Particularly useful to transnational political mobilizations has been the manufacture of wounded Hindu sentiments: a claim to victimhood that draws on the legitimizing language of religious minority rights in the US and UK. They also note more hopeful signs: Dalit and other oppressed caste politics have begun to strengthen in the diaspora; the contradictions between lived Hinduism and Hindutva have become clearer; there are some demographic and structural barriers to Hindutva’s further growth in the UK and US. Subir’s Recallable Book is Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop:The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (Harper Collins India, 2023), which looks at the proliferation of Hindutva Pop, a genre of music that is made to go viral and whip up mob violence against religious minorities. Mentioned in this episode: Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media, and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 4158–4180. Subir Sinha, “‘Strong leaders’, authoritarian populism and Indian developmentalism: The Modi moment in historical context.” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.019 Subir Sinha, “Modi's People and Populism's Imagined Communities.” Seminar, 7 5 6 – A u g u s t 2022, pp.18-23. Edward T. G. Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism. London: Hurst & Co., 2023. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, or Hindu nationalist family of organizations. It espouses principles of Hindu unity and aims to transform India into a Hindu supremacist nation-state. Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organization, is a branch of the Sangh Parivar. Its stated aims are to engage in social service work, construct Hindu temples, and defend Hindus. On the anti-caste discrimination bill in the UK parliament, see David Mosse, Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom The Ganesh Puja period is a 10-day festival that honors the Hindu god Ganesha, and usually takes place in late August or early September. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso; Revised edition, 2016. Yohann Koshy, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain – and Modi’s India.” The Guardian, 8 February 2024. Richard Manuel, Cassette Culture in North India: Popular Music and Technology in North India. University of Chicago .Press; 2nd ed. Edition,1993. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recall This Book 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, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast between the FBI’s work in the 1960’s to wipe out left-wing and Black protests and its efforts to control and tame right-wing and white supremacist movements. That gives him a valuable perspective on the run-up to January 6th–and what may happen next. Mentioned in the Episode David Cunningham collaborated on this article about the “common pattern of underestimating the threat from right-wing extremists.” Ulster Defence Association Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America Ulster Defence Association Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing: FBI perspective and reported book Two of the “after-action” reports on Charlottesville that David discusses are: “Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia” (Hunton and Williams 2017) “Virginia’s Response to the Unite the Right Rally: After-Action Review” (International Association of Chiefs of Police, December 2017) Lessons Charlottesville (should have) taught us: “Prohibiting Private Armies at Public Rallies” (Georgetown Law School, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and protection, September 2020). Listen and Read Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025). Mark sees 2008-9 as a true economic and political volta, one that the world has been busily ignoring to its peril in the years since. Early on, Mark mentions his 2016 article "Global Trumpism." Piketty's "Brahmins vs Merchants" explains the diploma divide. The top two employers in America are Amazon and Walmart, both warehouses for foreign goods coming for American consumers. Mark invokes the business cycle theory pioneered by Nikolai Kondratiev known as Kondratiev waves. He also invokes Piketty's "R over G"; that if return on investment among the rentier class exceeds growth, inequality will grow and grow. In the short term, Mark sees immense financial gains mainly for the top but for the middle and bottom as well. The Republicans are in a pole position to capitalize on this. Higher ed is a legitimate site of concern: Blyth points to the Agenda 47 commitment to hamstringing private and public universities in various ways. Is there hope? Well, sort of. US carbon emissions will make less of an impact on global warming than you might think--and yes it is still the most creative and technologically advanced country. Cheers! Tune in tomorrow to hear another perspective from Vincent Brown, and finally from David Cunningham. Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this 2019 episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. The conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, the inhumanity!) and what it means to be a London–no, a Northwest London–writer before arriving at her case against identity politics. That case is bolstered by a discussion of Hannah Arendt on the difference between who and what a person is. Zadie and John also touch on the purpose of criticism and why it gets harder to hate as you (middle) age. She reveals an affection for “talkies” (as a “90’s kid,” she can’t help her fondness for Quentin Tarantino); asks whether young novelists in England need to write a book about Henry VIII just to break into bookstores; hears Hegel talking to Kierkegaard, and Jane Austen failing to talk to Jean Genet. Lastly, in Recallable Books, Zadie recommends Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom. Transcript of the episode here. Mentioned: Zadie Smith, White Teeth, NW, Swing Time, “Two Paths for the Novel” “Embassy of Cambodia,” Joni Mitchell: Some Notes on Attunement” “Zadie Smith on J G Ballard’s Crash“ Willa Cather, Song of the Lark (1915, revised 1932) Elif Batuman, The Idiot Charlotte Bronte, The Professor and Villette George Eliot, Middlemarch Pauline Kael, various film reviews Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood Ursula Le Guin, “The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview” Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall Dexter Filkins, “The Moral Logic of Humanitarian Intervention” (on Samantha Power) Patti Smith, Just Kids Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again Gary Winick (dir.), Thirteen Going on Thirty (starring Jennifer Garner, not Anne Hathaway) Sally Rooney, Normal People Toyin Ojih Odutola Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance Jean-Philippe Toussaint, The Bathroom  Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) is here to discuss his amazing new Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2022) He speaks with John and with Nick Dames, co-editor of Public Books, Professor of Humanities at Columbia and most recently author of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2023). The gap between criticism and scholarship looms large, as does the utility of Panofsky's 1940 distinction between "monuments" and "documents." they ask what sorts of cultural documents achieve aesthetic memorability, for good or for ill. Mentioned in the episode: W. B Yeats, "Monuments of unageing intellect"; a line from "Sailing to Byzantium" (1933). George Eliot, in Middlemarch (1871-2): "Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those [Samuel Daniels] sonnets to Delia which strike us [nowadays] as the thin music of a mandolin?" Hannah Arendt, Lectures of Kant's Political Philosophy (1982) on judgment, and how general categories can be brought to bear on particulars. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925) Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954; John has a short "B-Side" appreciation in Public Books). Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction Alvin Gouldner , The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979) Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dana Stevens joins Elizabeth and John to discuss Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Her fantastic new book serves as occasion to revel in the work and working world of Buster Keaton, that "solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne man." Although packed with fascinating tidbits from Keaton's life, Camera Man is much more than just a biography. It performs its own airborne magic, lightly traversing topics like the crackdown on the use of children in vaudeville, the fluidity of roles before and behind the camera in early Hollywood and the doors that were briefly (ever so briefly) opened for female directors. Among other treats, Dana unpacks one of Keaton's early great "two-reelers" One Week ( a spoof of brisk upbeat industrial films) and his parodic "burlesques" e.g. of Lillian Gish. People, Films, Books and Ideas in the conversation include: Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle: got Keaton his start in early films like Butcher Boy, reportedly filmed the day Keaton first stepped onto a set. He said "Buster lived inside the camera." "Cinema of Attractions." a phrase coined by film historian Tom Gunning to describe the way the early years of cinema (1895 to 1913, more or less) achieved success by way of gags, stunts, special effects and other dazzling technological innovations--rather than plot or character development,. John and Dana rave about Keaton's last great film (age 33!), The Cameraman (1928) and deprecate the later silents (with a silent caveat for the pancake scene Grand Slam Opera). Mabel Normand: Arbuckle's longtime collaborator and briefly a rising director--Charlie Chaplin kneecapped her at a crucial moment in her career. Dana singles out for special praise Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916) starring Luke, the first canine movie star. Singing in the Rain as a MGM-friendly myth-making explanation for Clara Bow's eclipse (and the famous vocal failure moment: "I can't stand 'im") Steamboat Bill Jr. ( 1928, Buster Keaton feature) "Keaton's most mature movie" says Dana. Read the transcript here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Avi Shlaim, is a celebrated "New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel's relations with the Arab world. Most recently he has turned to his own Iraqi/Israeli/British past in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew–which he refers to as an "impersonal autobiography." He speaks today to John and his Brandeis colleague Yuval Evri, the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies. Yuval’s 2020 The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew explores how fluidity in such categories as the "Arab-Jew" becomes a source of resistance to exclusive claims of ownership of land, texts, traditions, or languages. The three quickly agree that the crucial category for understanding Avi's latest work is that of the Arab Jew: "I am a problem for Zionists, an ontological impossibility....[as] a living breathing standing Arab Jew. A problem for them but not for me." Coexistence for him is not remote, but something that the Iraqi Jewish community experienced and touched on a daily basis.  In describing the factors that sped migration from Iraq to Israel in its early years, Shlaim lays bare some evidence for Mossad involvement in three for the Baghdad bombs that hastened the flight from Baghdad. That bombing forms part of the “Cruel Zionism” that Avi sees having gravely damaged the possibilities of Middle Eastern religious coexistence. He also discusses the 1954 Lavon affair, and more generally reflects on the way that Zionism ("an Ashkenazi thing") conscripted Arab Jews into its political formation (This is a topic also discussed extensively in RTB"s conversation with Natasha Roth-Richardson and Lori Allen, in Violent Majorities). True, there is a much-discussed 1941 Baghdadi pogrom, The Farhud. It stands alone in the area and by Shlaim's account was largely a product of British colonialism in Iraq, with its divisive elevation of Christians and Jews over Muslims. Yuval asks Avi to discuss the power (or permission) to narrate stories told from below. Avi's tales of his own mother's resourcefulness and his father’s struggles betoken the range of poignant response to what for so many Arab Jews was not aliyah (ascent) but a yerida, a descent into marginality, unemployment, and cultural exclusion. To Avi, a single state of Israel/Palestine seems the best hope to ward off the worst that may come from the accelerated ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank, which may lead to a second Nakba. Avi Shlaim's earlier books include: Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988) The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World  (1988). Mentioned in the podcast The New Historians of Israel/Palestine. Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998) Alliance Israelite Universelle Salo Baron anatomizes the "lachrymose version of Jewish history"; e.g. in his 1928 "“Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Noam Chomsky called settler colonialism the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism. Recallable Books Avi credits the influential work of Ella Shohat on the idea of the Arab Jew and "cruel Zionism." One pathbreaking article was her 1988 "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims." but he recommends On the Arab Jew. In her work the hyphen unites rather than divides Arab and Jew. Yehoudah Shinhav, The Arab Jews (2006). Sami Michael - Victoria Shimon Ballas, Outcast (1991) Samir Naqqash, Tenants and Cobwebs Iraqi Jewish Writers: Banipal 72 Michael Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951) and the rest of his New York trilogy. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, 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 imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP. Greg's historical and hemispheric perspective helped bring out the differences between calling an event “sedition,” “seditious conspiracy” and “insurrection,” the new “Lost Cause” that many of those attacking the Capitol seem to hold on to and the particularities of Whiteness in the United States, as compared to elsewhere in the Americas. Greg even proposes a new word for what happened January 6th, 2021: counterinsurgency. Mentioned in this episode: Legitimation Crisis (1974), Jurgen Habermas On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J. G. A. Pocock Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), Stephanie Camp Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1998), Charles Tilly The Possessive Investment of Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (orig. 1998) 20th anniversary edition, George Lipsitz Listen and Read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture. What exactly happened and will happen? Well, Vince has sympathy for Bernie Sanders Boston Globe op-ed about the Democrat's neglect of working-class and Gabriel Wynant's "Exit Right" abut the need to remake left-wing politics. He also takes seriously Thomas Piketty's theory of the rise of "Brahmin Left". That's a topic explored in the Recall This Book series on the Brahmin left ( Jan-Werner Muller, Matthew Karp and Thomas Piketty). Any hopeful note to end on? Well, bad government breeds righteous opposition. From Ronald Reagan we got...Minor Threat and the Bad Brains. Tune in tomorrow to hear John speak with David Cunningham; the previous conversation, already up on New Books Network, was with Mark Blyth. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) 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 left Atlas Obscura to found City Cast. So, when John called him up in April 2020 for the Books in Dark Times series, what was his Pandemic reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and Mark Twain tempt David, but he goes another direction. He picks one book that shows humanity at its worst, heading towards world war. And another that shows how well we can behave towards one another (and even how happy we can be…) at “moments of super liquidity” when everything melts and can be rebuilt. He also guiltily admits a yen for Austen, Rowling, and Pullman–and gratuitously disses LOTR. John and David bond about their love for lonnnnnnng-form cultural history in the mold of Common Ground. Finally the brothers enthuse over their favorite book about Gettysburg, and reveal an embarrassing reenactment of the charge down Little Round Top. Mentioned in this episode: Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield“ J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Hobbit“ Mark Twain, “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) Barbara Tuchman, “The Guns of August” (1962, but about 1914) Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven” (2014) Jon Moallem, “This is Chance” (March 2020; on the great Alaska earthquake) Isabel Wilkerson,. “The Warmth of Other Suns” (2010) (David delightedly discovers it on his bookshelf..) J Anthony Lukas, “Common Ground” (1986) (the mothership of the long-form cultural history that DP and JP both adore) Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter series Michael Shaara, “The Killer Angels” (1974) Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste" Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book, The Culturalization of Caste in India. He joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian to kick off a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." The three discuss the ideological bases of Indian ethnonationalism, including its historical links to European fascism, the role of caste as both a conduit and impediment to suturing a Hindu majority, the overlaps and differences between the mobilization work of the Hindu Right in India and the U.S., and possibilities for countering India's slide towards fascism. Mentioned in the episode: -B. R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, Verso, 2014 [1936]. -Zaheer Baber, "Religious nationalism, violence and the Hindutva movement in India," Dialectical Anthropology 25(1): 61–76, 2000. -Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, NYU Press, 2011. -Christophe Jaffrelot on Radikaal podcast, August 28, 2022. -Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Columbia University Press, 1996. -Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021. -Jairus Banaji, "Fascism as a Mass-Movement: Translator's Introduction," Historical Materialism 20.1, 2012: 133-143. -Arthur Rosenberg, "Fascism as a Mass Movement," Historical Materialism 20.1 (2012) [1934]: 144-189. -Stuart Hall, "The Great Moving Right Show," Marxism Today, January 1979. -Snigdha Poonam, Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World, Harvard University Press, 2018. -Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton University Press, 2001. (edited) Read and Listen to the episode here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch--spoke with him back in October 2021 about his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus? As always, below you will find helpful links for the works referenced in the episode, and a transcript for those who prefer or require a print version of the conversation. Please visit us at Recallthisbook.org (or even subscribe there) if you are interested in helpful bonus items like related short original articles, reading lists, visual supplements and past episodes grouped into categories for easy browsing. Mentioned in the Episode: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin "Open the pod bay doors, Hal": a chilling line from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) District Nine (2009, dir. Neill Bloomkamp) in which giant intelligent shrimp from outer space play the role of octopus-like alien intelligence, and prompt a complex but unmistakably racist reaction on their arrival in South Africa. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Erik Linklater, Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949) Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (U Chicago Press, 2020). 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 of open letters that explore the layers of silence and complicity that enabled torture and the activist movements that have helped to uncover this history and implement forms of collective redress and repair. Elizabeth and John ask Laurence about that genre choice, and he unpacks his thinking about responsibility, witnessing, trauma and channels of activism. Arendt’s “banality of evil” briefly surfaces. Mentioned in this episode: Laurence Ralph, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago (U Chicago Press, 2014) James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me Mahomedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, “banality of evil”; not optimism but hopefulness) Recallable …..Stuff Frederick Douglas, A Speech given at the Unveiling…… Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (here introduced by Angela Davis) Read Here: 45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo's book shows how residents of the region live with and through the "nuclear ghost" that resides with them. The trio discuss ways that residents acclimatize themselves to the presence of radiation, efforts to live their lives in ways not only shaped by catastrophe and irradiation, and the Geiger counter as a critical object. Ryo relates the astonishing--but when you stop to think unsurprising—fact that "once you have [a Geiger counter] you actually want to see higher scores." Mentioned in this episode: Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic Tarkovksy, Stalker (the film) Stalker (the video game) Haruki Murakami 1Q84 Pat Barker The Ghost Road Read the episode here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.” if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk. Mentioned in this Episode: By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Should a Person Be? Alphabetical Diaries Ticknor We Need a Horse (children’s book) The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman) Also mentioned: Oulipo Group Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael George Eliot, Middlemarch Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy Willa Cather , The Professor’s House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”) William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble. Listen and Read: Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth talk cultural renewal with Christina Thompson in this rebroadcast of a 2019 Recall this Book conversation. Her Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia both relates the history of Polynesia, and explores how histories of Polynesia are constructed. The discussion considers various moments of cultural contact between Polynesian and European thinkers and doers. Those range from the chart Tupaia drew for Captain Cook during the “first contact” era (above) to the moment ijn 1976 when the Hokule’a‘s traveled from Hawaii to Tahiti in a triumphant reconstruction of ancient Polynesian wayfinding. Thompson has fascinating thoughts on how the work of David Lewis, Brian Finney and the Bishop Planetarium served as invaluable background to the navigational achievements of Mau Pialug and Nainoa Thompson. The conversation then turns to Epeli Hau’ofa’s influential article, “Our Sea of Islands,” and the conditions that arise to separate islands–water, language, or national boundaries. Can these conditions also serve to draw islands together? The discussion turns to the much-celebrated voyage of the Hokule’a, revivals of Polynesian tattooing practice, hula dancing, and oh yes, Moana. Planetarium at the Bishop Musuem Finally, in Recallable Books, Christina recommends Nancy D. Munn’s The Fame of Gawa as a book that takes seriously the theories of value developed within Gawan community; Elizabeth recommends Sam Low’s documentary text Hawaiki Rising; and John, thinking archipelagically, recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. Christina Thompson (not in our studio) Mentioned in this episode: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia and Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, Christina Thompson “Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific,” Andrew Sharp We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, David Lewis “Our Sea of Islands,” Epeli Hau’ofa Moana, dir. Ron Clements and John Cusker The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society, Nancy D. Munn Hawaiki Rising, Sam Low The Books of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin Read transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Books in Dark Times series offered John this 2021 chance to speak with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. 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 Objectivity (coauthored with Peter Galison). Although she “came of age in an era of extreme contextualism” Daston is anything but time-bound. She starts things off in John’s wheelhouse with Henry James, before moving on to Pliny the Younger–no, not the scientist, the administrator! Then she makes a startling flanking maneuver to finish with contemporary Polish poetry. John puffs to keep up… Discussed in this episode: Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, American abroad, in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady) Pliny the Younger, Letters (“the very model of the good civil servant”) Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty Ovid, Tristia Zbigniew Herbert, e.g. Mr. Cogito Wislawa Szymborska View with a Grain of Sand D. H. Lawrence, “Snake” (and other animal poems) Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (“This [octopus encounter] is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”) George Herbert, “The Rose“ Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971) Listen and Read: 41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Octopus month has morphed seamlessly into Multispecies month here at RtB, bringing with it not only last week's piece on chimpanzees, but also this sparkling conversation about all sorts of multi-species communities. Recorded live in front of an audience of writing students and introduced by Brandeis physicist Matthew Headrick, it features Patricia Alvarez Astacio, an anthropologist and filmmaker. She has made a film about her work in the Peruvian highlands, where people live with, respect, shear and sometimes eat alpacas. Gina Turrigiano, RtB guest-host of long standing, wears her biological hat in this conversation, bringing to bear insights about avian intelligence and the other sorts of animal community that silently surround our species (think microbiome...). John tries to steer the conversation towards SF as usual. Read Transcript Here (or Visit the Recallthisbook.org Transcript page) Upcoming episodes: What do you make of Amazon? The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet) just a click away? We talk in early November with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, who faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world of private equity "guys" (who are indeed mostly guys) and the ways they are "suspended in webs of significance [they themselves have] spun" as Clifford Geertz puts it. Further, he explores the ways we are all suspended in these webs through the immense buying and managing power of private equity firms. Private equity investors buy out publicly traded companies, often through enormous debt (which is why these deals used to be called "leveraged buyouts" or LBOs), manage the companies and then sell them. They argue they are creating value by cutting fat in management; typically workers bear the brunt of the debt while executives--and the private equity firm and lawyers and others servicing the deal--receive hefty payments. Dan pulls off a tough feat in his book, helping us see the concerns and motivations of people he's working with as understandable and the people themselves as reasonable and even likeable, while also maintaining his own view of private equity as, generally speaking, a noxious force in society. We end with a discussion of the Occupy movement and how it helped to change public conversations about inequality and the power of finance (another angle on the themes we tackled in our earlier "Brahmin Left" conversations). Mentioned in this episode: Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gates: The Fall of NJR Nabisco Karen Ho Liquidated; ethnography of Wall Street, and of "smartness" Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, (John misremembered the title as Confessions of a Stockjobber) Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991) The transcript for this episode is here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created. Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes). The conversation then turns to the difference between artworks that slide in at the ear and those that come in by eye. What kind of world-building is going on on Recall This Book? Which podcasts are like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and which are more Schubertian, semi-detached and conversational? Then, in Recallable Books, Jared recommends Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elizabeth recommends the work of Sarah Lewis, and John recommends the Habitat podcast. Discussed in this episode: Lapham’s Quarterly The Lover, Marguerite Duras “The Photograph,” Umberto Eco Various audiobooks, John Le Carré Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, Robert Frost The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse “The Dead,” James Joyce Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes Aperture 223, “Vision and Justice,” ed. Sarah Lewis The Habitat  Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions. Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinating new book, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K Pop (Norton, 2023) argues that mediators, translators and transmitters are not just essential supplements, they are the whole kit and kaboodle—it is borrowing and appropriation all the way down. Mentioned in the episode: Cave art: Chauvet cave "Meaning rather than utility" (cf Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams) Recovery of Gilgamesh retold in David Damrosch's The Buried Book) David Ferry translation of Gilgamesh John Guillory's version of multiple forms of cultural transmission: "Monuments and Documents" William Blake, "Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead" Alex Ross writes eloquently in his book The Rest Is Noise about music's "pulverized modernity"; the revival of ancient culture in a reformulated, fragmented and reassembled from. Creolization as distinctively Caribbean (cf Glissant's notion of creolite ) Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death (cf also Vincent Brown on the syncretism and continuity in Carribean deathways, Reaper's Garden) "Revenants of the past" as a way of understanding what scholars do: a phrase from Lorraine Daston's Rules--and was extensively discussed in the RTB conversation with Daston. Peter Brown Through the Eye of the Needle on monastic wealth and the rise of "mangerial bishops"--a topic that came up in his conversation with RTB. John presses the non-cenobitic tradition of the hermit monk, but Martin insists that most Church tradition shares his preference for the cenobitic or communal monastic tradition --even on Mt Athos. Recallable Books:  Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture Richard Price, First Time (the dad of Leah Price?) Aphra Behn Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688) Roberto Calasso (an Umberto Eco sidekick?) The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony  Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality. Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced. Mentioned in the episode Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021) Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history. Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world? Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif) Ian Bogost on e-readers C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936) Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies. The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains. Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life We Met in Virtual Reality Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse. Recallable Books Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973). Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615) Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989) Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection. Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats. And we share a delight we've been holding back for just this occasion, a series of clips from John's interview with Le Guin in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, in 2015 (a longer print-only version appeared in Public Books). Since Ursula is no longer with us, having died in 2018, it's especially poignant to listen to their conversation. Though its tone actually isn't sad at all, but friendly, generous, and ruminative. Mentioned in the Episode Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea Friedrich Schiller, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" Ursula K. Le Guin, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer (and the Chronicles of Prydain) Judith Butler Gender Trouble Angelica Gorodischer (esp. Le Guin's translation of Kalpa Imperial) Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin "The Bones of the Earth" in Tales from Earthsea John Plotz, Time and the Tapestry Listen to the episode here Read episode here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at the heart of hurricanes, and tells us about his academic work on data centers, and a collaborative speculative film that imagines a world without clouds. Steve and Elizabeth reflect on current shifts within anthropology that are opening the discipline to other modes of expression, including speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin (the subject of a recent episode and of John's recent book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea: My Reading) and of Arkady Martine, Byzantine historian and author of A Memory called Empire, and A Desolation Called Peace. As her Recallable Book, Elizabeth offers an anthropological space opera, The Expanse. Mentioned in the episode: "World without Clouds" by Jia Hui Lee, Luísa Reis Castro, Julianne Yip, Steven Gonzalez, and Gabrielle Robbins. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City by Vera S. Candiani. Haraway, Donna. "Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1." In Women, science, and technology, pp. 455-472. Routledge, 2013. Marcus, George E. "On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary anxiety in the making of ethnography." Cross Cultural Poetics 12, no. 12 (2003): 7-20. Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith, so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding. Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous. Discussed in this episode: Tony Judt, Postwar Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge Doris Lessing The Fifth Child Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…) Joseph O’Neill, Netherland J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being” Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost  You can read the transcript here: RTB 15x Ferry and Plotz on ZS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c). Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden) They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fiction fandom, and the powerful influence of Leo Tolstoy on Mr. Liu’s work, which leads to a consideration of realism and its relationship to science fiction. Science fiction is also compared and contrasted with myth, mathematics, and technology. Lastly, they consider translation, and the special capacity that science fiction has to emerge through the translation process relatively unscathed. This is a testament to science fiction’s taking as its subject the affairs of the whole human community–compared to the valuable but distinctly Chinese concerns of Mo Yan, or the distinctly Russian concerns of Tolstoy. Discussed in This Episode: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops“ Mo Yan, Red Sorghum Read the transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today Recall this Book welcomes Zachary Horton, Associate Professor of Literature and director of the Vibrant Media Lab at University of Pittsburgh; game designer, filmmaker and camera designer. Out of all these endeavors, he came to talk about his book The Cosmic Zoom Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation. This dizzying book begins with a bravura description of a movie we both loved as kids: The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. It's a view of two people enjoying a picnic zooms up and away to show their surroundings, all the way up into space then zooms back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, ending top at the atomic level . The book, uses the cosmic zoom as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference. Zach shares his worries about scale literacy, and what happens when we diverge from the "meso-scale of the human sensorium." John approaches scale by way of Naturalism and SF in the late 19th century, both of which refuse the meso-scale aesthetic realism of their day in order to anchor it at a different scale. Elizabeth asks about temporal scales and geology's activation of human sense of humans' scalar insignificance. Mentioned in this episode: Italo Calvino The Complete Cosmicomics The Holy Bible Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: the Universe in 40 Jumps PBS, The Bigger Picture Voltaire, Micromegas Mark Twain, 3000 Years Among the Microbes Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle.” It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin. Before diving into the story itself, Ivan and John marvel at STW's weird greatness--and great weirdness. Like Hilary Mantel, she is drawn to the deep strangeness of other people. Prompted by John to think about these fairy stories as posthuman, Ivan notes the "dehumanization ceremonies" fairies perform on stolen changelings. John builds on the idea by bringing up the rise (in the 1960's) of alien abduction narratives. Do they form an invisible subtext to the abduction that begins the story? David Trotter's "Posthuman? Animal Corpses, Aeroplanes and Very High Frequencies in the Work of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner" explores Warner’s taste for non-human perspectives in e.g. The Cat's Cradle Book. Warner's own line on her stories--"bother the human heart, I’m tired of the human heart"--signals to Ivan her knowledge that the animals we share the world with see things quite differently: his own cat, he suspects, might let him die without too much emotion. John respects Charles Foster's Being a Beast for his decision to live like a badger (worm-eating and all) rather than just imagining it. Literature cited: Ivan has a piece in praise of STW’s 1926 Lolly Willowes. John and Ivan also revere Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), The Corner That Held Them (1948) and The Flint Anchor (1954). When the two compare STW to Hilary Mantel they are thinking of historical fiction (Wolf Hall especially) as well as her biting novel of the Thatcher era, Beyond Black. Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) comes up in the posthumanism discussion. Randall Jarrell, "The Sick Child" ("all that I've never thought of--think of me!") Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley. And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to takes to down a couple of drinks, scuttle feverishly through some midtown streets, and take a lumbering commuter train out of the city. Steve feels that in our own century, things have changed for the American short story and there's no going back to Cheever's mode. After Raymond Carver, it would be hard to embrace the proliferation (sometimes dizzying, sometimes delightful) of solid details that Cheever deploys. The two try out a final comparison to E M Forster who also quasi-fit into this society, but, Steve opines, could project himself into his female characters in a way that Cheever cannot or will not. John Cheever works mentioned: "The Swimmer" (also a Gregory Peck movie) "The Jewels of the Cabots" "Oh Youth and Beauty" and other stories that nest multiple lives within a single frame, like "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well" Works by others: Sloane Wilson's 1955 novel, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (and the 1956 film) Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ("she would have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life.") Anton Chekov, "Lady with the Lapdog" Richard Yates and mid-century office nihilism (eg his 1961 Revolutionary Road) Jean Stafford's novels (The Mountain Lion, Boston Adventure) do get reprinted and re-read, Steve points out. Raymond Carver, only partially minimalist, but reduced still further by Gordon Lish in e.g. the story "Mr Copy and Mr fix-it" Listen to and read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Fainaru and his brother Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote a bestselling and award-winning book (and accompanying PBS documentary series) about the NFL coverup of concussion trauma, League of Denial. This conversation inaugurates an occasional Recall this Book series on collaborative work: who does it well, what makes it succeed, why can't grumpy isolatos like English professors get with the program? The brothers generously praise the colleagues and mentors who helped them on their way. They also dig into questions of trust between collaborators and constant choices reporting and writing entails. Some stories are dogs, some are "unmakeable" and some you can't see; how do you recognize the situation and cope? Almost as afterthought, they lay bare the amount of persistent, patient long-term conversation and relationship-building that goes into finding out the truth behind events that powerful organizations. Steve explains the reporting behind his 2008 Pulitzer-winning stories about American private contractors during the invasion of Iraq. Basically, "institutions react institutionally." Then the tricky question of how to be a football fan in the concussion era arises. Mentioned in the episode:  Phil Bennett a mentor for Steve. Lance Williams journalist, partner, source-maintainer: inspiration for Mark. The memorable newspaper advisors who shaped Mark and Steve in their high-school gig at the Redwood Bark: Sylvia Jones and Donal Brown. Plus: Stand by for more of their work on the NBA in China.... Read and listen to the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second book Best Barbarian was published by W. W. Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation of The Aeneid was published by the University of Chicago Press. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic 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 loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?” Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die. Mentioned in this episode David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric , Harvard University Press. Read transcript of the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 board at Catalyst joined Elizabeth and John back in Fall, 2020, to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy. Adaner offers a complex genealogy of violence, mass incarceration and their roots in the social inequity (and iniquity) of antebellum economic relations. He emphasizes a frequently overlooked fact that a century ago Du Bois had already identified a key issue: the belatedness of African-American access to the social mobility offered by the North's industrialization, thanks to structures of a racist Southern agricultural economy that kept African-American workers away from those high-wage jobs. The result? An explanation for racial injustice that hinges on ossified class imbalances--contingent advantages for certain groups that end up producing (rather than being produced by) bigotry and prejudice. Adaner Usmani and John Clegg, "The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration" (Catalyst 3:3, 2019) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006) Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (2017) Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1987) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (U California Press, 2005). His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory. David's vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George ("Segregation....forever") Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory. Notes of hope? Well, David has faith in extant political institutions and even bureaucracy (long live the deep state) to blunt the force of Trump's onslaught; movement politics of the left may also prove capable, as they were in the 1930's of rising up in response to a ferocious successful mobilization on the right. You can also listen to earlier conversations with Vincent Brown and Mark Blyth. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground. "You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention. Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts. Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control? Mentioned in the Episode E.O. Wilson, Half Earth "Gene editing could revive a nearly lost tree"; the chestnut gene splicing debate in a recent Washington Post article. (Elizabeth has reported on Bill Powell's work) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) Cli-fi: climate fiction in all its bleakness. For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: how to see things happening at different time scales. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962) Henry David Thoreau, "the touchstone" of American nature writing. e.g Walden (1854); dated yes, but "in most ways ahead of his time" Des Poissons dans le Desert: Elizabeth's book title in French! Listen to the episode here. Read the transcript here. Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's sometimes called "studying up" and Dan and Elizabeth (who's writing a book about gold, after all!) have both thought a lot about it. Read the transcript here. Read Aneil Tripathy's RTB piece about actuarial time scales and how they shape the sort of anthropology that both he and Souleles practice. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well. The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities--while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging. The companion text for this episode--Privilege by Shamus Khan--addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts. Discussed in this episode: Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test John Carson, The Measure of Merit Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State Donna Tartt, The Secret History Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India  Listen and Read Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought. Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What’s Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and most recently "Narrative and Meaning in Life". (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art. John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting--and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro. Discussed in this episode: "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf "Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir," Sue William Silverman The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro The Moth The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch Listen and Read Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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? Back in 2021, Elizabeth and John invited illustrious and illuminating book historian Leah Price to decode childhood reading past and present. The conversation explores the tactile and textual properties of great children’s books and debate adult fondness for juvenile literature. Leah asks if identifying with a literary character is a sign of virtuous imagination, or of craziness and laziness. She also schools John on what makes a good association copy, and reveals her son’s magic words when he wants her to tell a story: Read it! For many years an English Professor at Harvard, Leah is founder and director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book, and she tweets at @LeahAtWhatPrice. Her What We Talk About When We Talk About Books recently won Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, the concern about distinguishing between juvenile and adult books seemed to shift from moral panic about speeding up sexual maturity to worry about turning back the clock on what we now call adulting through the mainstreaming of young adult literature. Mentioned in the episode: Patrick Mc Donnell, A Perfectly Messed-Up Story “Association copy”–e.g. Frida Kahlo’s goofily annotated and illustrated Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Mo Willem, We Are in a Book! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) Manners with a Library Book Dorothy Kunhardt, Pat the Bunny Erica Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar Peggy Rathmann, Ten Minutes Till Bedtime Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are Richard Wilbur, The Disappearing Alphabet Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote Charlotte Lenox, The Female Quixote  Recallable Books: what else should I read if I enjoyed this episode? (Leah) Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading (Elizabeth) E. Nesbit The Railway Children: not to mention The Phoenix and the Carpet and Five Children and It (John) Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats: it’s The Road for cats… John also wrote a children’s book, back when his kids were tiny: Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism. Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2024) on Jewish Defense League Founder and the surprising American origins of Jewish radicalism not of the left but of the right. The conversation starts with Magid recounting a call from celebrated leftist radical Arthur Waskow to make the case that all American Jewish radicalism is of the left. Magid sees it differently: Although the radically right Meir Kahane went on to fame and influence in Israel, both through his party Kach (meaning Thus!) and through successor parties that heightened ultra-nationalism, he loved baseball, and grew up thinking about how to strengthen Jewish identity within a late 1960's America defined by "race wars and culture wars of 1967/68. " Long before his semi-successsful transplantation to Israel, he was the founder of the Jewish Defense League, which absorbed black nationalism (he even wrote a piece called "The Jewish Panthers") and tried to flip it into a model for mobilized Jewish ethnic sectarianism. John asks Shaul about Kahane's claim not to hate Arabs but to love Jews--Shaul believes he actually hated both. Kahane's misunderstanding of the Israeli Black Panthers (a group of Jewish radicals from Middle Eastern and North African origins, inspired by the American Black Panther revolutionary movement) is symptomatic of his failure to grasp the complexity of political currents in Israel. Golda Meir was able to adapt to Israeli political currents when she emigrated from America; Kahane not so much. Nonetheless, by the late 1970's a home-grown neo-Kahanism waxes in Israel, with a majoritarian arrogance unlike Kahane's perennially minoritarian view. He may not have fully broken through to the mainstream, but when he was assassinated in 1990 his funeral (at the time when his party Kach was still banned, when a solution to Jewish-Arab coexistence still seemed within reach) was still the largest any Israeli had ever had. Does liberalism, and liberal Zionism in the 1990s succeed? Magid says it had its moment in the 1990s--it tepidly opposed settlers, endorsed Oslo. But the reality of the 2020's has no space for that liberal two-statism. What we have now, which is distinct from Kahane's older (right) radicalism is outright Jewish conservatism, driven by the potent impact of Orthodoxy. About October 7, Kahane would have said "I told you so." Kahane’s recurrent refrain was that, no matter what naïve liberals might hope, Palestinian nationalism would not be bartered away for the goods of electricity or a washing machine. And yet Magid sees this current moment as an unexpected boon in some ways for the Jewish radical left. The journal Jewish Currents and Jewish Voices for Peace have found a new argument for turning away from liberal Zionism to a new form of unapologetic diasporism. [Click here for further detail on works cited in the episode] Listen to and Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Francisco del Pino is a widely celebrated composer from Buenos Aires, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. John fell in love with Francisco's music (during his own semester there) when he heard a piece based on the poetry of his longtime friend Victoria Cóccaro. Recall This Book seized the chance to speak with del Pino (in John's weirdly resonant office) about composition and collaboration. Listen to all of Decir on New Amsterdam Records. You can hear more of the music on Spotify, Band Camp and even on his You Tube channel. J. S. Bach: Reasons to be interested in late almost abstract or even inhuman pieces (e.g. 1747Musical Offering.) that may have been written without any particular instrument in mind. John brings up whale songs, thinking of the memorable 1979 National Geographic record he listened to as a kid. Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just YouTube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. So, David discusses with John his interest in using dreaming as a window into consciousness. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams... David details the "flattening and impoverishing effect on the natural sciences" wrought by 20th century behaviorist paradigms. He also expresses skepticism about the likelihood of AI ever achieving more than a "zombie" state; it now and perhaps always will profoundly differ from animals' varied experiences of our shared world. The biological commonality that most strikes David is the idea it is logically inconceivable that there might be a dreamer devoid of consciousness or sentience. Dreaming, he argues may be the key to acknowledging animal's "moral considerability"--the right to have their consciousness, sentience and in the deepest sense their standing taken into account. . Finally David admits to a feeling of tragedy in writing this book: he has had to engage with experimentation that crosses boundaries in animal treatment in order to make the case for those boundaries. He understands his decision as tragic because either way--to engage or to ignore the science--would be to lose something. Mentioned in the episode: New Wave of "inner space" SF authors who focus on the alien nature of humanity itself: J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and John's hero Ursula Le Guin. Recallable Books: Susana Monso, Playing Possum a newly translated book on the ways that animals mourn their beloveds. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals (both 1872) are two of the crucial 19th century texts begin to think of animals as complete subjects. That makes Darwin an early theorist of biosemiosis. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about 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 “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring. Mentioned Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing (2019) Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k (2016) Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…. (1997) Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (2012) New Thought (philosophy? religious movement?) Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859) Orison Swett Marden, How to Succeed (1896) David Riesman et al. The Lonely Crowd (1950) Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1945) Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (1982) Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. (2007; concept of”self-belabourment”) Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019) Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2015) Recallable books Epictetus, Handbook (125 C.E.) Sheil Heti, How Should a Person Be (2012) Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904) Read Here: 38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth and John talk about fantasy's power of world-making with Edinburgh professor Anna Vaninskaya, author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 ( 2010) and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien ( 2020). Anna uncovers the melancholy sense of displacement and loss running through Tolkien, and links his notion of "subcreation" to an often concealed theological vision. Not allegory but "application" is praised as a way of reading fantasy. John asks about hopeful visions of the radical politics of fantasy (Le Guin, but also Graeber and Wengrow's recent work); Elizabeth stresses that fantasy's appeal is at once childish and childlike. E. Nesbit surfaces, as she tends to in RtB conversations. The question of film TV and other visual modes comes up: is textual fantasy on the way out? Mentioned in the Episode: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. In "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" Ursula Le Guin perhaps surprisingly praises the otherworldly prose style of Anna's beloved E. R. Eddison, best known for The Worm Ouroboros (1922) J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories" E. Nesbit The Phoenix and the Carpet Lord Dunsany, King of Elfland's Daughter Ursula Le Guin The Books of Earthsea Recallable Books: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (and read this lovely Ivan Kreilkamp article on her earlier strange great Lolly Willowes) Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season Read transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and new Brandeis host Jerome Tharaud (author of Apocalyptic Geographies) learn exactly how the growth of America's public universities relied on shameful seizures of Native American land. Working with Tristan Athone --editor of Grist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe--historian Robert Lee wrote a stunning series of pieces that reveal how many public land-grant universities were fundamentally financed and sustained by a long-lasting settle-colonial "land grab." Their meticulous work paints an unusually detailed picture of how most highly praised institutions of higher education in America (Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley and virtually all of the great Midwestern public universities) were initially launched and sometimes later sustained by a flood of cash deriving directly or indirectly from that stolen and seized land. Jerome and John discuss with Lee issues that are covered in the initial article in High Country News, a dedicated website with a better version of this fantastic map, a follow-up article tracing land that was never sold, and a scholarly forum that followed from their findings. The Morrill Act (1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, and that is no coincidence). Its author Justin Morrill, a Vermont Senator, argued the land-grants were a payback for the East's investment in opening the West. The West was "a plundered province" wrote Bernard de Voto (Harpers, August 1934). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades. 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 Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own). Although there is plenty of subtle racism in policing as well, there can be a brutally frontal quality to white-power policing: just look at the racial disparity in the stubbornly astronomically number of fatal shootings by police. David and Daniel ask how much of the current system of racial and class disparity can be traced back to slavery or to subsequent 19th century racial logic, and howw much arises from the confluence of other forces. The conversation notes the widespread white participation in 2020 protests–did we ever expect to hear Mitt Romney chanting “Black Lives Matter”?– and what this might suggest about the possibilities for actual change. It also touches on the roles of the media and institutions such as police unions and the erosion of federal oversight of local police departments. Mentioned in this episode: Klansville, USA (cf. the PBS show of the same name that drew heavily on the book; and an interview David did on the topic of today’s Klan) Kerner Commission Report (1968) Ethical Society of Police (cf. this compelling local post-Ferguson PBS documentary that speaks with St. Louis African-American police officers) Recallable Books Walter Johnson, “The Broken Heart of America” (2020) James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963) Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (2015) Listen and Read Here: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political situation for contemporary Chinese writers who come to the West to discuss their work. They consider whether our world is like a cabinet in a basement, and what kind of optimism or pessimism might be available to science fiction writers. They compare the interview to a recent profile of Liu in The New Yorker, and ponder the advantages and disadvantages of pressing writers to weigh in on the hot-button topics of the day. Discussed in this episode: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End Jiayang Fan, “Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds” (New Yorker interview/profile) Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity George Melies (dir.), A Voyage to the Moon Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov Transcript available here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crossover Month at Recall this Book ends with a glance sideways at the doings of our pals Saronik and Kim, hosts of the delightfully lapidary podcast High Theory. Refresh your sense of them with Recall this Book 52: they joined John to showcase their distinctive approach, taking as their topic "the pastoral." Or, just click Play without further ado to hear their thoughts on teletherapy, a concept that proves far more familiar, and omnipresent than we at RtB had realized. Take those omnipresent signs for the Suicide Hotline, for starters.... In this 18-minute gem of an episode, Hannah Zeavin talks with HT about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. This mediated practice is the topic of her new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021). You can learn more about Hannah’s research and teaching on her website: zeavin.org Read the transcript here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love." Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through the ages (The Written World) this episode brings back happy memories of Elizabeth and John piling their guests into a cozy sound booth at Brandeis, the kind of place that's utterly taboo in Pandemic America.So travel with us back to 2019 for a close encounter with the epic of Gilgamesh. The three friends discuss the different stages of world writing--from the time of the scribes to the time of great teachers like Confucius, Socrates and Jesus Christ, who had a very complicated relationship to writing. In Recallable Books, Martin recommends the fan fiction website Wattpad; Elizabeth recommends "No Reservations: Narnia," in which Anthony Bourdain goes through the wardrobe. John feints at recommending Dennis Tenen's book on the writing within coding before recommending the Brautigan Library. Come for the discussion of writing, stay for the impressions of Gollum! Discussed in this episode: The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilization, Martin Puchner Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, David Ferry Wattpad "No Reservations: Narnia," Edonohana Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, David Tenen The Brautigan Library Episode transcript available here: Episode 6 Puchner 3.28.19 Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more. It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present. Mentioned in the Episode James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time Richard Wright, Native Son Johnny Pitts, Afropean Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips) Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.” Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom Read a transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 and developing different modes for visualizing evidence. For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!). You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SARS-CoV2 virus to a hapless cell and fusing their membranes. Or click through to watch a gorgeous video Gael and his team have created. Mentioned in the Episode: Gael praised Galileo’s revolutionary images (drawings? diagrams?) of Jupiter’s moons: Leonardo’s stunning anatomical drawings: The DNA Double-Helix: We all knew that Watson and Crick‘s revelation came with this model: But it’s easy to forget this indispensable antecedent: the enigmatic yet foundational x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin: “All models are wrong; some are useful.”smiley statistician George Box “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115 And what sort of deceptive picture did Wittgenstein have in mind? well, how about the 1904 “Plum-pudding model” of what the atom might look like? Wrong, and productive of all sorts of mistaken hypotheses. Gina credited the beautiful drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal with inspiring and illuminating generations of neuroscientists. John credits Science in the Marketplace, an edited collection reminding us that even in crowded lecture-halls, to display science may also mean doing science….. Gael ended his historical tour by praising David Goodsell, cell-painter extraordinaire: John also raved (as he is wont to do) about cave paintings as the first animation in the world (e.g. these horses from Peche-Merle). Listen and Read Here: 47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far right. She joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian midway through a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." Listen to episode 1 here. The three discuss the transnational formation of the Jewish far right over the 20th and 21st centuries, the gradual movement of far right actors into the heart of the Israeli state, and the shared investment in territorial maximalism, racial supremacy, and natalism across the Zionist ideological spectrum. Coming up next in RTB 120: Lori and Ajantha sit down with John to synthesize what Murli and Natasha had to say about Ethnonationalism in Indian and in Israel. Mentioned in the episode Ben Shitrit, Lihi. Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. El-Or, Tamar, and Gideon Aran. “Giving Birth to a Settlement: Maternal Thinking and Political Action of Jewish Women on the West Bank.” Gender and Society 9, no. 1 (February 1995): 60-78. Neuman, Tamara. “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave.” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 51-70. Neuman, Tamara. Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Krampf, Arie. The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity, and Change. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. Read and Listen here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction. When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke. Mentioned in the episode Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse." The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him. Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded. "When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral) Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962 Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion? Head on over to Part 2 of episode 135. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words." The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing." Mentioned in this episode: "Code Words and Crumbs," Brandeis Magazine "Crybabies and Snowflakes," Download from Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, Cambridge University Press, 2020. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth. Hofstadter, Richard The paranoid style in American politics." 1964. Lepselter, Susan, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan, 2016 Trollope, Anthony. Marion Fay: a Novel. Vol. 29. Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883. Silverstein, Michael. "Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology." In Semiotic mediation, pp. 219-259. Academic Press, 1985. Listen to the episode here Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything. We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance. Desan’s research explores money as a legal and political project. Her approach opens economic orthodoxy to question by widening the focus on money as an instrument, to examine the institutions and agreements through which resources are mobilized and tracked, by means of money. In doing so, she shows that particular forms of money, and the markets within which they circulate, are neither natural or inevitable. Christine Desan, “Making Money“ Ursula Le Guin The Earthsea Novels (money hard to come by, but kinda cute) Samuel Delany, the Neveryon series (money part of the evils of naming, slavery, labor appropriation) Jane Austen “Pride and Prejudice“ Richard Rhodes, “Energy“ John Plotz, “Is Realism Failing?” (on liberal guilt and patrimonial fiction) William Cobbett, “Rural Rides” (1830; London as wen) E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (notional “just price” of bread) Peter Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD” Chris Vanden Bossche, “Reform Acts“ “Sanditon” on PBS (and the original unfinished Austen novel) Still from “Sanditon” Margot Finn, “Character of Credit“ Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century“ L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900) Leo Tolstoy “The Forged Coupon” (orig.1904) Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp” (1891) Frank Norris, “The Octopus” (1901) D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909) Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists sit down together in peace, He speaks with John and with science-fiction scholar Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine. The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.” Mentioned in this Episode: --Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) --W. E. B. Du Bois on “double-consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.” Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.” Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to Novel Dialogue's traditional "signature question": A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six. Mentioned in this Episode: By Anne Enright: The Gathering (2007; Booker Prize) The Forgotten Waltz (2011) The Green Road (2015) The Portable Virgin Taking Pictures Yesterday’s Weather Granta Book of the Irish Short Story Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood No Authority Also mentioned: Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking about This Sally Rooney on the social life of the young on the internet, e.g. Conversations with Friends Christopher Hitchens, “Booze and Fags:” Transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project. Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all. Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life. Mentioned in the Episode: 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. The Beinart Notebook podcast Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently. They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized? Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity. Discussed in this episode: The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail A Republic, Not an Empire and The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan Dune, Frank Herbert “Living on a Lifeboat,” Garrett Hardin The Lobster Gangs of Maine, James M. Acheson The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome Libra, dir. Patty Newman “Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Jason W. Moore The Wall, John Lanchester Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks, Douglas R. Holmes The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin Read here: RTB Slobodian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch-- loves his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus? As always, below you will find helpful links for the works referenced in the episode, and a transcript for those who prefer or require a print version of the conversation. Please visit us at Recallthisbook.org (or even subscribe there) if you are interested in helpful bonus items like related short original articles, reading lists, visual supplements and past episodes grouped into categories for easy browsing. Mentioned in the Episode: --Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin --"Open the pod bay doors, Hal": a chilling line from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) --District Nine (2009, dir. Neill Bloomkamp) in which giant intelligent shrimp from outer space play the role of octopus-like alien intelligence, and prompt a complex but unmistakably racist reaction on their arrival in South Africa. --Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) --Erik Linklater, Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949) Transcript Finally, all listeners and readers who are interested in the gentle art of podcasting are cordially invited to the inaugural Humanities Podcasting Symposium, held over Zoom, October 15-16. Latif Nasser of Radiolab will headline two days of workshops, seminars and discussions among scholars students and amateurs who have fallen in love with the pedagogical and intellectual possibilities the medium affords. Elizabeth and John will both be presenting. Join us. RSVP here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London -- is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of "ethnic expectations" and the ways it can have negative effects even when the expectations themselves are positive, and the dense intertwining of race, class, nation, colonial status, and gender, and the travels of the concept of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Mentioned in the episode: The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report [the Sewell Report] (2021) The Moynihan Report (1965) Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" (1923) Diane Reay, "What Would a Socially Just Educational System Look Like?" (2012) Bernard Coard, How the Caribbean Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System Steve McQueen, Small Axe, "Education," (2020) Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019) B. Brian Forster, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Adieu Culture: A New Duty Arises" (2003) David Simon's TV show The Wire (and also Lean on Me, and To Sir, with Love and with major props from Derron, Top Boy) Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (1994) Listen and Read Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This conversation, first aired in July 2021, features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014). Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.” Mentioned in This Episode: C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of Dislocation C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road Lorine Neidecker, Lake Superior Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Anne Carson, Plainwater William Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt Listen and Read: Read transcript here: Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard UP, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans, known under the term “Coromantees” who were the chief protagonists in this war. Tracing the vectors of this war within the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and West Africa, Vince shows us how these particular enslaved Africans, who are caught in the gears of one of human history’s most dehumanizing institutions, constrained by repressive institutions, social-inscribed categories of differences and brutal force, operate tactically within and across space in complex and cosmopolitan ways. Vince locates his interest in warfare (as an object of study) in emergence of new world order and disorder through the Gulf Wars. His attention to routes and mobilities he credits to an epidemiological turn of mind–perhaps inherited from his father Willie Brown, a medical microbiologist now retired from UCSD. The idea of the vector shaped his first book as well. Vince’s “cartographic narrative” “A Slave Revolt in Jamaica: 1760-1761” and the film he produced with director Llewellyn Smith, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (which traces African studies and anthropology’s understanding of cultural movements from between Africa and the Americas) also explore these burning questions. Along the way, Vince discusses C.L.R. James’ notion of conflict, war and global connectedness in The Black Jacobins and the ways that categories of social difference both are constituted by global capital (reminding us of our conversation on caste, class and whiteness with Ajantha Subramanian) and those bumper stickers from the early 1980s in which the Taliban were the good guys. Mentioned in this episode: Rambo III (1988) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself (1789) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688) Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (2002) C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World-1400-1800 (1992) Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson on his advocacy to make Tacky a national hero in Jamaica Black X walks barefoot across Jamaica to make Tacky a national hero  Recallable Books: Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (2009) John Tutino, Making a New World (2011) Angel Palerm, The First Economic World-System (1980) Listen and Read Here: 34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread. Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem Their conversation ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else’s thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from Egan’s forthcoming novel, The Candy House (April, 2022) make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre’s relationship to specialized lingos and argots–and the way a genre’s norms and structure can function like a “lifeline” and also a “portal.” Mentioned in the Episode Jennifer Egan: Visit from the Goon Squad; Look at Me; Manhattan Beach; The Keep Samuel Richardson: Clarissa; Pamela Henry Fielding, Shamela Herman Melville, Moby Dick Patrick O’Brian (e.g. Master and Commander) Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat Read the transcript here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). is just out. Daston's earlier pathbreaking works include Against Nature, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and many co-authored books, including Objectivity (with Peter Galison) which introduced the idea of historically changeable "epistemic virtues." In this Recall this Book conversation, Daston--Raine to her friends--shows that rules are never as thin (as abstract and context-free) as they pretend to be. True, we love a rule that seems to brook no exceptions: by the Renaissance, even God is no longer allowed to make exceptions in the form of miracles. Yet throughout history, Raine shows, islands of standardized stability are less stable than they seem. What may feel like oppressively general norms and standards are actually highly protected ecotopes within which thin rules can arise. Look for instance at the history of sidewalks (Raine has)! Raine, Elizabeth and John dive into the details. Implicit and explicit rules are distinguished in the case of e.g. cookbooks and monasteries--and then the gray areas in-between are explored. When students unconsciously ape their teachers, that is a tricky form of emulation--is it even possible to "follow but not ape"? Perhaps genres do this work: The Aeneid is not the Iliad and yet older writers are somehow internalized in the later ones. Mentioned in the Episode Karl Polanyi, 1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on the embeddedness of markets in norms and rules. John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690) denounces the "arbitrary will of another," an early case of seeing will simply qua will is unacceptable. Arnold Davidson sees genre variation (like Milton learning from Homer) also happening in musical invention. Michael Tomasello works on children's rule-following and enforcement against violations, Johannes Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938) with its notion of demarcated "sacred spaces of play" is a touchstone of rule-following Lorraine and John both adore. Recallable Books The Rule of Saint Benedict (516 onwards) Irma Rombauer, Joy of Cooking (1931 onwards) As Elizabeth says, it's from following the rules that joy emerges.... Walter Miller's Canticle for Liebowitz Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864) an instance of the notion that one establishes free will by caprice or defiance against natural laws ("damnit, gentleman, sometimes 2+2=5 is a nice thing too!") Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here. Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction. When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke. Mentioned in the episode Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse." The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him. Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded. "When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral) Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962 Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion? Head on over to Part 1 of episode 135. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic 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 loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. The poets talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?” "I feel the feathers softly gather upon My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings. Melodious bird I'll fly above the moaning Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus, I'll coast along above the coast of Sidra And over the fabled far north Hyperborean steppes." -- from "To Maecenas", The Odes of Horace, II: 20. Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us. David Ferry, “Resemblance” Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die. Henry Justice Ford, ‘Grendel’s Mother Drags Beowulf to the Bottom Of The Lake’, 1899 So furious. So furious, I was, When my son called to me, called me out Of heaven to come to the crag and corner store Where it was that he was dying, “Mama, I can’t breathe;” even now I hear it— Roger Reeves, “Grendel’s Mother” Mentioned in this episode David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press Horace, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian, W.W. Norton Press Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press Read transcript of the episode here. Listen to the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do you make of Amazon: The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet) just a click away? John and Elizabeth speak with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, whose previous books include the pathbreaking The Program Era. Mark faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: if you want to know even more about it, check out the NY Times review by RTB's own book-history maven, star of RTB 46, Leah Price. Mark ponders when service became an idiom for the relationship between writer and reader and how strong a claim he is willing to make about Amazon's impact on the modern novel (pretty strong!). Finally, he tackles the key question: is the genre of "Adult Diaper Baby Love" (a breakout hit in Kindle sales; google it at your peril!) the perfect metaphor for Amazon's effort to soothe, pacify and succor its infantilized consumer-base? Mentioned in the episode: Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption Public libraries going trashy or classy: John wrote an article about this topic, praising a compelling database, "What Middletown Read" Recallable Books: Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980) Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1853) Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855) Transcript available here RTB 67 Transcript (or Visit the Recall this Book Transcript page) Upcoming: Mark's discussion of the history of books and book publishing inspired next week's blog post: tune in next Thursday to find out more! It also sent us back to the archives for a golden RTB oldie starring Martin Puchner. That will appear, freshly rewrapped for the occasion, just before Thanksgiving. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfied, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches. Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration? Mentioned in the episode: Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here) Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“ Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris Brian Teare, Doomstead Days Derek Walcott, “Omeros“ W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs” Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“ Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides) Trixie Belden Shel Silverstein Lois Lowry, “The Giver“ Liz equates poetry and Tetris Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“ Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“ Listen and Read Here: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning. The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements. Mentioned in the episode Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege. Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.) Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland. RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque. Lori's interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism. Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland's recent dissertation ("'Not One Inch of Retreat': The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996"), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing. Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation. Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation. Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism. Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization. Recallable Books Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism. Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110) Susan Bayly's Saints, Goddesses and Kings. Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India. Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of Recall This Book, John talks to Stephen McCauley, a novelist and Professor of the Practice of English and Co-director of Creative Writing at Brandeis. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve, and there is no comic novelist he loves better than Barbara Pym, a mid-century British comic genius who … Continue reading "5 The Comic Novel with Stephen McCauley" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 … Continue reading "9* Women in Political Power, with Manduhai Buyandelger (Rebroadcast, in honor of Elizabeth Warren)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 “neo-stoical” self-help gurus … Continue reading "38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From its origins in clay tablets to its future on digital tablets, Martin Puchner has thought about writing in all its forms. In this episode, John and Elizabeth talk to Martin, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard. They begin with a discussion of a very early writerly text–the epic … Continue reading "6 Writing Then and Now: Martin Puchner (The Written World)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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). … Continue reading "39 RTB Books in Dark Times 12: Carlo Rotella (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“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 … Continue reading "24 RTB Books in Dark Times 1: Alex Star (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 … Continue reading "25 RTB Books in Dark Times 2: Stephen McCauley (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We frequently worry that we live in a “distracted age.” But perhaps the human condition is always to live “almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another” (Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism”). Join John’s conversation with Marina Van Zuylen of Bard College. Van Zuylen, the author of The Plenitude of Distraction, makes … Continue reading "8 Distraction, a Conversation (Marina Van Zuylen and John Plotz at Harvard’s Mahindra Center)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 … Continue reading "35 RTB Books In Dark Times 10: Martin Puchner" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 close with beloved books that … Continue reading "28 RTB Books in Dark Times 5: Seeta Chaganti (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Then the old friends share their … Continue reading "31 RTB Books in Dark Times 7: Vanessa Smith (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 fiction. … Continue reading "32 RTB Books in Dark Times 8: Paul Saint-Amour (JP 5/20)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.” Probably … Continue reading "26 RTB Books in Dark Times 3: Plotz/Ferry" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. So, what is he reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and … Continue reading "27 RTB Books in Dark Times 4: David and John Plotz" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books. Fresh on the heels of our conversation with Madeline Miller, author of Circe,  John Plotz has a talk with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble … Continue reading "7 In Focus: Samuel Delany in conversation with John Plotz (Nevèrÿon, Triton, Gertrude Stein and more….)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 … Continue reading "29 RTB Books in Dark Times 6: Kim Stanley Robinson (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices