Think About It

Feb 17 2025 136 ep. 61 mins 409
Think About It Podcast artwork

Think About It engages today's leading thinkers in conversations about powerful ideas and how language can change the world.

  Arts  Education
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Free Speech 71: Ruby Lowe on John Milton’s Definition of Free Speech

Feb 17 2025 84 mins  
British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the inner workings of Parliamentary politics. I spoke with Ruby Lowe about how today’s co

Free Speech 70: Michael S. Roth on the Rise of Student Protests, the Fall of Some College Presidents, and Why Liberal Education Matters

Sep 28 2024 76 mins  
The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this podcast, recorded live at the New York Institute of the Humanities, Michael S. Roth, the long-time President of Wesleyan College, explains how he navigates sharp disagreements on campus, what he means by “safe enough spaces,” and

Book Talk 63: Nietzsche Now! with Glenn Wallis

May 01 2024 75 mins  
What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche’s work that help navigate today’s

Book Talk 62: Stefanos Geroulanos on "The Invention of Prehistory"

Apr 26 2024 68 mins  
What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos Geroulanos to discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) to discover how claims about the earliest humans and humankind’s true beginnings inform polit

Book Talk 61: Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H.L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"

Dec 09 2023 57 mins  
A century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior is not only not shocking but that we should in fact expect democracies to give rise to un- and even anti-democratic forces. Mencken doubted that such the evils of democracy will be cured by more democracy, which usually means election

Book Talk 60: Cleo McNelly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"

May 20 2023 78 mins  
Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into eac

Free Speech 69: Campus Misinformation with Bradford Vivian

May 02 2023 73 mins  
State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” students and sacrifice the hallowed v

Book Talk 59: Reading the Classics with Louis Petrich

May 01 2023 78 mins  
Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over four years, all via primary

Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman

Mar 17 2023 64 mins  
What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conversation. This was the

Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)

Jan 30 2023 69 mins  
Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think About It episode, and Rajgopa