The Quarantine Tapes 191: Rebecca Solnit
“Just as therapists say that no two people have the same families, so no two people have the same pandemic.”
May 20, 2021•31 min
The Quarantine Tapes
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.“ - Blaise Pascal.
The Quarantine Tapes: A week-day program from Onassis LA and dublab. Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, the series chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic.
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Episodes
The Quarantine Tapes 190: John Freeman
“I think in our time we need many more collaborative modes if we’re going to find our way out of the spiritual malaise and the problems that we find ourselves in this country.”
May 12, 2021•34 min
The Quarantine Tapes 189: Durs Grünbein
“What we now experience is a pandemia, as it is universal, it’s also a daily, constant World War. Each part of the world has its place in this war. There are so many battle grounds at the same time.”
May 05, 2021•28 min
The Quarantine Tapes 188: Tracy K Smith
“I am someone who has been eager to bring the vocabulary of justice and anti-racism into the different contexts that I inhabit, and one of them is the campus where I teach and where I feel fortunate to serve students who have a lot of wishes and needs. I think it’s been a year of working together with others to see how far we’re willing to go with this goal. But, as you may know, we’re not all on the same page, and it’s been painful to be reminded of that.”
Apr 30, 2021•31 min
The Quarantine Tapes 187: Nilanjana Bhowmick
“The grief that we’re experiencing in India is as profound as it is stunning. We’re mourning the loss of our democracy--at least, some of us...and then suddenly the pandemic scattered us on islands of grief.”
Apr 28, 2021•26 min
The Quarantine Tapes 186: Trevor Paglen
“What does it mean to arrive at a moment in history when we can build computer vision systems, build artificial intelligence systems, that look at images that we post on the internet?
Apr 22, 2021•30 min
The Quarantine Tapes 185: Debra Winger
“You can do anything if you’re ready for it.”
Apr 21, 2021•28 min
The Quarantine Tapes 180 : Henry Rollins (Part2)
"When you lose art and culture in a society you lose the society itself.”
Apr 16, 2021•18 min
The Quarantine Tapes 184: Tess Lewis
“In the idea of responsibility, and the idea of translation as responsibility, as a responsible, responsive act, I think you are both communing with the text and, in a certain sense, resisting it, testing it, pushing it.”
Apr 14, 2021•30 min
The Quarantine Tapes 183: Paul Muldoon
“The bit that is generally not so honored and so valorized is ignorance, unknowing, innocence. And that’s what I try to teach my students and that’s what I try to remember myself anytime I try to sit down to write something. I write in the absolute conviction that I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Apr 12, 2021•30 min
The Quarantine Tapes 182: Paul Haller
“As we’re more contained in our activities, that aspect of zen, which is where the everyday activity is almost ritualized. It becomes a precious event, something we give our attention to.”
Apr 07, 2021•27 min
The Quarantine Tapes 181: Sven Birkerts
“You realize at a certain point that you’re carrying the thing, it has entered you, it has affected you, and that, in a way, is the afterlife of reading. But in a way it’s the real life of reading. Reading was just getting you ready to have this ongoing experience.”
Apr 05, 2021•28 min
The Quarantine Tapes 180: Henry Rollins (Part 1)
"When you lose art and culture in a society you lose the society itself.”
Apr 05, 2021•27 min
The Quarantine Tapes 179: Annie Zaidi
"The reason why I am a little quiet is that I like to reflect, not only about other people’s lives and politics, but also about myself. So when I look at something, I look at the thing, but I also look at myself looking at the thing.”
Mar 31, 2021•30 min
The Quarantine Tapes 178: Jacqueline Novogratz
On episode 178 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by Jacqueline Novogratz. Jacqueline is the founder and CEO of the non-profit Acumen. Jacqueline and Paul celebrate their birthday, both born on the Ides of March, before turning to how Jacqueline approaches her work with Acumen, both during the pandemic and beyond. Jacqueline talks about how Acumen engages with investment and how the pandemic drove them to understand their role in community-building on a deeper level. They talk ...
Mar 30, 2021•30 min
The Quarantine Tapes: A Symphony Of Voices Part 2
On this episode on The Quarantine Tapes, join us for another very special look back at the highlights of the past one year of episodes. In these clips, we hear from Julie Mehretu, Etgar Keret, and Jerry Saltz on the challenges and fears of the pandemic, and from Jorie Graham, Andy Borowitz, Calvin Trillin, and many more voices on the topics that have been on their minds as they navigated the past twelve months.
Mar 29, 2021•35 min
The Quarantine Tapes 176: Nathalie Etoke
On episode 176 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by author Nathalie Etoke. Recorded during the time of the historic trials surrounding the death of George Floyd, Nathalie expands on the way that the pandemic has brought into focus many things that were dormant. In this moment of reckoning, Nathalie expertly addresses the truth about what shapes racism, and asks us all to consider what are the consequences of imperialism on our notions of collective human culture. Paul and Nath...
Mar 26, 2021•31 min
The Quarantine Tapes: A Symphony Of Voices Part 1
This episode of The Quarantine Tapes is a very special episode bringing together clips from the past one year of the podcast. With these clips, join us in returning to some of the most thoughtful, interesting, and moving moments from this chronicle of our past year in quarantine. We hear from Werner Herzog, Naveen Kishore, and Rosanne Cash on their hopes and fears in the early days of this crisis, and from Patton Oswalt, Joy Harjo, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., and many more over the course of the past ...
Mar 25, 2021•33 min
The Quarantine Tapes 174: Thelma Golden
“Grief, just holding the space of grief, of understanding this space of loss that we have all been existing in. I think for me, it is about a way of acknowledging not just the intellectual and emotional space of grief, but the physical space: what this moment has felt like, felt to carry this in my body.”
Mar 18, 2021•32 min
The Quarantine Tapes 173: Edward Hirsch
“As soon as something happens to you in America people start asking if you’re healing yet and they immediately start with the healing questions. It’s not that I’m against healing, I think healing is important, but you can’t--the only way to get out of grief is to get through it. And you can’t start healing before you grieve. You have to experience the feelings that you actually have.”
Mar 16, 2021•31 min
The Quarantine Tapes 172: Danielle Spencer
“One of the focuses [of Narrative Medicine] is to try to elevate the voices of people who are traditionally disempowered in these spaces.”
Mar 15, 2021•31 min
The Quarantine Tapes 171: Samantha Rose Hill
“I’ve often been wary of hope. Hope implies a great many things that may or may not exist on some future temporal horizon.”
Mar 11, 2021•54 min
The Quarantine Tapes 170: Merve Emre
“On the one hand, this has felt like a moment of impossibility, of stupidity, and of being stuck--quite literally of being stuck in your own home. And at the same time, I think from that impossibility there has arisen a sense of possibility, of thinking that the world might be otherwise than the world that gave rise to and so dreadfully mismanaged a global health crisis.”
Mar 09, 2021•33 min
The Quarantine Tapes 169: Fred Wiseman
“What I’m really doing is having a look at human behavior. The way people act and talk and connect and move during the period of time in which I am making movies. The institution simply provides a convenient framework for that.”
Mar 08, 2021•27 min
The Quarantine Tapes 168: Salman Rushdie
“I do think that stories are these storehouses of who we are as human beings and what we can be. They speculate what we can be, they tell us what we have been.”
Mar 04, 2021•40 min
The Quarantine Tapes 167: Johnny Temple
“The business felt to me, as I was getting into it, as sort of a punk rocker getting into publishing, it felt to me like upper middle class and upper class white people gazing at themselves and marveling at how clever they are; a industry trying to sell books to people with fancy liberal arts college degrees and I’m not interested in that at all. I love books and my vision of books is not selling books to well-educated people.”
Mar 02, 2021•37 min
The Quarantine Tapes 166: Wayne Koestenbaum
“The thing I find consoling, Paul, is to make sure before I go to bed that I read one poem by somebody else...I always feel that that moment before going to bed is my last chance to make something good of my life.”
Mar 01, 2021•33 min
The Quarantine Tapes 165: Sanford Biggers
“This is a cyclical nature that we’re seeing this violence. We’ve been watching this violence for 400 years and we will still see more of it. But it’s also the fact that, regardless of how often it happens, we will not be silenced. We will not disappear. In fact, if anything, the remembering and memorialization of those incidences makes us stronger and fortifies us as a people--not just African Americans, but Americans, to seek justice.”
Feb 25, 2021•32 min
The Quarantine Tapes 164: Esther Choo
“Working in the ER, in particular, is this constant reminder of what I go home to and just the enormous--I feel like “privilege” is overused--but I feel so privileged to have this job and being in a position to help.”
Feb 24, 2021•43 min
The Quarantine Tapes 163: Alicia Hall Moran
“For kids, they might begin with that type of innocence but the more that they’re rewarded for one type of speech or the other, then you start to get warp in society. And if the parents don’t fix it, you start to lose information from generation to generation. You go backwards so fast.”
Feb 23, 2021•1 hr
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