With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptu…| Recall This Book
A rebroadcast of a Scene on Radio episode, eighty years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The word “Hiroshima” may bring to mind a black-and-w| Scene on Radio
Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve–his latest is You Only Call When You’re in Trouble, but …| Recall This Book
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. H…| Recall This Book
Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. His truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) Metazoa and most recently Living on Earth (John raves about that book here.) Recall this Book, including two Brandeis undergraduates, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch–spoke with Godfrey-Smith back in October 2021 about his … Continue reading "140* Octopus World: Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smit...| Recall This Book
Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 202o, she spoke with John about how how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the … Continue reading "136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)"| Recall This Book
This June 2020 episode, 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 by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham,two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades. Many of the mechanisms … Continue reading "132* Policing and White Power with David Cunningham and Daniel Kryder"| Recall This Book
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 rel…| Recall This Book
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 da…| Recall This Book
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. It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked … Continue reading "121* Ajantha Subramanian on the Caste of Merit (EF,JP)"| Recall This Book
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. 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 … Continue reading "117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
“My subject was not my inward self, but…the worlds within me.” John spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar. The topic? His marvelous new book about that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys. Krishnan sees the “Contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at … Continue reading "115* Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the For...| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "113* David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)"| Recall This Book
. 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, … Continue reading "111* Samuel R Delany, Nevèrÿon and beyond (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "109* Recall This Buck with Thomas Piketty (JP, Adaner)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "108* Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck )"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "105* David Plotz: Books in Dark Times (JP)"| Recall This Book
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. … Continue reading "103* Elizabeth Bradfield in Da...| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "101* Chris Walley on Deindustrialization (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
What’s a picture worth? How about the picture that allows scientists to grasp what’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and … Continue reading "99* Gael McGill Visualizes Data (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "95* Kim Stanley Robinson, Books in Dark Times (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "93* Quinn Slobodian on Ethnonationalism since 1973 (JP, EF)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "*87 In Focus: Mike Leigh (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "*85 Pu Wang and JP unpack their Cixin Liu interview"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "*84 Cixin Liu (JP, Pu Wang)"| Recall This Book
In this 2019 episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. Zadie’s horror at the idea of rereading her own novels opens the show; she can more easily imagine rewriting one (as John’s beloved Willa Cather once did) than having to go through them all again. From there the conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, … Continue reading "*82 Zadie Smith in Focus (JP)"| Recall This Book
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. They discuss Circe’s place in Greek mythology and in a retelling of the Odyssey “from below” or “from the side,” the concept of “mythological realism,” and the influence … Continue reading "79* Madeline Miller on Circe (GT, JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "77* Polynesia, Sea of Islands: with Christina Thompson (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
This July 2021 conversation (the asterisk in 75* indicates a rebroadcast) features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014). Sean read his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged … Continue reading "75* Sean Hill talks about bodies in space and time with Elizabeth Bradfield"| Recall This Book