Clik here to view.
100 Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)
John and Elizabeth explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Grey Zone is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
101* Chris Walley on Deindustrialization (EF, JP)
On a blustery fall morning back in 2019, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along...
View ArticleClik here to view.
102 Sassan Tabatabai: poetry, observation, and form (EF, JP)
“For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone” says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem “Firestones” the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together....
View ArticleClik here to view.
103* Elizabeth Bradfield in Dark Times (JP)
For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfied, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her...
View ArticleClik here to view.
104 Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada: Journalistic Collaboration (JP)
Steve Fainaru and his brother Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote a bestselling and award-winning book (and accompanying PBS documentary series) about the NFL coverup of concussion trauma, League of Denial. This...
View ArticleClik here to view.
105* David Plotz: Books in Dark Times (JP)
Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
106 Musical Collaboration: Francisco del Pino (JP)
Francisco del Pino is a widely celebrated composer from Buenos Aires, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. John fell in love with his music (during his own...
View ArticleClik here to view.
107* Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)
Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created. Elizabeth, Jared and John...
View ArticleClik here to view.
108* Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck )
Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We...
View ArticleClik here to view.
109* Recall This Buck with Thomas Piketty (JP, Adaner)
Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
110* Novel Dialogue: Joshua Cohen (JP, Eugene Sheppard)
In this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning...
View ArticleClik here to view.
111* Samuel R Delany, Nevèrÿon and beyond (JP)
. John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went...
View ArticleClik here to view.
112 Earthsea, and other realms: Ursula Le Guin as social inactivist (EF, JP,...
To mark the publication of John’s book Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press, John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin’s “speculative...
View ArticleClik here to view.
113* David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)
Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
114 John Guillory Professes Criticism (JP, Nick Dames)
John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) visits RTB to discuss Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022, Chicago). He speaks with John...
View ArticleClik here to view.
115* Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation...
“My subject was not my inward self, but…the worlds within me.” John spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar. The topic? His marvelous new book about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
116 “We are all latecomers”: Martin Puchner’s Culture (JP, EF)
RTB listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)
In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The book relates...
View ArticleClik here to view.
118 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 1:...
“The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste” Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2:...
“What is mainstream shifts to the right every generation.” Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far...
View ArticleClik here to view.
120 Violent Majorities Roundup (Ajantha, Lori, JP)
Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode...
View ArticleClik here to view.
121* Ajantha Subramanian on the Caste of Merit (EF,JP)
Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
122 The Culture Trap, with sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)
In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of race, ethnicity, and education, and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores “ethnic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
123* Sheila Heti speaks about awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
124 The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)
NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race, begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
125*David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld
In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) “I feel the feathers softly gather upon My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings. Melodious bird I’ll fly above the moaning Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
126 E.G. Condé / Steve Gonzalez on Hurricanes, Fiction, and Speculative...
Sordidez, by E.G. Condé, Stelliform Press, 2023 In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
127* Helena De Bres on Life-Writing (JP, EF)
How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those...
View ArticleClik here to view.
128 Recall This Story: Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever’s “The...
We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB’ shouse sage, Steve...
View ArticleClik here to view.
129* Vince Brown, Vectors ( EF, JP)
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
130* Adaner Usmani, Racism as Power Relation (EF, JP)
Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality?Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power...
View ArticleClik here to view.
131 Shaul Magid on the Jewish Radicalism of Meir Kahane (JP, Eugene Sheppard)
“For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism.” Shaul Magid, Distinguished...
View ArticleClik here to view.
132* Policing and White Power with David Cunningham and Daniel Kryder
This June 2020 episode, 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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
133 Beri Marusic on Grief and other Expiring Emotions (Katie Elliott, JP)
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue conversation (Paige...
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg reading and discussing...
[this is the first half of the story; the second half can be found here] Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice...
View Article135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro’s “Miles...
{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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)
Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 202o, she spoke with John about how how self-help went from its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals dream, which makes them morally considerable (JP)
In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
138a. What Just Happened? Mark Blyth (An Existential Fight between Green and...
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
138b. What Just Happened? Vincent Brown (Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock)
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
138c. What Just Happened? David Cunningham (Herbert Hoover gave us Woody...
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
139 Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Foxcastle”...
Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall...
View ArticleClik here to view.
140* Octopus World: Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)
Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. His truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) Metazoa...
View ArticleClik here to view.
141 The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life (Yuval Evri, JP)
Avi Shlaim, is a celebrated “New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel’s relations with the Arab world. Most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
142* Greg Childs on seditious conspiracy (EF, JP)
What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
143 Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on long-distance Israeli...
Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB’s Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak...
View ArticleClik here to view.
144 Violent Majorities 2.2 Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance...
Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
145 Violent Majorities 2.3 Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS, JP)
John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
146* Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early...
Peter Brown‘s fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in...
View Article