Recall This Book

Nov 23 2024 146 ep. 39 mins 25

Recall This Book Podcast artwork

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.

Arts History Society & Culture

Copy RSS

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)

Nov 23 2024 24 mins

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FB

138b Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock (with Vincent Brown)

Nov 22 2024 21 mins

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.

138a An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

Nov 21 2024 33 mins

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transfo

137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals Dream and That Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)

Oct 31 2024 51 mins

In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than

136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)

Oct 17 2024 29 mins

Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “n

135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)

Oct 04 2024 54 mins

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

135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)

Oct 03 2024 48 mins

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.

134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue Conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)

Sep 19 2024 44 mins

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 w

133 Beri Marusic on Grief and other Expiring Emotions (Katie Elliott, JP)

Sep 05 2024 65 mins

Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable--and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic's "Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief" begins with his grief for the unexpected and early loss of his mother: "I stopped grieving or at least the grief diminished, yet the reason didn't really change. It's not like that my mother stopped mattering

132* Policing and White Power with Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham (JP, EF)

Aug 15 2024 39 mins

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 subor