We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American... more

The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the... more

We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the... more

We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says,... more

We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone,... more

The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his... more

Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and... more

The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or,... more

Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it... more

The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a... more

On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s... more

With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It... more

The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the... more

Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes... more

In this podcast, two old friends in and out of journalism talk about the Middle East war, which comes to... more

We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in... more

The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double... more

Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just... more

It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but... more

Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only... more

It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to... more

In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They... more

This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too:... more

We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica... more

We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he... more

This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s... more

The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in... more

We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever... more

Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore:... more

William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism.... more