The Vault

Sep 07 2024 73 ep. 385
The Vault Podcast artwork

Select lectures and conversations from the New York Institute for the Humanities' forty-year archive.

  Society & Culture  Arts
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


The Epic Story of America's Great Migration: A Talk by Isabel Wilkerson

Sep 07 2024 68 mins  
In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, In 1994, Wilkerson was the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her profile

On Michael Jackson: A Lecture by Margo Jefferson

Jun 29 2024 48 mins  
In September 2006, Margo Jefferson spoke to the Institute about her book, On Michael Jackson (Vintage, 2007). Jefferson received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for criticism when she was at the New York Times. Her 2015 book, Negroland: A Memoir, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. And in 2022, she published, Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir in fragments. She has taught at N

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: A Lecture by Anthony Grafton

Jun 22 2024 42 mins  
Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2020). In N

"America: Now and Here": A Lecture by Artist Eric Fischl

Jun 15 2024 56 mins  
Artist Eric Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the Long Island suburbs. His paintings first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. In 1972 he received a B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts. In February 2012, Fischl spoke to the Institute about his work, and about his project “Ame

The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

Jun 02 2024 74 mins  
Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory. In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has writte

Shakespeare in America

May 18 2024 56 mins  
James Shapiro spoke at the Institute in 2014 about Shakespeare in America, the anthology he edited for the Library of America. He is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Shapiro is the author of many books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare in a Divided America, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics

The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Aug 25 2023 54 mins  
In this 2014 episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Betty Medsger. Medsger was a Washington Post reporter in March 1971, and received a cache of stolen FBI files that detailed the elaborate surveillance activities the bureau was using against Vietnam war protesters and others whom J. Edgar Hoover deemed “subversive.“ All Medsger knew about the documents was that the

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Aug 21 2023 40 mins  
In this episode from the Institute’s Vault we hear from Rebecca Goldstein, an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her first book was her 1983 novel, The Mind Body Problem. Goldstein spoke to the Institute in 2006 about her book, Betra

Nicholas Lemann, "Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream" (FSG, 2019)

Aug 02 2023 50 mins  
Nicholas Lemann is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor of journalism at Columbia. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (FSG, 2019). Lemann spoke at the Institute about Transaction Man in 2019. Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stab

The Happiness Myth: A Talk by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Aug 01 2023 49 mins  
In 2006, Jennifer Michael Hecht spoke to the Institute about her book, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong. Hecht is a poet and historian, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of science/European cultural history from Columbia University. She has published four books of nonfiction and three books of poetry. She has taught in the MFA programs at Columbia University a