
September 7, 2023
Henry at Work
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...| More

August 24, 2023
The Cosmic Scholar
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...| More

August 10, 2023
Noam Chomsky: American Socrates
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....| More

July 27, 2023
The Country of the Blind
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...| More

July 13, 2023
Animal Spirits
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...| More

June 29, 2023
Happy Birthday to Us
We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom,...| More

June 15, 2023
Blyth Returns
We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big...| More

June 1, 2023
It Ain’t Over
This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit...| More

May 16, 2023
A Working Life with Eileen Myles
The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become...| More