An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Di…| Recall This Book
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
John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair” in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administ…| Recall This Book
In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists’ prior expectations. The three discuss what it means … Continue reading "152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)"| Recall This Book
Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up–we inflict it on our peers, we i…| Recall This Book
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
Emilie Diouf of Brandeis English, whose monograph on genocide and trauma is forthcoming, joins John to speak with the celebrated French journalist and activist Rokhaya Diallo. Diouf places Diallo …| Recall This Book
Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string and quantum theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth …| Recall This Book
John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and …| Recall This Book
Peter Brown‘s fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. For our 2020 series in the rise of money (we also spoke to Thomas … Continue reading "146* Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)"| Recall This Book
John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations wit…| Recall This Book
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 wi…| Recall This Book
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 …| 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
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 …| 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
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 … Continue reading "139 Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Foxcastle” (JP)"| Recall This Book
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, U.S.A. and There’s something happening Here: The … Continue reading "138c. What Just Happened? David Cunningham (Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "138b. What Just Happened? Vincent Brown (Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "138a. What Just Happened? Mark Blyth (An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets)"| Recall This Book
In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, 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 You Tube … Continue reading "137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals dream, which makes them morally considerable (JP)"| 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
{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. Mentioned in the episode … Continue reading "135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)"| Recall This Book
[this is the first half of the story; the second half can be found 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. This story first appeared in The … Continue reading "135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg reading and discussing Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "133 Beri Marusic on Grief and other Expiring Emotions (Katie Elliott, 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
“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,…| 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
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. … Continue reading "128 Recall This Story: Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight” (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "127* Helena De Bres on Life-Writing (JP, EF)"| Recall This Book
Sordidez, by E.G. Condé, Stelliform Press, 2023 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 … Continue reading "126 E.G. Condé / Steve Gonzalez on Hurricanes, Fiction, and Speculative Ethnography (EF)"| Recall This Book
In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) “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, … Continue reading "125*David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld"| Recall This Book
NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race, 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 … Continue reading "124 The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "123* Sheila Heti speaks about awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)"| Recall This Book
In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of race, ethnicity, and 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 … Continue reading "122 The Culture Trap, with sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)"| 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
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. Along with John they discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the “slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste” and Natasha Roth-Rowland‘s description of the … Continue reading "120 Violent Majorities Roundup (Ajantha, Lori, JP)"| Recall This Book
“What is mainstream shifts to the right every generation.” 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 … Continue reading "119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethno...| Recall This Book
“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 … Continue reading "118 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 1: Balmurli Natrajan (with Lori Alle...| 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
RTB 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 P. G. Wodehouse from his Books in Dark … Continue reading "116 “We are all latecomers”: Martin Puchner’s Culture (JP, EF)"| 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
John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) visits RTB to discuss Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022, Chicago). 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 … Continue reading "114 John Guillory Professes Criticism (JP, Nick Dames)"| 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
To mark the publication of John’s book Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press, 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 … Continue reading "112 Earthsea, and other realms: Ursula Le Guin as social inactivist (EF, JP, [UKL])"| 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
In 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 … Continue reading "110* Novel Dialogue: Joshua Cohen (JP, Eugene Sheppard)"| 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
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 … Continue reading "107* Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
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 his music (during his own semester there) when he heard a piece based on the poetry of Francisco’s longtime friend Victoria Cóccaro. photo credit: Clara Elena Montes Recall … Continue reading "106 Musical Collaboration: Francisco del Pino (JP)"| 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
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 … Continue reading "104 Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada: Journalistic Collaboration (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
“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, … Continue reading "102 Sassan Tabatabai: poetry, observation, and form (EF, JP)"| 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
John and Elizabeth 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 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 … Continue reading "100 Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (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
Today we welcome 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 … Continue reading "98 Horton’s Cosmic Zoom Room (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "97* Lorraine Daston Books In Dark Times (JP)"| Recall This Book
Historian of science Lorraine Daston‘s wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By is just out from Princeton University Press. 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 … Continue reading "96 Lorraine Daston Rules the World (EF, 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
How should we humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, we turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall as part of the New Student Book Forum. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging … Continue reading "94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP,NS, HY)"| 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
John and Elizabeth 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 … Continue reading "92 Janet McIntosh on “Let’s Go Brandon,” QAnon and alt-right language (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
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. … Continue reading "91* Leah Price on Children’s Books: Turning Back the Clock on “Adulting” (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. His recent mind-bending book The Immersive Enclosure 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 … Continue reading "90 Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "89* Charles Yu with Chris Fan: The Work of Inhabiting a Role (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP)"| Recall This Book
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. … Continue reading "88 Underwater Eye: Margaret Cohen explores the Film Aquatic (JP)"| 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
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, … Continue reading "86 Dana Stevens Keaton (JP EF)"| 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 conversation, rebroadcast now to follow up RTB 82, 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 … Continue reading "*83 Plotz and Ferry on Zadie Smith"| 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
by Patrick Sylvain As dwellers of and in language, we know the power of words, but what we do not know—or perhaps we know but aren’t able to predict the particular form and effects of—is the process by which language forms a spectacular house of meaning, such as the poetic edifice that Mohabir has built. … Continue reading "On Rajiv Mohabir, the Chutney Wordsmith"| Recall This Book
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. Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us. David Ferry, “Resemblance” The underworld, that … Continue reading "*81 David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld"| Recall This Book
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. (If you don’t need to … Continue reading "80 We are Not Digested: Rajiv Mohabir (Ulka Anjaria, JP)"| Recall This Book
Abigael Good Madeline Miller has made a name for herself by retelling Greek myths; she calls it literary adaptation or mythological realism. Her 2012 debut novel The Song of Achilles (Orange prize winner), retells an episode from the Iliad. Circe, published in 2018, is a retelling and expansion of the Odyssey from the perspective of … Continue reading "Retelling and Balancing: Circe’s Journey from the Margins to the Center"| 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
Cassie Schifman As I grapple with this week’s rich walk around fantasy with Anna Vaninskaya, I’d like take a break with my favorite national pastime: Vampire Baseball. When Stephenie Meyer’s first Twilight Saga entry made it to the big screen in Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008), it dutifully included a rendition of the vampiric Cullen family’s … Continue reading "Twilight, Tolkien, and the Problem of Immortality: On (The Contemporary Answer To) Fairy Stories"| Recall This Book
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” … Continue reading "78 Fantasy Then, Now, and Forever: Anna Vaninskaya (EF, 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
by Anik Chartrand As an indigenous person, listening to “Land-Grab Universities” (Recall this Book 76) made me reflect on my own education–acquired from a land-grant institution. It was both sobering and stimulating to consider how I profited from a university whose historic and present-day rhetoric on land-grabbing, land acknowledgement, and land-use is a continued support … Continue reading "Land-Grab Universities and Me"| Recall This Book
John and new 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 … Continue reading "76 Land-Grab Universities with Robert Lee (Jerome Tharaud, 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
by Dominick Knowles In “Church Bells Will Signal,” the Greek poet and revolutionary Yiannis Ritsos mourns and celebrates the oppressed and martyred during the fight for a liberated Greece: “those ones are in irons, and those others are in the earth. // The earth is theirs and ours.” Although not a “political” poet in the … Continue reading "Roots and Ruins: On George Kalogeris’s Winthropos"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "74 George Kalogeris on Words and Places (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
Crossover Month at Recall this Book ends with a glance sideways at the doings of our pals Saronik and Kim 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 … Continue reading "73 Teletherapy with Hannah Zeavin (High Theory Crossover, Saronik)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "72 Caryl Phillips speaks with Corina Stan (Novel Dialogue Crossover, JP )"| Recall This Book
By Paige Eggebrecht This essay first appeared on the website Novel Dialogue, our partner podcast for this month’s episodes, and is reprinted by permission, with our thanks. If you like what you read, head over to Noveldialogue.org to read and hear more. “The novel wraps itself around you like a cocoon.” In last week’s RtB, Jennifer … Continue reading "Jennifer Egan, Reverberator"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "71 Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp: fiction as streaming, genre as portal (Novel Dialogue crossover, JP)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "70 Recall this Buck 5: “Studying Up” with Daniel Souleles (EF, ...| Recall This Book
by Aneil Tripathy As a fellow anthropologist of finance, I especially enjoyed this month’s Recall this Book conversation with Dan Souleles. His trajectory—from studying monks to private equity mavens!–proves anthropologists can help us make sense of the inequality that the world of finance produces. Building on comparisons with other powerful groups in the anthropological record, … Continue reading "Points of Comparison in Time: Methods in the Anthropology of Finance"| Recall This Book
In this installment of our Recall this Buck series, 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 … Continue reading "69 Recall this Buck 4: Daniel Souleles on private equity (JP, EF)"| Recall This Book
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 … Continue reading "68* Martin Puchner: Gilgamesh to Amazon (EF, JP)"| Recall This Book
