Shows
Recall This Book157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.”
Comedy has provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them "collective repertoires") for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.John's interest in Menippean satire within science fiction leads him to ask...
2025-10-0246 minRecall This Book151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP)Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up--we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why?
To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhil...
2025-06-0530 minRecall This Book150* Steve McCauley on Barbara Pym: The Comic Novel Explored and Adored (JP)Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve--his latest is You Only Call When You're in Trouble, but John still holds a candle for his 1987 debut, Object of My Affection, made into a charming Jennifer Aniston Paul Rudd movie. And there is no comic novelist Steve loves better than Barbara Pym, a mid-century British comic genius who found herself forgotten and unpublishable in middle age, only to roar back into print in her sixties with A Quartet in Autumn. Steve and John’s friendship over the years has been...
2025-05-1529 minRecall This Book148* Albion Lawrence: Scientists Cooperate while Humanists Ruminate (EF, JP)Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?”The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography to the influence of place and geographic location in scientific collaboration to mountaineering traditions in the sciences. As a Recallable Book, Elizabeth champions The People of Puerto Rico, an experiment in ethnography of a nation (in this case under colonial rule) from 1956, including a chapte...
2025-04-1739 minRecall This Book147 Ieva Jusionyte on American Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds (EF, JP)John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions.Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence org...
2025-04-0356 minRecall This Book145 Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism’s more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John expresses puzzlement about the fervent ethnonationalism of minorities within a pluralistic society Lori and Ajantha point out that a sense of minority vulner...
2025-03-0644 minRecall This Book142* Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP.Greg's historical and hemispheric perspective helped bring out the differences between calling an event “sedition,” “seditious conspiracy” and “insurrection,” the new “Lost Cause” that many of those attacking the Capitol seem to hold on to and the particularities of Whiteness in the Un...
2025-01-2333 minRecall This Book139 Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle" (JP)Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle.” It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin.Before diving into the story itself, Ivan and John marvel at STW's weird greatness--and great weirdness. Like Hilary Mantel, she is drawn to the deep strangeness of other people. Prompted by John to think about these fairy stori...
2024-12-051h 02Recall This Book135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here.Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the pri...
2024-10-0452 minRecall This Book135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction.When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't thi...
2024-10-0346 minRecall This Book134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue Conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.”Anne speaks of...
2024-09-1942 minRecall This Book132* Policing and White Power with Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham (JP, EF)This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades.Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Co...
2024-08-1537 minRecall This Book131 Shaul Magid on the Jewish Radicalism of Meir Kahane (JP, Eugene Sheppard)For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism.Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Judaism in America. He joins John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard to discuss his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2024) on Jewish Defense League Founder and the surpris...
2024-08-0153 minRecall This Book130* Racism as Power Relation: A Discussion with Adaner Usmani (EF, JP)Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joined Elizabeth and John back in Fall, 2020, to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy.Adaner offers a complex genealogy of violence, mass incarceration and their roots in the social inequity (and iniquity) of antebellum economic relat...
2024-07-0433 minRecall This Book129* Vince Brown, Caribbean Vectors (EF, JP)The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Harvard UP, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans, known under the term “Coromantees” who were the chief protagonists in this war.Tracing the vectors of this war within the C...
2024-06-0645 minRecall This Book128 Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight" (JP)We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley.And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to...
2024-05-091h 13Recall This Book127* Helena De Bres on Life-Writing (JP, EF)How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought.Joining Rec...
2024-04-1841 minRecall This Book126 E. G. Condé / Steve Gonzalez on Hurricanes, Fiction, and Speculative Ethnography (EF)In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at the heart of hurricanes, and tells us about his academic work on data centers, and a collaborative speculative film that imagines a world without clouds.Steve and Elizabeth reflect on current shifts within anthropology that are opening the discipline to oth...
2024-04-0437 minRecall This Book122 The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London -- is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of "ethnic expectations" and th...
2024-02-0147 minRecall This Book121* Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well.The wide-r...
2024-01-1851 minRecall This Book117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (U Chicago Press, 2020). The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series of open letters that explore the layers of silence and complicity that enabled torture and the activist movements that have helped to uncover this history and implement forms of collective redress and repair. Elizabeth and John ask Laurence about that genre choice, and he...
2023-11-1642 minRecall This Book116 "We are all latecomers": Martin Puchner's "Culture" (JP, EF)Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions.Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinating new book, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K Pop (Norton, 2023) argues that mediators, translators a...
2023-11-0252 minRecall This Book115* Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation (JP)John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book on that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys.Krishnan sees the “contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at noticing the unevenness with which the blessings and curses of modernity were distributed in the era of decolonization. Centrally, Naipaul realized and reckoned with the always complex and messy question of the minority within postcolonial societies.He talks with John about Naipaul’s early focus on post...
2023-10-1939 minRecall This Book114 John Guillory Professes Criticism (JP, Nick Dames)John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) is here to discuss his amazing new Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2022)He speaks with John and with Nick Dames, co-editor of Public Books, Professor of Humanities at Columbia and most recently author of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2023). The gap between criticism and scholarship looms large, as does the utility of Panofsky's 1940 distinction between "monuments" and "documents." they ask what sorts of cultural documents achieve aesthetic memorability, for good or for ill.Mentio...
2023-10-0541 minRecall This Book112 Earthsea, and Other Realms: Ursula Le Guin as Social Inactivist (EF, JP, [UKL])To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats.And we share a delight we've been holding back for just this occasion, a series of clips from John's interview with Le Guin in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, in 2015 (a longer print-only version appeared in Public Books). Since Ursula is no longer with us, having died in 2018, it's especially poignant to listen to their conversation. Though its tone actually isn...
2023-09-0750 minRecall This Book111* Samuel R. Delany, Neveryon and Beyond (JP)John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution.Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon ...
2023-08-1728 minRecall This Book110* Joshua Cohen’s "The Netanyahus" (JP, Eugene Sheppard)n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past a...
2023-08-0348 minRecall This Book109* Thomas Piketty on Capitalism and Inequality (Adaner Usmani, JP)Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join this 2020 conversation with John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Power Relation) to find out.Why did we invite him? John thinks nobody is better than Piketty at mapping and explaining the nature and origin of the glaring and growing inequality that everywhere defines wealth distribution in the 21st century—both between...
2023-07-2050 minRecall This Book108* Chris Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck)Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything.We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money a...
2023-07-0547 minRecall This Book107* The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely...
2023-06-1547 minRecall This Book106 Musical Collaboration: A Chat with Francisco del Pino (JP)Francisco del Pino is a widely celebrated composer from Buenos Aires, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. John fell in love with Francisco's music (during his own semester there) when he heard a piece based on the poetry of his longtime friend Victoria Cóccaro.Recall This Book seized the chance to speak with del Pino (in John's weirdly resonant office) about composition and collaboration.Listen to all of Decir on New Amsterdam Records.You can hear more of the music on Spotify, Band Camp and even on his You Tub...
2023-06-0143 minRecall This Book105* David Plotz: Books in Dark Times (JP)Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and left Atlas Obscura to found City Cast.So, when John called him up in April 2020 for the Books in Dark Times series, what was his Pandemic reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and Mark Twain tempt David, but he goes another direction. He picks one book that shows humanity at its worst, heading towards world war. And another that shows how well we can behave to...
2023-05-1821 minRecall This Book103* Elizabeth Bradfield in Dark Times (JP)For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfied, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?Mentioned in the episode:
Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry...
2023-04-2030 minRecall This Book101* Chris Walley on Deindustrialization (EF, JP)On a blustery fall morning back in 2019, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands of other steel workers, lost his job when the mills in Southeastern Chicago closed. The book is part of a multimodal project, including the documentary film, “Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story,” (with director Chris Boebel) and an NEH-funded digitization project of the Southeastern Chicago Historical Museum, a community-based archive of materials related to the neighborhood.How can academics begin conversations about class and deindustr...
2023-03-0939 minRecall This Book100 Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)John and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo's book shows how residents of the region live with and through the "nuclear ghost" that resides with them.The trio discuss ways that residents acclimatize themselves to the presence of radiation, efforts to live their lives in w...
2023-03-0243 minRecall This Book99* Gael McGill Visualizes Intracellular Data (JP, GT)What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!).You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SA...
2023-02-1636 minRecall This Book98 Horton's Cosmic Zoom: A Discussion with Zachary HortonToday Recall this Book welcomes Zachary Horton, Associate Professor of Literature and director of the Vibrant Media Lab at University of Pittsburgh; game designer, filmmaker and camera designer. Out of all these endeavors, he came to talk about his book The Cosmic Zoom Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation.This dizzying book begins with a bravura description of a movie we both loved as kids: The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. It's a view of two people enjoying a picnic zooms up and away to show their surroundings, all the way up into space then zooms back i...
2023-02-0242 minRecall This Book97* Lorraine Daston Books In Dark Times (JP)Our Books in Dark Times series offered John this 2021 chance to speak with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her 2007 Objectivity (coauthored with Peter Galison).Although she “came of age in an era of extreme contextualism” Daston is anything but time-bound. She starts things off in John’s wheelhouse with Henry James, before moving on to Pliny the Younger–no, not the scientist, the administrator! Then she makes a st...
2023-01-1932 minRecall This Book96 Lorraine Daston Rules the World (EF, JP)Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). is just out. Daston's earlier pathbreaking works include Against Nature, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and many co-authored books, including Objectivity (with Peter Galison) which introduced the idea of historically changeable "epistemic virtues."In this Recall this Book conversation, Daston--Raine to her friends--shows that rules are never as thin (as abstract and context-free) as they pretend to be. True, we love a rule that seems to brook no exceptions: by the Renaissance, even God is no longer allowed to make exc...
2023-01-0544 minRecall This Book95* Books in Dark Times: A Discussion with Kim Stanley RobinsonKim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change.In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our partner Public Books) Stan and John start out with Stan’s emerging from the Grand Canyon in...
2022-12-1524 minRecall This Book94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP, NS, HY)How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground."You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have...
2022-12-0145 minRecall This Book93* Ethnonationalism since 1973: A Discussion with Quinn SlobodianWhat’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism?John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobi...
2022-11-1745 minRecall This Book92 Janet McIntosh on "Let's Go Brandon," QAnon and Alt-Right Language (EF, JP)Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words."The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her wo...
2022-11-0337 minRecall This Book91* Leah Price on Children’s Books: Turning Back the Clock on “Adulting” (EF, JP)What do children love most about books? Leaving their mark on inviting white spaces? Or that enchanting feeling when a book marks them as its own, taking them off to where the wild things are? Back in 2021, Elizabeth and John invited illustrious and illuminating book historian Leah Price to decode childhood reading past and present. The conversation explores the tactile and textual properties of great children’s books and debate adult fondness for juvenile literature. Leah asks if identifying with a literary character is a sign of virtuous imagination, or of craziness and laziness. She also schools John on what...
2022-10-2031 minRecall This Book90 Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality.Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and...
2022-10-0638 minRecall This Book88 Underwater Eye: Margaret Cohen explores the Film AquaticMargaret Cohen joins John to discuss The Underwater Eye, which explores "How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy." Margaret's earlier prizewinning books include The Novel and the Sea and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, but this project brings her places even her frequent surfing forays hadn't yet reached. She charts the rise of "wet for wet" filming both in the ocean itself and in various surrogates, exploring the implications of entering a domain that humans can explore and come to know, but never master.She and John discuss the rarity of pro...
2022-09-0145 minRecall This Book87* Mike Leigh In Focus (JP)In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, British director Mike Leigh has ranged from comic portrayals of ordinary life amid the social breakdowns of Thatcher’s Britain (Life is Sweet, High Hopes) to gritty renditions of working-class constraint and bourgeois hypocrisy (Meantime, Abigail’s Party, Hard Labour) to period films that reveal the “profoundly trivial” elements of artistic life even two centuries in the past (Topsy-Turvy, Mr. Turner).Leigh contains multitudes. What Roland Barthes says about the novels of Marcel Proust is true of Mike Leigh films as well: you notice different things every time you return to them.In this C...
2022-08-1851 minRecall This Book86 Dana Stevens on Buster Keaton (JP EF)Dana Stevens joins Elizabeth and John to discuss Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Her fantastic new book serves as occasion to revel in the work and working world of Buster Keaton, that "solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne man."Although packed with fascinating tidbits from Keaton's life, Camera Man is much more than just a biography. It performs its own airborne magic, lightly traversing topics like the crackdown on the use of children in vaudeville, the fluidity of roles before and behind the camera in early Hollywood and the door...
2022-08-0442 minRecall This Book85* Pu Wang and John Plotz Look Back on their Cixin Liu InterviewOur first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political situation for contemporary Chinese writers who come to the West to discuss their work.They consider whether our world is like a cabinet in a basement, and what kind of optimism or pessimism might be available to science fiction writers. They compare the interview to a recent profile of Liu in The New Yorker, and pond...
2022-07-2131 minRecall This Book84* Cixin Liu Talks About Science Fiction (JP, Pu Wang)John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End.When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c).Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden)They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fict...
2022-07-0750 minRecall This Book83* Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz on Zadie SmithJohn and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith, so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding. Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous.Discussed in this episode:
Tony Judt, Postwar
Richard Hoggar...
2022-06-1627 minRecall This Book82* Zadie Smith in Focus (JP)In this 2019 episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. The conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, the inhumanity!) and what it means to be a London–no, a Northwest London–writer before arriving at her case against identity politics. That case is bolstered by a discussion of Hannah Arendt on the difference between who and what a person is.Zadie and John also touch on the purpose of criticism and why it gets harder to hate as you (middle) age. She reveals an affection for “talkies” (as a “90’s kid,” she can’t help her fondness for Quentin...
2022-06-0253 minRecall This Book81* David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the UnderworldSince the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second book Best Barbarian was published by W. W. Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation of The Aeneid was published by the University of Chicago Press.The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have...
2022-05-1946 minRecall This Book80 We are Not Digested: Rajiv Mohabir (Ulka Anjaria, JP)Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration.He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman.Elizabet...
2022-05-0549 minRecall This Book79* Madeline Miller on Circe (GT, JP)In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2022-04-2146 minRecall This Book78 Fantasy Then, Now, and Forever with Anna VaninskayaElizabeth and John talk about fantasy's power of world-making with Edinburgh professor Anna Vaninskaya, author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 ( 2010) and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien ( 2020). Anna uncovers the melancholy sense of displacement and loss running through Tolkien, and links his notion of "subcreation" to an often concealed theological vision. Not allegory but "application" is praised as a way of reading fantasy.John asks about hopeful visions of the radical politics of fantasy (Le Guin, but also Graeber and Wengrow's recent work); Elizabeth stresses that fantasy's appeal...
2022-04-0745 minRecall This Book77* Polynesia, Sea of Islands: with Christina ThompsonJohn and Elizabeth talk cultural renewal with Christina Thompson in this rebroadcast of a 2019 Recall this Book conversation. Her Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia both relates the history of Polynesia, and explores how histories of Polynesia are constructed.The discussion considers various moments of cultural contact between Polynesian and European thinkers and doers. Those range from the chart Tupaia drew for Captain Cook during the “first contact” era (above) to the moment ijn 1976 when the Hokule’a‘s traveled from Hawaii to Tahiti in a triumphant reconstruction of ancient Polynesian wayfinding. Thompson has fascinating thoughts on how the wor...
2022-03-1744 minRecall This Book76 Land-Grab Universities with Robert Lee (Jerome Tharaud, JP)John and new Brandeis host Jerome Tharaud (author of Apocalyptic Geographies) learn exactly how the growth of America's public universities relied on shameful seizures of Native American land. Working with Tristan Athone --editor of Grist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe--historian Robert Lee wrote a stunning series of pieces that reveal how many public land-grant universities were fundamentally financed and sustained by a long-lasting settle-colonial "land grab." Their meticulous work paints an unusually detailed picture of how most highly praised institutions of higher education in America (Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley and virtually all of the great Midwestern public universiti...
2022-03-0352 minRecall This Book75* Sean Hill Talks about Bodies in Space and Time with Elizabeth BradfieldThis conversation, first aired in July 2021, features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014).Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.”Mentioned in This Episode:C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of DislocationC.S. Giscombe, Giscome RoadLorine Neidecker, Lake Superior
2022-02-1739 minRecall This Book74 George Kalogeris on Words and PlacesJohn and Elizabeth had the marvelous fortune to talk with George Kalogeris about his new book Winthropos (LSU Press, 2021). The title comes from the "Greek-ified" name that George's father gave to their town, Winthrop, MA. George's poems are soaked in memories and tacit, deep affection, communicated through the language of the lines and especially through certain Janus-faced words that reflect the old country and the new at once.George reads and discusses three poems from his new book in the course of the conversation. If you want to read along as you listen to him, click here. You...
2022-02-0336 minRecall This Book73 Teletherapy with Hannah Zeavin (High Theory Crossover, Saronik)Crossover Month at Recall this Book ends with a glance sideways at the doings of our pals Saronik and Kim, hosts of the delightfully lapidary podcast High Theory. Refresh your sense of them with Recall this Book 52: they joined John to showcase their distinctive approach, taking as their topic "the pastoral." Or, just click Play without further ado to hear their thoughts on teletherapy, a concept that proves far more familiar, and omnipresent than we at RtB had realized. Take those omnipresent signs for the Suicide Hotline, for starters....In this 18-minute gem of an episode, Hannah Zeav...
2022-01-2720 minRecall This Book72 Caryl Phillips Speaks with Corina StanOur second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more.It’s a rangy con...
2022-01-2047 minRecall This Book71 Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp: Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal (Novel Dialogue crossover, JP)This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem
2022-01-0637 minRecall This Book70 Recall this Buck 5: "Studying Up" with Daniel Souleles (EF, JP)John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019).Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's sometimes called "studying up" and Dan and Elizabeth (who's writing a book about gold, after all!) have both thought a lot about it.Read the transcript here.Read Aneil Tripathy's RTB piece about actuarial time scales and how...
2021-12-1611 minRecall This Book69 Recall this Buck 4: Daniel Souleles on Private Equity (JP, EF)In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world of private equity "guys" (who are indeed mostly guys) and the ways they are "suspended in webs of significance [they themselves have] spun" as Clifford Geertz puts it.Further, he explores the ways we are all suspended in these w...
2021-12-0236 minRecall This Book68 Martin Puchner: Writing and Reading from Gilgamesh to AmazonBook Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love."Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through the ages (The Written World) this episode brings back happy memories of Elizabeth and John piling their guests into a cozy sound booth at Bran...
2021-11-1841 minRecall This Book67 Everything and Less: Mark McGurl on Books in the Age of AmazonWhat do you make of Amazon: The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet) just a click away? John and Elizabeth speak with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, whose previous books include the pathbreaking The Program Era.Mark faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: if you want to know even more about it, check out the NY Times review by RTB's own book-history maven, star of RTB 46, Leah Price. Mark ponders when servic...
2021-11-0442 minRecall This Book66 On Multi-Species Community: A Critical Conversation with Patricia Alvarez Astacio (Gina T, John P)Octopus month has morphed seamlessly into Multispecies month here at RtB, bringing with it not only last week's piece on chimpanzees, but also this sparkling conversation about all sorts of multi-species communities. Recorded live in front of an audience of writing students and introduced by Brandeis physicist Matthew Headrick, it features Patricia Alvarez Astacio, an anthropologist and filmmaker. She has made a film about her work in the Peruvian highlands, where people live with, respect, shear and sometimes eat alpacas. Gina Turrigiano, RtB guest-host of long standing, wears her biological hat in this conversation, bringing to bear insights about avian i...
2021-10-2133 minRecall This Book65 Octopus World: Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch-- loves his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here...
2021-10-0747 minRecall This Book64 Brahmin Left 4: Adaner and John wrap up with ElizabethOur Summer series on the Brahmin Left, winding down as Fall approaches, was inspired by our bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. It starts from the assumption that a major realignment (or, rather, a “dealignment”) from the class-based politics of the mid-20th century is underway all over Europe and North America–and perhaps worldwide. What caused … Continue reading "64 Brahmin Left 4: Adaner and John wrap up with Elizabeth" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2021-09-1634 minRecall This Book60 Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time (EF, EB)Elizabeth is joined by Elizabeth Bradfield, poet, naturalist and professor of poetry at Brandeis, in a conversation with the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014). Sean read his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an … Continue reading "60 Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time (EF, EB)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2021-07-0838 minRecall This Book58 Recall this B-Side #3: Caleb Crain on Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters” (JP)John’s favorite avocation is editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers resurrect beloved but neglected books. Now comes a book that collects 40 of these columns (the Washington Post review was a big thumbs-up, and John talked about the B-side concept on Five Books). This week’s B-Sider is celebrated American novelist Caleb Crain (Necessary Errors … Continue reading "58 Recall this B-Side #3: Caleb Crain on Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters” (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2021-06-1713 minRecall This Book57 Recall this B-side #2: Elizabeth Ferry on “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley'” (JP)Given this podcast’s love of neglected books, you won’t be shocked to know that John has a side-hustle–in which Elizabeth plays a significant part. He edits a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers like Namwali Serpell and Ursula Le Guin sing praises to a beloved but neglected book. Now, there is a book that collects … Continue reading "57 Recall this B-side #2: Elizabeth Ferry on “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley'” (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2021-06-1014 minRecall This Book54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. Helen Garner … Continue reading "54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2021-04-2250 minRecall This Book50 Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy; or, Why Words MatterContinuing our conversation on the events at the Capitol and the end of the Trump era, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is forthcoming from Cambridge. His historical … Continue reading "50 Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy; or, Why Words Matter" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2021-02-0532 minRecall This Book44 Adaner Usmani: Racism as idea, Racism as power relation (EF, JP)Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joins Elizabeth and John to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-10-0132 minRecall This Book41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science (JP)In this final episode of Books in Dark Times, John chews the bibliographic fat with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her … Continue reading "41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-07-2431 minRecall This Book37 RTB Books In Dark Times 11: Elizabeth Bradfield (JP)Elizabeth Bradfied is editor of Broadsided Press, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer–and most of all an amazing poet (“Touchy” for example just appeared in The Atlantic). Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic … Continue reading "37 RTB Books In Dark Times 11: Elizabeth Bradfield (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-06-2629 minRecall This Book34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown (EF, JP)The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently … Continue reading "34 The Caribbean and Vectors of Warfare: Vincent Brown (EF, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-06-0543 minRecall This Book27 RTB Books in Dark Times 4: David and John PlotzAside from being John’s (younger, brighter, handsomer–and definitely hirsuter) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and run the amazing travel website, Atlas Obscura. So, what is he reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and … Continue reading "27 RTB Books in Dark Times 4: David and John Plotz" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-04-1621 minRecall This Book26 RTB Books in Dark Times 3: Plotz/FerryFor the third installment of Books in Dark Times, inspired by our global moment, Elizabeth and John turned inward. We started with a book that you might not think would be so comforting, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London “during the last Great Visitation in 1665.” Probably … Continue reading "26 RTB Books in Dark Times 3: Plotz/Ferry" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-04-0926 minRecall This Book9* Women in Political Power, with Manduhai Buyandelger (Rebroadcast, in honor of Elizabeth Warren)As we prepare our mini-season on the history of money (Recall This Buck) we dive back into the archives for our very first Rebroadcast. And our first asterisk, too: was that the right symbol to use? The egress of Elizabeth Warren from the race for the Democratic nomination saddened us: after all, we both belong … Continue reading "9* Women in Political Power, with Manduhai Buyandelger (Rebroadcast, in honor of Elizabeth Warren)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-03-1543 minRecall This Book22 Ajantha Subramanian: Meritocracy, Caste, and Class (EF, JP)Ajantha Subramanian‘s new book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. John and Elizabeth speak with Ajantha about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, … Continue reading "22 Ajantha Subramanian: Meritocracy, Caste, and Class (EF, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-02-0749 minRecall This Book21 Silvia Bottinelli: Food, Art, Food Art!Not long after Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to the wall, John and Elizabeth met with Silvia Bottinelli from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to talk about food as art and art as food. Silvia is a Modern and Contemporary Art historian in the Visual and Material Studies Department at SMFA and … Continue reading "21 Silvia Bottinelli: Food, Art, Food Art!" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2020-01-1738 minRecall This Book19 Scientists, collaboration, and groupthink with Albion Lawrence (EF, JP)In this episode John and Elizabeth sit down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?” The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography … Continue reading "19 Scientists, collaboration, and groupthink with Albion Lawrence (EF, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-12-0537 minRecall This Book15x Afterthoughts on Zadie Smith (John and Elizabeth)Zadie Smith touched down at Brandeis because Swing Time was this year’s New Student Book Forum selection. It made for a busy day: on top of the podcast, she spoke to faculty and undergraduates at two different events. So, lots of material to discuss. We do our best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, … Continue reading "15x Afterthoughts on Zadie Smith (John and Elizabeth)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-10-0127 minRecall This Book15 In Focus: Zadie Smith (JP)In this episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. Zadie’s horror at the idea of rereading her own novels opens the show; she can more easily imagine rewriting one (as John’s beloved Willa Cather once did) than having to go through them all again. From there the conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, … Continue reading "15 In Focus: Zadie Smith (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-09-2652 minRecall This Book14x Afterthoughts about the Cixin Liu interview (Pu Wang and John)In May, John and Pu interviewed SF superstar Cixin Liu (you will want to listen to that episode before this one). In August they entered the studio again to work on the final edits for that interview in both its Chinese and English versions. While they were there, they took some time to reflect on … Continue reading "14x Afterthoughts about the Cixin Liu interview (Pu Wang and John)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-08-1330 minRecall This Book14c 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Cixin Liu with Pu Wang (in Chinese)[This is the original Chinese interview with Cixin Liu; to hear the English translation, go to Episode 14] 今年5月18日，前来Brandeis大学接受荣誉博士学位的科幻小说家刘慈欣接受了John Plotz和王璞两位教授的专访。这次独具深度、异常精彩的访谈，已经整理为中英双语两个版本，想听刘慈欣中文原声的科幻迷们，请点这里！也请有兴趣的朋友们多多关注Recall This Book。 收听音频，请戳—— Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-08-1345 minRecall This Book13 Polynesia, Sea of Islands: with Christina ThompsonJohn and Elizabeth talk cultural renewal with Christina Thompson, author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, a book that both tells a part of the history of Polynesia, and tells how histories of Polynesia are constructed. The discussion also ranges to consider different moments of cultural contact between Polynesian and European thinkers and doers. Those … Continue reading "13 Polynesia, Sea of Islands: with Christina Thompson" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-08-0243 minRecall This Book12 RTB Presents “The Electro–Library” (with Jared Green)In this warm summer episode, Elizabeth and John present a marvelous podcast, The Electro-Library, and they speak with one of its hosts and founders, Jared Green. Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences … Continue reading "12 RTB Presents “The Electro–Library” (with Jared Green)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-07-0646 minRecall This Book11 Xenophobia and Ethno-Nationalism, 1973 to today (Quinn Slobodian)What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? What do a badly characterized, racist novel and an imaginatively metaphoric biology article from the 1970s have to do with that? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth find out all of that and more in this discussion with Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley … Continue reading "11 Xenophobia and Ethno-Nationalism, 1973 to today (Quinn Slobodian)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-06-1443 minRecall This Book10x Bonus! “Exit Zero” and Life WritingHelena DeBres had so many brilliant insights about the ethics and the future of life writing that the final third of our discussion overflowed the bounds of our ordinary format. So we present that final conversation to you here as a bonus episode–well, episodelette. Elizabeth, John and Helena here discuss Christine J. Walley’s “autoethnography” Exit Zero: … Continue reading "10x Bonus! “Exit Zero” and Life Writing" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-05-1614 minRecall This Book9 Women in Political Power; with Manduhai Buyandelger Evita, Thatcher and HRC walk into a glass ceiling…In this episode, John and Elizabeth are joined by MIT anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger to discuss women in political power in Argentina, Mongolia, the UK, the United States and beyond. At the conversation’s heart: Manduhai analyzes the legacy of “female quotas” in Soviet-era politics, as well as … Continue reading "9 Women in Political Power; with Manduhai Buyandelger" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-03-2842 minRecall This Book8 Distraction, a Conversation (Marina Van Zuylen and John Plotz at Harvard’s Mahindra Center)We frequently worry that we live in a “distracted age.” But perhaps the human condition is always to live “almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another” (Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism”). Join John’s conversation with Marina Van Zuylen of Bard College. Van Zuylen, the author of The Plenitude of Distraction, makes … Continue reading "8 Distraction, a Conversation (Marina Van Zuylen and John Plotz at Harvard’s Mahindra Center)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-03-1448 minRecall This Book7 In Focus: Samuel Delany in conversation with John Plotz (Nevèrÿon, Triton, Gertrude Stein and more….)On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books. Fresh on the heels of our conversation with Madeline Miller, author of Circe, John Plotz has a talk with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble … Continue reading "7 In Focus: Samuel Delany in conversation with John Plotz (Nevèrÿon, Triton, Gertrude Stein and more….)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-03-0728 minRecall This Book6 Writing Then and Now: Martin Puchner (The Written World)From its origins in clay tablets to its future on digital tablets, Martin Puchner has thought about writing in all its forms. In this episode, John and Elizabeth talk to Martin, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard. They begin with a discussion of a very early writerly text–the epic … Continue reading "6 Writing Then and Now: Martin Puchner (The Written World)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-02-2839 minRecall This Book3 Old and New Media with Lisa GitelmanIn this episode, John and Elizabeth speak with Lisa Gitelman, a professor in the departments of English and Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. They discuss Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) and Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” (1902). Both works examine shifts in media technologies that people … Continue reading "3 Old and New Media with Lisa Gitelman" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-01-3035 minRecall This Book2 Addiction with Gina TurrigianoIn this episode, John and Elizabeth speak with Gina Turrigiano, a neuroscientist at Brandeis, about a number of different facets of addiction. What makes an addiction to a morning constitutional different from–or similar to–an addiction to Fentanyl? What are the biological and social factors to consider? Should the addict be thought of in binary terms, … Continue reading "2 Addiction with Gina Turrigiano" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-01-2246 minRecall This Book1 Minimalism with Tory FairIn this episode, John and Elizabeth speak with Tory Fair, sculptor and professor in the Art Department at Brandeis about minimalism. They discuss the difference in involvement expected from the viewer of a minimalist work and other work, and compare modes of minimalism, from Donald Judd to Samuel Beckett to Marie Kondo. Their discussion of … Continue reading "1 Minimalism with Tory Fair" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2019-01-0236 min