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THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 1, 2026
AI Apocalypse?

"A juvenility of moral imagination that is at the core of this."

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May 9, 2024
Campus Uproar

"Discussions that I think are otherwise, in a sense, being shut down."

We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for...
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April 25, 2024
American Disorder

The origin of the culture war.

The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all...
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April 11, 2024
Lessons from Hannah Arendt

"We are free to change the world."

We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on...
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March 28, 2024
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets

(Harvard's Version)

We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of...
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March 14, 2024
Of Melville and Marriage

"A story about the love of literature."

We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dante—though he fled the writing...
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February 29, 2024
Against Despair

Escaping "a sense that meaning has drained out of things."

The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with...
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February 15, 2024
The Rebel’s Clinic

"To be a man, nothing but a man."

Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he...
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February 1, 2024
Algorithmic Anxiety

"Feeling something, but not feeling very much."

The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book...
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January 18, 2024
The Humbling of Harvard

"The hearing was a hit."

Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it...
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January 4, 2024
The Most Secret Memory of Men

"Literature holds a secret."

The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a novel titled The Most Secret Memory of Men. Our guest...
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December 20, 2023
The Revolutionary

"The prime mover."

On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s...
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December 7, 2023
Israel and Palestine Across History

"You either solve problems that way or you find out that they're insoluble."

With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between...
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November 22, 2023
Time’s Echo

The music of remembrance.

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...
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November 9, 2023
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn

"The world's patience with us . . . is coming to an end."

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,...
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November 2, 2023
Upended Assumptions

"I look on with horror."

In this podcast, two old friends in and out of journalism talk about the Middle East war, which comes to feel more like a contest in war crimes. Steven Erlanger...