The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think about what I read, what I write, and what I experience in life. It’s always about these three words. And you cannot separate them in a very clear way.”  This week, in a return of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and essayist Yiyun Li, author most recently of Things in Nature Merely Grow, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, about “The Try-Works,” chapter 96 of Melville’s novel, in which Ishmael teaches readers how to render whale blubber, falls asleep at the Pequod’s jawbone tiller, and, upon awakening, flies like a “Catskill eagle” into and out of the “blackest gorges” of the soul. The chapter’s closing paragraph is, to Li’s mind, possibly “the most gorgeous paragraph written.”  Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” and Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The oarfish is not only extremely long—I think they can be 20 feet long—but they have a very narrow, undulating body. They’re silvery, but they have a red crest all along their back. It really looks exactly like the sea monsters in ancient Greek vase paintings,” says Adrienne Mayor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It looks like an oarfish guarding the Golden Fleece. They live in very deep water, and they have fragile bodies. And if there’s an earthquake under the ocean, they’re damaged and they wash up on shore—that’s the only time most people see an oarfish, and it would look like a stereotypical dragon.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with folklorist, classicist, and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor about her new book, Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore. In 53 alphabetically arranged essays about “legends of the earth,” or “geomyths,” Mayor’s compendium draws upon oral traditions from all over the world and upon “historical and scientific discoveries that shed light on the remarkable phenomena featured in the legendary stories”—phenomena such as tsunamis, meteor impacts, lethal lakes, perpetual fires, fish that rain from the sky, and sand dunes that sing. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.”  This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The leviathan is both positive and negative,” says Philip Hoare on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The image is almost yin and yang: there is the behemoth, kind of a hippopotamus-elephant-rhinoceros, and the leviathan, which is a sea serpent, but has elements of a sperm whale skeleton that Blake had actually seen. So there is this struggle for good and evil. He acknowledged that you have to have heaven to balance hell and vice versa. But it seems the balance has been interrupted by the sea and he is too close to the power of the ocean.”  In this week’s two-part episode, Donovan Hohn speaks with Philip Hoare, author, most recently, of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Their conversation, like the book, is a séance that channels many ghosts—the ghosts of writers such as John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde; the ghosts of artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, Derek Jarman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andy Warhol, and Paul Nash; the ghosts of a great many historical and cultural figures. David Bowie and John Waters both make memorable appearances. But the conversation’s presiding spirit is artist, printmaker, poet, and proto-punk prophet of freedom William Blake. Part two of the episode resumes our intermittent and ongoing series on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the history of the sea. While considering Blake’s influence on Melville, Hohn and Hoare linger over chapter 55, “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”  Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“An 1833 review of the only book of poetry Hartley Coleridge published in his lifetime praised the verse for embodying ‘no trivial inheritance of his father's genius,’ but also observed, ‘It is an old saying that the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.’ I have long been interested in what makes some oaklings thrive and others wither, because, in a minor way, I’m an oakling myself. My father was a critic and an essayist. My mother was a war correspondent. The upside of this print-smudged parentage was that I was raised in a home with seven thousand books, plenty of literary conversation, and empirical evidence that writing was something you could actually do for a living." This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist Anne Fadiman about the history of the essay since Montaigne and the art of making essays out of history; about teaching essay-writing to college students; and about what Virginia Woolf called “the Common Reader.” The conversation addresses the title essay—about a pet frog named Bunky—of Fadiman’s new collection, Frog and Other Essays, but Hohn and Fadiman spend the most time with two other essays—one that originally appeared in the Family issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, on poet and essayist Hartley Coleridge, who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, Samuel Taylor, and one first published in the Harvard Review, about the South Polar Times, a magazine whose editors, contributors, and original readers were all members of the polar expeditions led by Robert Falcon Scott.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Because you’re going deeper into the painting.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist and critic Morgan Meis, author of a trilogy of books about the history of art, civilization, war, and much else. In The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Meis investigates a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. In The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy (2022), he turns to a masterpiece Franz Marc painted in 1913, three years before his death during the Battle of Verdun. And in The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood (2025), Meis explores Joan Mitchell’s The Grand Valley, a series of twenty-one paintings that Mitchell made between 1983 and 1984. Like the books, the conversation spirals outward into history and inward into the paintings under examination, all the while putting these three artists into conversation with other artists, writers, and philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Degas, Klee, and Monet, among others.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going every hour,” says Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “But, basically, a free port is an island, a cordoned-off piece of land, where the rules are not the same as outside. In economics and history, we sometimes talk about onshore and offshore. Onshore and offshore don't really refer to shores or land. They just refer to legal regimes. A free port will be offshore, and if you walk ten feet through a gate, you’re back onshore. It’s fiction. It’s a legal construct.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. Their conversation charts and explores the offshore archipelago of freeports, detention facilities, and other extraterritorial zones with which over the past few centuries—on land, on sea, in space, on islands encircled by water and islands encircled by fences, within the borders of nation states and beyond them—we’ve stitched together our global economy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all,” says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “There are three or four different factions, each with their own military wing, competing for control of Syracuse. Plato is watching all this from Athens in what must have been a state of horror, because he understands he was partly to blame, or at least that some people were blaming him for what was taking place. And the Seventh Letter—by far the longest, most detailed, the richest source of evidence for my story—is extremely defensive in an effort to extricate Plato from this morass.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with James Romm, historian and classicist, about his new book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece. The conversation follows Plato on three journeys the philosopher made to Syracuse, the Greek city on the island of Sicily. There, during the reign of Dionysius I and then again during the reign of Dionysius II, Plato attempted to put philosophy into practice. Although his efforts to turn tyrants into philosopher kings ultimately failed, although Syracuse fell catastrophically into political terror and civil war, the history of Plato’s involvement in the city’s politics can, Romm argues, complicate and deepen our understanding of The Republic. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “For instance, giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and other human beings, properly understood, that’s human attention. It also involves daydreaming and taking care of a child and burying your dead—those are attentional activities. It’s been hard for us to keep track of that fact about ourselves as we have increasingly asked ourselves to be more and more seamlessly integrated into these continuous, twenty-four seven data flows and communication entertainment networks. We worry about machinic attention—that it is inextricable from the way we feel bad; that there are authentic pandemics of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, despair; and that our politics is weirdly fractious and dysfunctional.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with D. Graham Burnett, historian of science, and Alyssa Loh, writer and filmmaker, about a new book, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, collectively authored by Burnett, Loh, and other members of the Friends of Attention (among them Peter Schmidt, program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention). The Friends of Attention are a coalition of artists, writers, and scholars committed to liberating human attention from the extractive technologies of the “attention economy.” Hohn, Burnett, and Loh discuss the history of, and possible remedies to, the attentional crisis that Attensity! diagnoses and describes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.” In this encore episode from 2022, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Handel gets to Dublin and he’s trying to put together musicians, he’s looking for singers and lo and behold, there is Susannah Cibber who has turned up in Dublin to try to restart her career at exactly the time that Handel is there,” says Charles King in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Handel enlists Cibber in the cast, but she doesn’t read music. Anything she sings has to be plunked out on the harpsichord for her. The place of the premiere is at a charitable event; it’s going to support the indigent and folks in the hospital, the jail—it is not in a cathedral. The premier of Messiah is not even in a church but in a music hall and this new music hall is also trying to develop its own reputation. There were some well-established, very famous theaters in Dublin. This is not it. This is an up-and-comer but they’ve booked Handel for this new piece of music that he’s going to premiere.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Charles King about his new book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. King recounts the history—both sacred and profane, but mostly profane—of the composer’s most famous oratorio, tracing its humble origins and eventual fame to series of unlikely collaborations. Among Handel’s collaborator’s: King George I, King George II, the actor Susannah Cibber, choristers from the church run by Jonathan Swift, and Charles Jennens, the depressive heir to an iron fortune who conceived of the Messiah and compiled the devotional libretto that Handel set to music influenced by Italian opera. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, about Greenblatt’s new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, a history of the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, cobbler’s son turned gentleman-scholar, turned spy in Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, turned playwright and poet who collaborated with Shakespeare. In Greenblatt’s telling, Marlowe’s career, cut violently and mysteriously short, is almost as improbable and tragic as that of his most famous creation, Doctor Faustus. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.” In an extended, three-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this episode of The World in Time considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Novelist and essayist Alexander Chee joins Donovan Hohn to talk about chapter four, “The Counterpane,” in which Queequeg and Ishmael, having just met, spend the night together. Melville scholar and historian Aaron Sachs closely reads the ideological, philosophical, political, and ecological implications of chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” wherein we find Ishmael and Queequeg tethered to each other by a hemp line, Ishmael aboard the Pequod, Queequeg balancing perilously atop the carcass of a slaughtered whale. Finally, novelist Caleb Crain goes swimming around in the Platonic mysteries of chapter 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Both Chee and Crain propose that the entire novel, dedicated to Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Religion gives people certainty and it gives people solace,” says Brenda Wineapple in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And according to William Jennings Bryan, it gives you a moral center, too, which would make impossible the cruelties of, say, World War One, which horrified him. But that kind of intolerable meaninglessness is something Clarence Darrow, too, feels so strongly. He said, and I’m paraphrasing: everybody needs their dope, whatever it is, whether it’s the church or whether it’s drugs or whether it’s sex. He’s open-minded about that. He's basically saying life is hard. Life is very hard. There are a lot of things we don’t understand. Whatever makes you feel better. One of the poignancies of Darrow’s life is that it was hard for him to feel better. He wanted people to feel better. There was so much cruelty in the world. I wonder if, in his heart of hearts, Bryan also couldn’t stand that meaninglessness.”   This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, about her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, which narrates and excavates the history of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. That case, tried and adjudicated in 1925, was, in Wineapple’s estimation, the “trial of the century,” pitting Clarence Darrow, the renowned labor lawyer, against William Jennings Bryan, the “boy orator” and three-time Democratic presidential nominee. As Wineapple’s book reveals, many of the conflicts that animated the courtroom drama in Dayton, Tennessee—between democratic majority rule and academic freedom, between the pursuit of scientific truth and the consolations of faith—are with us still, a century after the verdict in the Scopes trial was delivered. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in,” says Elizabeth Kolbert in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “We are extremely tied up as humans for whatever reason. We have obviously evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place. We are surrounded by species that all have long and rich evolutionary histories. They also have extraordinary talents that we can only appreciate by actually learning something about them. That parasitic wasp—it’s just another sort of pesky wasp or whatever. But if you delve into its life cycle, you find that every species has its own form of genius.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Elizabeth Kolbert—New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction—about her new book, Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World, which introduces us to a bestiary of creatures and to a gallery of natural scientists, and transports us to points remote, from the Arctic to New Zealand. Kolbert shares the stories and the thinking behind the field trips that the book collects, dwelling at length on “Talk to Me,” her 2023 New Yorker piece for which she joined the cetologists using machine learning to decipher—or so they hope—the communications of whales. The episode concludes with Kolbert’s firsthand account of a sperm whale’s birth, a scene that calls to mind Melville’s own visit to a whale nursery in “The Grand Armada,” chapter 87 of Moby Dick. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab,” says novelist and critic Charles Baxter in this episode of The World in Time. “Like Ahab, he is speaking from a great height. He begins his sermon by issuing orders. He tells all the congregants to sit down. And, you know, they have to listen to him. What other choice do they have? But what is important to me in ‘The Sermon’ is that he—how can I put this? He is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. And Ahab is the person who wants you to give up any sense of proportionality. It’s almost impossible to put things into perspective with Ahab. Father Mapple kind of supplies a warning and a possible lens for a reading of the entire novel. What Mapple is saying in his sermon, starting from the Book of Jonah, is that we have to learn humility. It is no use to flee from God. God will find us. And the last paragraph of ‘The Sermon’ is one of the most beautiful things, I think, that Melville ever wrote.” Charles Baxter, author most recently of Blood Test: A Comedy and Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature, visits The World in Time to talk with Donovan Hohn about the politics and the mysteries of charisma in Moby-Dick. The conversation dwells on Chapter 9: “The Sermon,” in which Father Mapple, from his cockpit of a pulpit, pilots a congregation of New Bedford whalers through the theological storms of the Book of Jonah. Baxter and Hohn consider whether the novel affirms what Father Mapple preaches. They contrast his humble leadership with Captain Ahab’s narcissistic yet magnetic charisma. And they consider what both Ahab and a showman like P.T. Barnum might reveal about the charismatic confidence men who command our attention and our country today. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yoran Cazac put it, they were ‘eating the same substance,’ and they happened to be of different nationalities and races and even sexualities. I appreciate that they had these complicated relationships where they saw each other across difference for who they were and what they shared. It’s what sustained Baldwin. It’s what enabled him to write. It’s what he wrote about.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am a part or particle of God.’ Now, I mean, that is lofty stuff, and it can edge over into silliness. In a way, if you picture it, it starts to be silly and that is why Christopher Cranch’s cartoon is hilarious, because a literalization of it is kind of ridiculous, in a way. Part of the thing I love about Emerson is that he wasn’t afraid to seem silly in his eagerness to render the experience. What he's talking about—if you get away from the actual image of an eyeball with a top hat on—is a kind of ecstatic merger with the universe, where the walls drop, the boundaries drop, the currents of the universe move through you. If you look at it that way, he’s talking about a classic ecstatic experience.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s sense of self was, Marcus says, “kaleidoscopic,” and so is this episode, presenting not one Emerson but many: Emerson the public intellectual who cherished the privacy of his study, Emerson the lapsed minister who left the church but continued to preach on the lyceum circuit, Emerson the initially reluctant but eventually ardent abolitionist, Emerson the Swedenborgian mystic, Emerson the loner who deeply loved his friends Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, Emerson the son estranged from his father, Emerson the father undone by grief for his dead son, and, finally, Emerson the volunteer firefighter. Marcus and Hohn also go searching for Emersonian influences in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby Dick. But they spend most of the conversation with the essayist from Concord, that artisan of indelible sentences, whom Melville once compared to a great philosophical whale who could dive “five miles or more,” sounding the depths. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compelling, it seems to me, because it does have ideas about moral choices, and it does have ideas about belonging that seem as important today as they were then. One of the great things that strikes me with the great parts of the Anglo-Saxon opus is how modern it feels—or rather, to put it a different way, how timeless the cares and concerns and worries of human beings can be. Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way, as they did this sailor.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with poet Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the world from which this mysterious tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem emerged, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. Into the conversation the episode weaves audio samples from different translations and different recordings, including one made by Lewis Lapham, another by Ezra Pound, and a third by Matthew Hollis himself. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the best of times,’ and people would get it backwards. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Because it establishes this kind of—you know, so much of the book is about authority. About authority, and the lack of authority, and what authority is, and who has it, and what you do with it. And that sentence is just pure authority. Pure narrative authority. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Bingo. It’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to call you Ishmael.’” This week on the podcast, the Quarterly’s editor-at-large Francine Prose returns for an in-depth conversation with Donovan Hohn about Moby Dick’s first chapter, “Loomings.” They consider the meanings of the verb to loom, whether Ishmael is likeable or funny, whether the American sermon influenced Melville’s oratorical prose, why the antebellum religious press condemned the novel, and what the best medicine might be for “the universal thump.” Earlier episodes in this series: Episode 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn and Episode 8 with Wyatt Mason. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people as long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries to get inside your head, and make you, and make everyone, believe. And it has secret police, and snitches, and surveillance. And it tries to fully organize society. It’s the most organized and successful attack on freedom that one can imagine. And so for Arendt, you can’t just be an individual and sit in jail and be free if you’re going to protect yourselves from the dangers of totalitarianism and the end of constitutional, free government, which is what she’s worried about. You need to act politically, and you need to act politically with a certain amount of power.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with Roger Berkowitz, writer, scholar, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They discuss the life and work of Hannah Arendt and two essays that share a name, “Civil Disobedience”—one by Arendt, the other by Thoreau, both recently collected in a volume that Berkowitz edited and introduced. Their conversation touches broadly on the works of the two writers, on their differences and disagreements, on the political tumults that inspired their famous essays, and on the lessons to be learned from them in the present day. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale,” writer Wyatt Mason says in this episode of The World in Time. “It’s astonishing as you’re reading through. It’s proof of two kinds of life. It’s proof of the life of the creature itself. But it’s also proof of the life of the mind and the attention that we pay—meaning, we readers and we writers pay—through time to this creature, which is very different from the elephant because most of us never see one in our lifetimes. If we’re fortunate, we might, but for the most part, no. So they reside or they live in texts.” With this episode, the second in an intermittent series on the literature, history, and science of the sea, The World in Time launches onto the waters of Moby Dick. The episode begins with excerpts from a pair of conversations Lewis Lapham recorded during his final years as host. First, Lapham speaks with Richard J. King about his 2019 book, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. In the second excerpted interview, recorded in 2022, Lapham talks with Aaron Sachs about Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. The episode concludes with a new conversation. Wyatt Mason and Donovan Hohn talk about the first time they read Moby Dick, about teaching Melville’s novel to incarcerated students enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative, and then, like a pair of sub-sub-librarians, they swim through two curious documents, “Etymologies” and “Extracts,” that precede the famous first sentence of Melville’s tragic Leviathan American novel. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“In a famous episode, he says his name is Nobody, which in a way is obviously a lie,” says writer, scholar, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn in this episode of The World in Time. “But in another way is sort of true because he has become a nobody, right? And another way to describe the sort of narrative arc of The Odyssey is: he has to go from being a nobody and reclaim his identity and be a somebody again. So, the question of the nature of identity—you know, he’s been changed by twenty years of aging, by trauma, by terrible suffering, and yet when he gets home, he has to ‘prove,’ quote-unquote, that he is the same person who left. And that, I think, raises one of the most fascinating questions of the epic—and this speaks to something we know about from our own lives—which is: is there a part of you that remains the same despite the changes that we undergo in life? And that’s the sort of paradox, I think, that’s at the center of the poem. Everybody changes in twenty years, and yet you feel the same in many ways. The Odyssey delves into these very profound questions.” This week’s episode of The World in Time is the first in a series of episodes about The Sea (Summer 2013). Donovan Hohn speaks with Daniel Mendelsohn about his new translation of The Odyssey, traveling back to antiquity in search of the origins of the Homeric epic. Then, in archival audio from 2013, editorial board member Aidan Flax-Clark interviews Lewis H. Lapham about his childhood reading of Moby-Dick, about Lapham’s greenhorn voyages, and about a doomed shipwreck hunt in the early 1960s that Lapham wrote about for The Saturday Evening Post. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, and you have people, at least going back to the Paleolithic, consuming these. But you don’t have the system of commodities that makes drugs a particularly modern phenomenon. And what happens as they are commodified—which you could also describe in the same way as saying what happens as they are transformed into drugs, as ayahuasca, for example, is transformed into a drug—is that they’re pulled out of the cultural and ritual context in which they had once made sense, and turned into intoxicants, turned into substances, the purpose of which is to remove you from the burdens of your life.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn revisits the topics of Intoxication (Winter 2012) and Disaster (Spring 2016), speaking first with Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of the forthcoming book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, about the history of drugs and the history of California; about trips, long and strange, good and bad; and about Smith-Ruiu’s experiments—in philosophy and literary nonfiction as well as in psychopharmacology. Later in the episode, Hohn speaks with poet Rachel Richardson about California on fire; about the ways technology gives us a distorted, fishbowl view of disasters, natural and otherwise; about the documentary poetics of C.D. Wright; and about the classical Greek poetic form of the cento, two contemporary examples of which Richardson shares from her new collection, Smother. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be able to develop a reputation as a real writer. And that’s something he really wants, too. And arguably, his breakthrough—which I argued that he achieves in the West first—is coming to recognize that those two aren’t mutually exclusive, that that’s a false choice, that he can actually do both, and do both quite well, and that what he thought was a weakness could be a strength.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode all about Mark Twain. First, he speaks with Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, about how Twain’s time in the far West shaped his indelible literary voice and helped give birth to stand-up comedy. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan about why Twain appears to be undergoing a cultural revival, and about how tracking Twain’s travels in newly-digitized archives led to Sullivan’s discovery of a lost Twain eulogy—and its lost writer, Adele Amelia Gleason. Finally, to conclude the episode, Sullivan shares with World in Time listeners yet another long lost passage, this one written by Twain himself, which Sullivan recovered while searching through a database of digitized Indiana newspapers. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“They would take you around, introduce you to all of their contacts, translate for you, and help you put together the story,” says scholar-journalist Kira Brunner Don in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And I often felt like, you pay them, of course, a day rate, but there was this understanding that real news was made by American journalists who flew in and told you what was what. All of us were depending on journalists from the country, or writers from the country, who knew it far better than we did and really had the context and the sensibility. But there was this unspoken rule that they’ll be biased. I really felt like I wanted to create something that instead focused on the actual voices of the people who live in the countries we’re covering.” This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode. First, he speaks with Kira Brunner Don, former executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, about the making of our first issue, States of War, from Winter 2008, and about the magazine Brunner Don edits now, Stranger’s Guide. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with Nathan Brown, translator of Verso’s new dual-language edition of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, about the history of Baudelaire’s magnum opus. Brown gives us a guided tour of “Recueillement,” the Baudelaire poem read at Lewis Lapham’s memorial service, which Brown has translated anew for Lapham’s Quarterly, under the title “Introspection.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the city had given it to artists and designers and said, You can live there, don’t burn it down. And so they carved out these incredibly beautiful spaces for themselves. But this was before the tech revolution, when the Mission was still kind of wild and free, and it wasn’t all the glass cubes and people in tech. It was a great city to live in then. There was a kind of freedom there. Certainly compared to what I’d come from. My good fortune was that I wasn’t around a lot of hippies giving acid to two-year-olds. The book takes place during the Vietnam War. We went out and protested McNamara. My husband was the one who scaled the Pentagon, the walls of the Pentagon. We were very idealistic. Maybe unrealistically idealistic, but hey, I’ll take it.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, author of 1974: A Personal History, about the San Francisco she remembers from her youth, about her relationship with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Tony Russo, about the final defeat of 1960s counterculture, and about the eerie echoes of Prose’s favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Lewis was always engaging with some important piece of literature from the past,” says historian and classicist Emily Allen-Hornblower in this episode of The World in Time, edited from audio recorded at the memorial service held for Lewis H. Lapham in September 2024. “You can be chatting about the insanity of the current political landscape and quickly things would shift to how history repeats itself, how humanity simply does not learn. And Thucydides or Cicero would rear their heads. To quote Cicero, ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ Lewis understood that without the past, we lose the ability to think productively or even understand the present. He made himself a warrior for the humanities, putting up a splendid fight on behalf of the arts and letters. ’Til the end.” In this second of two episodes this week, we are joined once again by Lewis, first in the tributes and remembrances of his friends and colleagues and then in his own voice. Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis introduces the proceedings. Former Harper’s Magazine literary editor Ben Metcalf recalls Lapham the mentor. Emily Allen-Hornblower reads from Homer and Baudelaire. Actor Alec Baldwin reads Mark Twain’s essay “At the Funeral.” Actor Christopher Lloyd performs Prospero’s epilogue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Producer and director Sandy Gotham Meehan shares a letter by Flaubert. In audio from our archives, Lewis Lapham reads from “’Round Midnight,” his preamble to Music, the Fall 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I’m an essayist, not a podcaster,” says Lapham’s Quarterly acting editor Donovan Hohn, “but then the same could be said of Lewis, who took the form and the medium of the podcast and did with it what he’d done all of his adulthood: have conversations with people whose voices he wished to hear. Seasoned listeners to The World in Time may rest assured that similar conversations will resume shortly. This episode, my first behind the microphone, won’t be a conversation, but it will be a duet. I’ll be sharing the microphone some with Lewis Lapham.” This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts two episodes devoted to the life, career, and memory of our founding editor, Lewis H. Lapham. In this first episode, Hohn announces the Quarterly’s plans for Summer 2025, shares excerpts from a keynote address Lapham delivered at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011, pays tribute to Lapham the essayist, and gives an account of the months preceding and following Lewis’ death in July 2024. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The Greeks knew that many problems have no solution,” journalist Robert D. Kaplan says on this episode of The World in Time, about his inspiration for writing “The Tragic Mind.” “They knew that leaders and people in their daily lives often face only bad choices. And yet the world at the same time is beautiful. The Greeks could admit a beautiful world and that the world ultimately could not be fixed. In this book, I define tragedy not as the triumph of evil over good, or the common misfortunes of life that we all face, or vile crimes against humanity…Tragedy is about the difficult choices that we all make between one good and another good where, whichever you choose, you will cause suffering.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Robert D. Kaplan, author of “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power,” about his career reporting on wars and revolutions around the world, the myth of American exceptionalism, and what ancient thinkers like Euripides understood about thinking tragically. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Among Shakespeare scholars,” journalist Elizabeth Winkler writes at the beginning of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” “the Shakespeare authorship question—the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name—does not exist; that is, it is not permitted. As a consequence, it has become the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. In literary circles, even the phrase ‘Shakespeare authorship question’ elicits contempt—eye-rolling, name-calling, mudslinging. If you raise it casually in a social setting, someone might chastise you as though you’ve uttered a deeply offensive profanity. Someone else might get up and leave the room. Tears may be shed. A whip may be produced. You will be punished, which is to say, educated. Because it is obscene to suggest that the god of English literature might be a false god.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Elizabeth Winkler, author of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” about the history of the authorship question and the writers and scholars who have clashed over doubting the Bard. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“When you start looking at deeper, more accurate history,” writer Jared Yates Sexton says in this episode of The World in Time, “you start to realize that a lot of what we have learned through conventional history—and this is in public education, best sellers, documentaries, and television shows—a lot of the history that we have gotten is actually mythology. Take a look at the American Revolution. One of the things that you have been taught for all this time is that it was some sort of spontaneous passion of liberty and freedom in which all Americans turned against Great Britain. And, of course, this is not true.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Jared Yates Sexton, author of “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ben Jealous, author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing, about Jealous’ personal history and his career, and how both inform what he makes of our current moment. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I think the mood in 1860 would have a haunting familiarity to people today,” Edward Achorn says at the start of this episode of The World in Time, discussing the setting of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” “The politics in the country seemed to have broken down. People were talking at each other. They were no longer listening to each other. They were increasingly using violence or looking toward violence as a way to settle their differences. So the whole political system was breaking down…There was a long, protracted fight over the selection of a House speaker, which is normally a pretty much rote action. There was a view…that Washington had become this festering swamp full of elites who didn’t have any sort of connection with common people in America.” And it was in this moment that Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown figure, became a presidential candidate. This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ed Achorn, author of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“If there was one thing that I would want people to take away from American Midnight,” Adam Hochschild says on this episode of The World in Time, “it’s the idea that democracy, despite all the different checks and balances and the separation of powers and whatnot written into our Constitution more than two hundred years ago, is fragile. It can easily be shattered and broken. It can easily be threatened.” And during the stretch of time covered in his latest book, which spans World War I and takes place on the American home front, “I really think a lot of the basic democratic freedoms that we take for granted in this country we lost during that period.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, about civil liberties, strikes, and Emma Goldman, among other subjects. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“For most of my adult life, I have been trying to understand why we are who we are,” Andrea Wulf writes at the start of “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.” “This is the reason why I write history books. In my previous books, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature in order to understand why we’ve destroyed so much of our magnificent blue planet. But I also realize that it is not enough to look at the connections between us and nature. The first step is to look at us as individuals—when did we begin to be as selfish as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did this—us, you, me, or our collective behavior—all come from? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrea Wulf, author of “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self,” and takes us to Jena to begin answering these questions by introducing us to a few German Romantics, including Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Schiller. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“We’re at a moment now,” Kermit Roosevelt III says of our national mythology on this episode of The World in Time, “where the standard story isn’t working for us anymore. And I think in part it’s not working for us because it actually teaches us bad lessons. It teaches us that violent revolution against the national government, treason against the national government, is American patriotism, which I think is a bad lesson. But it’s also inaccurate in a lot of ways. And it requires us to identify with people like Thomas Jefferson, which, frankly, I find pretty difficult and I think a lot of people find difficult…And there’s a struggle about how to deal with that because people want a story that’s accurate, that’s honest, that doesn’t downplay bad things that have been done in the past, which our standard story does a lot. But they also want a story that allows us to see an America that we believe in, that we can love, that we can feel patriotic attachment to. And that’s what I’m trying to offer.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Kermit Roosevelt III, author of “The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“These are indeed dark times,” Aaron Sachs, author of Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, says at the start of this episode of The World in Time. “And as a historian, I’ve been wondering my whole professional life how these dark times compare to other dark times…I feel like it’s my job as a historian to to really investigate the claim that there’s no precedent for what we’re going through, because that idea is really disheartening in a lot of ways.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Aaron Sachs, author of “Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times,” about dark times and white whales. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Tocqueville’s deepest belief,” historian Olivier Zunz writes at the beginning of “The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville,” “was that democracy is a powerful, yet demanding, political form. What makes Tocqueville’s work still relevant is that he defined democracy as an act of will on the part of every citizen—a project constantly in need of revitalization and of the strength provided by stable institutions. Democracy can never be taken for granted. Once the aristocratic chain connecting all parts of society is broken, democracy’s need for vigilance, redefinition, and reinforcement is constant if it is to ensure the common good on which it must, in the end, depend.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Olivier Zunz, author of “The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“There have been a number of biographies of Casanova, but the time is overdue for a biography of a different kind,” writes Leo Damrosch at the start of “Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova.” “He was the first to tell his own story, in a massive autobiography entitled “Histoire de Ma Vie”…The word histoire can mean ‘story’ as well as ‘history,’ and a story it certainly is. Previous biographers have tended to retell it as he told it, adopting his own point of view with only occasional queries. Some have betrayed a vicarious investment in his tales of seduction, just as many readers clearly have; it’s interesting that men with great political power, such as Winston Churchill and François Mitterrand, have been especially warm admirers of Casanova. In fiction such a character might be a charming rogue, but in real life Casanova’s behavior was often far from charming, and this is evident even when all we have to go on is his own narrative.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Leo Damrosch, author of “Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

During the American Revolution—and in all the years since—many believed that “privateering was a sideshow in the war,” writes Eric Jay Dolin in “Rebels at Sea.” “Privateering has long been given short shrift in general histories of the conflict, where privateers are treated as a minor theme if they are mentioned at all. The coverage in maritime and naval histories of the Revolution is not much better, with privateering often overshadowed by the exploits of the Continental navy.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Eric Jay Dolin, author of “Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution,” making the case that while “privateering was not the single, decisive factor in beating the British—there was no one cause—it was extremely important nonetheless.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“When Herodotus composed his great work,” Richard Cohen writes at the start of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, “people named it The Histories, but scholars have pointed out that the word means more accurately ‘inquiries’ or ‘researches.’ Calling it The Histories dilutes its originality. I want to make a larger claim about those who have shaped the way we view our past—actually, who have given us our past. I believe that the wandering Greek’s investigations brought into play, 2,500 years ago, a special kind of inquiry—one that encompasses geography, ethnography, philology, genealogy, sociology, biography, anthropology, psychology, imaginative re-creation (as in the arts), and many other kinds of knowledge, too. The person who exhibits this wide-ranging curiosity should rejoice in the title: historian.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Cohen, author of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, about some of the historians discussed in his book, as well as the many mediums they relied on to shape their narratives. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“In 1739 the members of Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences met to determine the subject of the 1741 prize competition,” historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran write at the beginning of “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.” “As was customarily the case, the topic they chose was constructed in the form of a question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’ According to the longer description of the contest that later appeared in the Journal des savants, the academy’s members were interested in receiving a winning essay that would solve the riddle of the African variety’s distinctive physical traits. But what really preoccupied these men were three larger (and unspoken) questions. The first two were straightforward: Who is Black? And why? The third question was more far-reaching: What did being Black signify? Never before had the Bordeaux Academy, or any scientific academy for that matter, challenged Europe’s savants to explain the origins and, implicitly, the worth of a particular type of human being.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrew S. Curran, co-editor of “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race,” about the ramifications of this 1741 contest and the racist answers to these questions offered by Montesquieu; Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon; and other philosophers based in one of France’s wealthy slave-trading ports. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Davos Man’s domination of the gains of globalization,” journalist Peter S. Goodman writes in “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World,” “is how the United States found itself led by a patently unqualified casino developer as it grappled with a public health emergency that killed more Americans than those who died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. Davos Man’s marauding explains why the United Kingdom was still consumed with Brexit—an elaborate act of self-harm—at the same time that it was failing to get a handle on the pandemic. It explains how France became roiled by a ferocious protest movement, and how even Sweden, a supposed bastion of social democracy, now seethes with anti-immigrant hate. This is not how history was supposed to unfold.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Peter S. Goodman, author of Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, about that history, starting with the robber barons of the Gilded Age, stopping by the Reagan era, and ending with 2022. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“A world without insects would be a particularly horrifying, grim place,” environmental journalist Oliver Milman tells us on the latest episode of The World in Time, “and certainly not a place we would want to live in—and indeed it wouldn’t be a place we would be able to live in.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Oliver Milman, author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World,” about the many types of food that we would no longer be able to enjoy without bugs and whether we should be relieved by the existence of robot bees. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“In my sophomore year of high school, I came upon a remarkable book in a garbage pile next to the house where we rented an apartment in Queens,” scholar Roosevelt Montás writes at the beginning of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” “It was the second volume of the pretentiously bound Harvard Classics series, and it contained a set of dialogues by Plato that record the last days of Socrates’ life. This first encounter with Socrates was a fortuitous as it was decisive. There is probably no better introduction to the life of the mind than Socrates’ defense of his philosophic activity in these dialogues.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Roosevelt Montás, author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” about what came after Montás read Plato for the first time and why he considers access to a liberal education so vital. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Existing biographies of Thomas Jefferson,” the historian Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy writes in The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, treat the retired president’s singular founding of a university “as merely an epilogue, while institutional histories give little consideration to the biographical context…Beginning at the age of seventy-three—having lived already far beyond the average life expectancy of the period—he spent the last decade of his life preoccupied with the quest to establish the University of Virginia. He wrote out the minutes of the Board of Visitors, estimated the number of bricks required for each building, and on his last visit to the university even unpacked boxes of books intended for the library. Despite ill health and excruciating pain in his right hand, he produced architectural drawings and drafted legislation. Ignoring his impending bankruptcy, he donated his own money to begin a fundraising campaign and hosted dinners for members of the university community. Because the university was so much of his making, its history is inseparable from Thomas Jefferson’s life.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, author of The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University about Jefferson’s influence on public education and how to balance this legacy with his place in historical memory as an enslaver. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In order to understand the American Revolution, historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, “we must be capable of thinking paradoxically. The American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution. Which means it succeeded because it failed.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, about the words, paradoxes, and local influences that powered the American Revolution. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.