The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken, in someone’s hope, perhaps, that it’ll be forgotten? Where does history live? Jeremy Eichler’s answer is that music becomes the code of our darkest secrets.

Jeremy Eichler.

Babi Yar is the ravine in Kyiv where Nazi invaders killed and dumped the bodies of more than 33,000 Jews in the last couple days of September 1941. It became an officially unmentionable disgrace to the Germans who executed the atrocity and to the Ukrainians and Russians who didn’t stop it. Almost 20 years later, and ever since then, Babi Yar got its standing as the biggest mass murder in the Nazi war on the Soviet Union, but only because Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a famous poem about it called “Babi Yar,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, in turn, defied Stalin to compose a Babi Yar memorial at the head of his thirteenth symphony.

There in one grim anecdote is how history lives inside music, music as a last refuge of history that we confront no other way. Jeremy Eichler’s irresistible new book from the ruins of the twentieth century is called Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. It’s very particularly about four giants in twentieth-century music: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.

Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas our “chief of intelligence” in the realm of world order and disorder. Chas Freeman calls himself sick at heart at the war crimes abounding in this war, some aided and abetted by the United States, he says.

Chas Freeman.

We’re at a turning point, he’s telling us—not far, perhaps, from nervous breakdown.

We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in a terrorist invasion from Gaza two weeks ago, thousands more Palestinians dead in a first round of punishment from Israel. “Only the beginning” says Prime Minister Netanyahu, while President Biden, in support, warns him against “all-consuming rage.” In all-consuming anxiety, more than a million Palestinians, under Israeli orders, have fled their homes in Gaza, without a clue where safety will be found.

David Shulman and Hussein Ibish.

What we went to find in conversation was the sound of deep experience in the war zone of the Middle East, and also, in a time of dread, some measure of confidence in restraint.

The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and more. She put a man’s name on her author’s page. She built very nearly a religion on her foundational ideas about marriage, yet she never married the man she loved and for 24 years called her husband.

Clare Carlisle.

It was an astonishing feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It’s another considerable feat of Clare Carlisle’s to fill out for modern readers the question that she and George Lewes were exploring together.

Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and out of two centuries. It can feel very Victorian and it can feel very 2023. Frauds, trials, disbelief abounding.

Think of Zadie Smith as the current title-holder in the glorious old lineage of English and American fiction, looking both forward and backward, and sideways, in this new novel about her professional family over the generations: literary ancestors and cousins in the game today. It can feel confessional at one moment, comical the next, stone serious before you’re done. Founders of the Victorian novel turn up in The Fraud. At the same time, she’s addressing the extended family of readers and writers today.

It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how to make a living.

John Kaag.

Have no doubt that the gabby man-about-Concord in the 1850s was a worker: expert surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he said, not to mention the writer of Walden and Civil Disobedience, of course, and a life journal that came to two million words. We read Henry Thoreau anew for his insight into our work, not his: the often fruitless, driven, underpaid labor of the 2020s, and, oddly enough, our midnight anxiety that ChatGPT could take it all away. This is a conversation in the Harvard Bookstore with our friend the philosopher John Kaag, who co-wrote the pungent and personal handbook titled Henry at Work.

Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots music that Harry Smith collected; Thelonious Monk, who talked him through the bop era; Patti Smith, the songster—no relation; the poet Allen Ginsberg, who looked after the homeless Harry Smith.

John Szwed.

And now the historian/detective John Szwed has filled in a thousand details in his portrait of the cosmic scholar and catalyst of our culture, Harry Smith. He was a compulsive worker who never took a straight job, a heavy drinker and a druggie, “a social outcast with time on my hands,” he called himself. He was a working artist in film, a mystic and a philosopher who said late in life that he had had the thrill of proving Plato right. Music, he declared, can change the direction of a civilization.

It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: that the power of language is born in our biology—it’s not acquired. Chomskyan linguistics came to explain how the human species alone got that gift of language.

But it’s not the only reason Professor Chomsky is on our minds this summer of 2023. Frail and quiet approaching his 95th birthday in the fall, he has been for half a century the model of Socrates in the American square: the public pest with questions that sting. So we are listening again to some of our best conversations with this fortress of science and political dissent. This one was in his MIT office in 2017.

In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes.

They have their own senses of beauty and of sexual interest. They have their own sore spots when sighted people speak of their disability. They have their own Facebook pages and their own panic attacks—their own wacky humor, as well. They have their own Hall of Fame, back to Homer, among the ancients. They have a sense of their modern selves as strivers, even adventurers, more than victims. They argue fine points among themselves, like whether Lady Justice in front of the courthouse is, or ought to be, blind, and whether a male gaze persists among men who cannot see.

This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street.

Jackson Lears.

The historian Jackson Lears is reintroducing us to the energy, enchantment, courage, spontaneity, and longing that have driven the American story uphill and down, to wherever we are in the 2020s—a big question in itself. He gives us a world that’s thrumming with invisible currents of power: something more than animal magnetism, bigger than electricity.