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Fall RTB Lineup: Writers, Scholars, Auteur
The RTB crew were busy over the summer. Like an iceberg (although not quite as cool….maybe more like a duck) most of what we do lurks beneath the surface, invisible and inaudible. Getting Cixin Liu’s...
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15 In Focus: Zadie Smith (JP)
In this episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. Zadie’s horror at the idea of rereading her own novels opens the show; she can more easily imagine rewriting one (as John’s...
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15x Afterthoughts on Zadie Smith (John and Elizabeth)
Zadie Smith touched down at Brandeis because Swing Time was this year’s New Student Book Forum selection. It made for a busy day: on top of the podcast, she spoke to faculty and undergraduates at two...
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16 de/industrialization with Christine Walley (EF and JP)
On a blustery fall morning, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands...
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17 In Focus: Mike Leigh (JP)
The British filmmaker Mike Leigh puts the move into movies: he never stops changing, never stops inventing. In nearly 50 years of filmmaking, he has ranged from comic portrayals of ordinary life amid...
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18 Fictional Empathy. Rita Felski and Namwali Serpell (with JP)
John travelled to Odense, Denmark for a conference called “Love Etc.” (RTB is for it…) and fell into this conversation about empathy, identification and “uncritical reading” with the novelist Namwali...
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19 Scientists, collaboration, and groupthink with Albion Lawrence (EF, JP)
In this episode John and Elizabeth sit down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why...
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20 The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)
John sits down with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus to discuss her latest book, The Drama of Celebrity, a tour-de-force argument about how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly...
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21 Silvia Bottinelli: Food, Art, Food Art!
Not long after Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to the wall, John and Elizabeth met with Silvia Bottinelli from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to talk about food as art and art as food. Silvia...
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22 Ajantha Subramanian: Meritocracy, Caste, and Class (EF, JP)
Ajantha Subramanian‘s new book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. John and...
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9* Women in Political Power, with Manduhai Buyandelger (Rebroadcast, in honor...
As we prepare our mini-season on the history of money (Recall This Buck) we dive back into the archives for our very first Rebroadcast. And our first asterisk, too: was that the right symbol to use?...
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23 Recall This Buck 1: Chris Desan on Making Money (EF, JP)
This is the first of several RTB episodes about the history of money. We are ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. Our idea...
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Books in Dark Times: What Are You Reading?
My own thoughts nowadays turn–surprise, surprise–to Hannah Arendt. She has this to say in her unforgettable 1968 book, Men in Dark Times: “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect...
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24 RTB Books in Dark Times 1: Alex Star (JP)
“Books In Dark Times” takes its inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, which proposes “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such...
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25 RTB Books in Dark Times 2: Stephen McCauley (JP)
On March 20th, John talked to Stephen McCauley, author of such brilliant comic novels as Object of My Affection (also a Jennifer Aniston movie) and most recently My Ex-Life. Steve brings light to dark...
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26 RTB Books in Dark Times 3: Plotz/Ferry
For the third installment of Books in Dark Times, inspired by our global moment, Elizabeth and John turned inward. We started with a book that you might not think would be so comforting, Daniel...
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27 RTB Books in Dark Times 4: David and John Plotz
Aside from being John’s (younger, brighter, handsomer–and definitely hirsuter) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books...
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A Book in Dark Times: Albert Camus, “The Plague”
I recognize that hearkening back to Albert Camus in our own post-existentialist moment is controversial. Heck, calling him controversial may even itself be controversial. He’s long struck many as a...
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28 RTB Books in Dark Times 5: Seeta Chaganti (JP)
Seeta Chaganti, medievalist extraordinaire (Strange Footing and The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary) joins John to discuss–wait for it–data visualization in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois,...
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29 RTB Books in Dark Times 6: Kim Stanley Robinson (JP)
Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and, most celebrated of all, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. His honors...
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