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)"...
Jun 04, 2020•42 min
Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie. What is consoling and engaging the author of the best novel about America’s dismal experience in Iraq? American novels, especially … Continue reading "33 RTB Books in Dark Times 9: Ben Fountain (JP)"
May 28, 2020•23 min
Who better to talk about Dark Times than the author of an unforgettable scholarly book about the grimness of the interwar years, Tense Future? Paul Saint-Amour, Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and author of various prizewinning books and brilliant articles, joins John to talk about realism, escapism and the glories of science fiction. … Continue reading "32 RTB Books in Dark Times 8: Paul Saint-Amour (JP 5/20)"...
May 21, 2020•34 min
U. Sydney professor Vanessa Smith–author of Intimate Strangers, and also of this lovely short piece about Marion Milner–joins John to discuss her pandemic reading. She praises a Milner (quasi)travel book, but she also makes the case for M F K Fisher and a book about the glories of hypochondria. Then the old friends share their … Continue reading "31 RTB Books in Dark Times 7: Vanessa Smith (JP)"
May 14, 2020•20 min
On April 27, David D. Kirkpatrick reported in the N. Y. Times that Oxford’s Jenner Center is close to starting human trials on a potential Covid-19 vaccine. According to Kirkpatrick, “ethics rules, as a general principle, forbid seeking to infect human test participants with a serious disease. That means the only way to prove that … Continue reading "30 In Focus: Nir Eyal on (the deontology of) “Challenge Testing” a Covid Vaccine"...
May 07, 2020•29 min
Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and, most celebrated of all, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. His honors include many Locus, Hugo and Nebulae awards. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with … Continue reading "29 RTB Books in Dark Times 6: Kim Stanley Robinson (JP)"...
Apr 30, 2020•22 min
Seeta Chaganti, medievalist extraordinaire (Strange Footing and The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary) joins John to discuss–wait for it–data visualization in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, philosopher, visionary and scholar. They go on to discuss past traditions that merge text and image in ways that foreshadow modern visualization practices, and close with beloved books that … Continue reading "28 RTB Books in Dark Times 5: Seeta Chaganti (JP)"...
Apr 23, 2020•29 min
Aside 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"...
Apr 16, 2020•20 min
For 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"
Apr 09, 2020•24 min
On March 20th, John talked to Stephen McCauley, author of such brilliant comic novels as Object of My Affection (also a Jennifer Aniston movie) and most recently My Ex-Life. Steve brings light to dark corners in this the second installment of Books in Dark Times. He sings the praises of Charles Dickens, of Anthony Trollope … Continue reading "25 RTB Books in Dark Times 2: Stephen McCauley (JP)"
Apr 02, 2020•23 min
“Books In Dark Times” takes its inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, which proposes “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and … Continue reading "24 RTB Books in Dark Times 1: Alex Star (JP)"
Mar 26, 2020•27 min
This is the first of several RTB episodes about the history of money. We are ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. Our idea is that forms matter, and matter in ways that those who profit from those forms often strive to keep hidden. … Continue reading "23 Recall This Buck 1: Chris Desan on Making Money (EF, JP)"
Mar 20, 2020•44 min
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)"...
Mar 15, 2020•41 min
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)"...
Feb 07, 2020•47 min
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!"
Jan 17, 2020•37 min
John sits down with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus to discuss her latest book, The Drama of Celebrity, a tour-de-force argument about how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans. They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting … Continue reading "20 The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)"...
Dec 19, 2019•30 min
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)"...
Dec 05, 2019•36 min
John travelled to Odense, Denmark for a conference called “Love Etc.” (RTB is for it…) and fell into this conversation about empathy, identification and “uncritical reading” with the novelist Namwali Serpell and literary theorist Rita Felski. Hannah Arendt’s distrust of too much feeling, not enough thinking loomed large; so did Zadie Smith’s recent article in … Continue reading "18 Fictional Empathy. Rita Felski and Namwali Serpell (with JP)"...
Nov 15, 2019•24 min
The British filmmaker Mike Leigh puts the move into movies: he never stops changing, never stops inventing. In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, he 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, … Continue reading "17 In Focus: Mike Leigh (JP)"...
Oct 31, 2019•49 min
On a blustery fall morning, 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 … Continue reading "16 de/industrialization with Christine Walley (EF and JP)"...
Oct 25, 2019•36 min
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)"
Oct 01, 2019•25 min
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)"
Sep 26, 2019•50 min
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)"...
Aug 13, 2019•29 min
In this episode, John and Brandeis professor Pu Wang talk with the bestselling science fiction author Cixin Liu. Mr. Liu is the author of The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s End, and other works. When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record … Continue reading "14 In Focus: Cixin Liu (in English, with Pu Wang, JP)"
Aug 13, 2019•49 min
[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——
Aug 13, 2019•44 min
John 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"...
Aug 02, 2019•42 min
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)"...
Jul 06, 2019•45 min
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)"...
Jun 14, 2019•42 min
Bonus! Available only on our website, Episode 10X includes a brief RTB discussion about Exit Zero, a stunning “auto-ethnography” that raises fascinating questions about what it means when people retell stories or anecdotes about their own lives as a form of evidence that helps explain their overall worldview. Update: For more on autofiction, check out this essay on … Continue reading "10 Life, Writing, and Life Writing with Helena DeBres"...
May 16, 2019•38 min
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"...
Mar 28, 2019•41 min
