PODCAST · arts
Think About It
by Ulrich C. Baer
Think About It engages today's leading thinkers in conversations about powerful ideas and how language can change the world.
Episodes
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Book Talk 69: American Medium, with Eyal Peretz
What is “America” not only as a political entity but in our imagination? How can we properly envision America, without repeating clichés that frame America as either reactionary or revolutionary, repressive or liberatory? I spoke with Eyal Peretz about his book American Medium, which looks at...
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Free Speech 72: What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala
The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle these debates but provokes more questions. We have lost our way, it seems, since people on all sides invoke free speech and then try to silence...
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Book Talk 69: Uncanny E.T.A. Hoffmann with Peter Wortsman
Step into the unsettling world of E.T.A. Hoffmann with translator Peter Wortsman to explore “The Sandman”—a tale that haunted Freud enough to spark his famous psychoanalytic analysis of “The Uncanny,” examining familiar things that unsettle and disturb us for no clear reason. What makes this...
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Book Talk 68: Ham’s Heaven with Ori Gersht
Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Ham’s Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores the friendship of an ape and his trainer to examine what we do with animals in the name of progress. Drawing on careful research and echoing the...
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Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides,...
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Book Talk 66: Political Hope, with Loren Goldman
How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to have hope in dark times, and how political hope differs from naïve optimism, faith in progress, or passive reliance on a hidden logic that will…
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Book Talk 65 Emily Dickinson, with Sharon Cameron
We need Emily Dickinson’s startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson’s poetry, to explore some of Dickinson’s poems in an extra-long podcast. “It’s astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I...
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Book Talk 64 How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty
What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by “experts,” influencers, and gurus. But these one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain. In How to Fall in Love With Questions,...
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Free Speech 71: Ruby Lowe on John Milton’s Definition of Free Speech
British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the...
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Free Speech 70: Michael S. Roth on the Rise of Student Protests, the Fall of Some College Presidents, and Why Liberal Education Matters
The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this podcast, recorded live at the New York Institute of the Humanities, Michael S. Roth, the long-time President of Wesleyan College, explains how he...
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Book Talk 63: Nietzsche Now! with Glenn Wallis
What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis...
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Book Talk 62: Stefanos Geroulanos on "The Invention of Prehistory"
What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to...
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Book Talk 61: Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H.L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"
A century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior is not only not shocking but that we should in fact expect democracies to give rise to un- and even anti-democratic forces. Mencken doubted that…
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Book Talk 60: Cleo McNelly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"
Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical...
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Free Speech 69: Campus Misinformation with Bradford Vivian
State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk...
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Book Talk 59: Reading the Classics with Louis Petrich
Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and…
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Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman
What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to…
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Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)
Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs....
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Book Talk 56: Roosevelt Montás on "Great Books"
Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing...
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Book Talk 55: Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"
Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who…
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Book Talk 54: Anne Fernald on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"
Halfway through Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith mutters to himself: "Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication.” It’s easy to write off his message that communication is vital for human existence. He’s a shell-shocked World War I vet, who, in this moment, hallucinates that…
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Book Talk 53: Paul Edwards on Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark"
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and in the formation of American identity in general. In her short, incisive book, Nobel-prize winner Morrison explores the ways in which canonical authors like...
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Book Talk 52: Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"
When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of expats in post-World War I Europe whose relationships unravel as they travel from Paris to the bullfights in Spain. Unsettling, provocative, and...
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Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde
Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a...
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Book Talk 50: John Waters on James Joyce's "Dubliners"
James Joyce’s 1914 collection of fifteen short stories, Dubliners, is righty considered one of the greatest literary achievements of Western modernity. But what is so original about these stories that begin with childhood, cover adolescence and adult choices, and conclude with a deeply moving...
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Book Talk 49: “The Good Life” with Dora Zhang
“The good life” and “the American Dream “remain powerful animating principles in popular culture, politics, and also our individual psyches. I spoke with Professor Dora Zhang at the University of California at Berkeley who teaches a course on “the good life,” using mostly literary rather than...
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Book Talk 48: Charlie Louth on Rainer Maria Rilke
Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such preternatural attraction for now several generations of readers. The early 20th century German-language poet captured the experience of European...
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Book Talk 47: Wendy Lee on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"
Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice delights, charms and entrances reader since its anonymous publication in 1813. The Bennett sisters need to marry rich, for otherwise they'll fall into poverty and social disgrace. I talked with one of the great Austen experts of our time, Professor Wendy…
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Book Talk 46: Marlene Daut on the Haitian Revolution in Literature
To learn more about the Haitian Revolution in fiction, I spoke with Professor Marlene Daut specialized in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in...
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Book Talk 45: Paul Mendes-Flohr on Martin Buber's "I and Thou"
Today we talk a lot about a need for genuine dialogue, and for conversations across partisan divides and differences. What is a true, authentic, and meaningful conversation? Martin Buber's landmark 1923 book, I and Thou, examines and also proposes how genuine dialogue can happen. The short book...
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Book Talk 44: Samantha Hill on Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt's 1967 essay on "Truth and Politics" centers on the uneasy relation between truth-telling and politics. Lying has always been part of politics, Arendt says, but something shifts with the wholesale attack on our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and make-believe....
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Book Talk 43: Mark Wunderlich on Rainer Maria Rilke
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the order of angels?" This angsty cry opens poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies -- one of the greatest poetic masterpieces of all time that grounds us, modern beings, in a disenchanted, mechanized, and godless world. Is there a meaning to our lives...
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Book Talk 42: Rafael Walker on Kate Chopin's "The Awakening"
Kate Chopin's absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who questions her life choices, and seeks something else. What does she want? I spoke with Professor Rafael Walker, who has written and thought deeply about Chopin's writings, to…
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Great Books 41: John Collins on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"
The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels ever written and a masterpiece of American fiction. Midwesterner Nick Carraway spends a summer on Long Island where he is lured into the ultra-glamorous parties and social circle of his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. It is a tale of obsessive...
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Great Books 40: Mary Chapman on Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"
The first Asian American writer to publish stories in the US, Sui Sin Far could have “passed” for a white woman but during a time of intense Sinophobia, aligned herself with Chinese Americans. I spoke with one of the great experts on Sui Sin Far, Professor Mary Chapman, at the University of…
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Great Books 39: Robert Dale Parker on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, the first known Indian poet, and the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language. A poet who wrote in at least two languages, navigated several cultures and…
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Great Books 38: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams, James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, relates the emotionally gripping tale of a mixed-race piano prodigy who...
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Great Books 37: J. Gerald Kennedy on Edgar Allan Poe
To understand Poe, inventor of the detective story, tales of terror, and progenitor to Hitchcock, Stephen King and much of Netflix's programing, I spoke with J. Gerald Kennedy who's written award-winning books on Poe in American culture. I asked Professor Kennedy about his favorite stories and…
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Great Books 36: Doon Arbus's "The Caretaker"
Something different today: I was lucky to speak with writer Doon Arbus about her debut novel, The Caretaker, published September 2020 by New Directions books. It's a spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher's house museum filled with his collection of objects…
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Great Books 35: Susan Weisser on Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the great love stories of all time, but it's also the story of a woman who speaks her truth even when this means risking everything she wants. Jane, an orphan raised in a cruel family and struggling to survive in a world where poor women have few...
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Great Books 34: Vivek Chibber on Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto"
Marx has never left us. In our era of populism, political polarization, and the pandemic, concerns central to Marx such as economic inequality, the consolidation of power in the hands of the few, and the fate of workers are urgently discussed. How should we think about Marx today? I spoke with...
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Great Books 33: Nicholas Frankel on Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was the novel that shocked, challenged, and inspired Victorian England with its tale of a beautiful young man who trades his soul, captured in a portrait, for eternal youth. I spoke with Professor Nicholas Frankel of Virginia Commonwealth University, whose...
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Great Books 32: Brenda Wineapple on Emily Dickinson--Isolation and Intervention
I spoke with Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat, about Dickinson's remarkable assuredness, her confidence, and her decision to spend much of her life secluded in her father's home in Amherst, Massachusetts. In this state of being on her own, Dickinson had intense, passionate and…
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Great Books 31: Ann Stoler on Truth and Knowledge for Michel Foucault
Is "truth" a historical construct? Michel Foucault's work investigates this and other concepts. I spoke with Ann Stoler of NYC's New School for Social Research about Foucault to understand his investigations. How can we think of "truth" as something historically and culturally specific, rather…
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Great Books 30: Carolin Weber on Albert Camus's "The Plague"
Novel laureate Albert Camus's 1947 novel The Plague is about the human response to extreme circumstances. For a long time the book was read as an allegory of people resisting fascism, but the plague never quite stays only a metaphor. I spoke with Caroline Weber, Professor of French and…
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Great Books 29: Jenny Davidson on Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year"
Why read books in dark times? Daniel Defoe, known to most as the author of Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, about the plague that decimated London's population in 1665. The gripping account is presented as a survivor's story who confronts his world being ravaged by...
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Great Books 28: Béatrice Longuenesse on Kant's "What is Enlightenment?"
Immanuel Kant's short 1784 essay, "What is Enlightenment?" clearly lays out what the Age of Reason means: that we are encouraged to think for ourselves to claim our freedom. I spoke with one of the great experts on Kant's philosophy, Professor Béatrice Longuenesse of NYU and the author of Kant…
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Free Speech 68: Henry Reichman--Can Professors Get Fired for a Tweet?
Should professors be held accountable for speech they make off-campus, on-line, and apart from their professional role in the university? Does academic freedom mean freedom of speech and what are the differences? I spoke with Professor Henry Reichman, who has served as Vice President of the...
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Great Books 26: Vivian Liska on Franz Kafka (not the way you know him)
The Kafka most known today is a writer of existential despair, a futile search for meaning, and the 20th century's nightmare of humans trapped in inhuman bureaucracies or situations of terror. Liska explains how Kafka's short parables and prose conundrums offer a way out of the dilemmas of modern...
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Affirmative Action: Margaret Chin on Affirmative Action After Harvard's Win
A recent legal case about affirmative action was decided in favor of Harvard University's holistic admission practices. Is the fight over affirmative action over now? Professor Chin, at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, explains what the legal ruling in favor of Harvard University means for higher...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Think About It have?
Think About It currently has 144 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Think About It about?
Think About It engages today's leading thinkers in conversations about powerful ideas and how language can change the world.
How often does Think About It release new episodes?
Think About It publishes regularly with 144 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Think About It on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Think About It?
Think About It is created and hosted by Ulrich C. Baer.
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