The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

Episodes

• Lapham’s Revolutionary America: Jill Lepore and Gordon S. Wood 03.07.2026 1h 24m

  “What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse Americahad become. We’ve got Frenchmen, we’ve got Spaniards, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Irish, we’ve got all these different Scots, how are we going to hold together? We’re not a nation. Lincoln says, Well, we have an answer to that, and it’s that good old Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal.”  On June 7 of this year, news came that the American historian Gordon S. Wood had died at the age of 92. In commemoration of him, this episode presents in its entirety a conversation Wood recorded with Lewis H. Lapham in 2017 about Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, draws from archival conversations that Lewis H. Lapham recorded with scholars and historians of the American Revolution, occasionally complementing those archival conversations with new ones. As introduction to the series, this episode begins with an excerpt from a 2018 conversation about These Truths, Jill Lepore’s single-volume history of the U.S. It concludes with an audio version of “‘As Though They Were Blood of the Blood’: Jefferson’s Declaration and the Problem of American Identity,” an essay adapted from the foreword Gordon S. Wood wrote to Ted Widmer’s new book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Lapham's Revolutionary America [Teaser] 30.06.2026 3m

  A series from The World in Time, beginning Friday, July 3, 2026. Voices heard here: Lewis H. Lapham, Jill Lepore, Gordon S. Wood. Illustration: The 1795 flag that flew from Fort McHenry and inspired Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Michael Pollan on Consciousness 26.06.2026 1h 9m

  “We have language. That’s the best tool we have for understanding the consciousness of another,” says Michael Pollan on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You can go pretty far with it, as Proust himself showed, but that is, in the end, the function of art: to translate one consciousness into another. That’s the only way we know how to do it right now, and it’s pretty powerful, but there’s still a remnant, some residue that can never be translated. Even Proust, who wrote millions of words and was a great believer in the power of words, said consciousness is not a verbal construction. He didn’t think that consciousness was made of words. The visual arts can tell us things, too. A Rothko painting conveys so much consciousness. That’s the importance of art—helping to ferry us from one island of consciousness to another.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Michael Pollan, award-winning author and journalist, about his new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, in which Pollan explores one of our most complex and enduring mysteries: the “hard problem” of consciousness. Initially, he seeks the headwaters of consciousness in neuroscience, computer science, and in science that bridges computers and biology, but, midway through the book, and midway through this episode, suspecting that “third-person” science might be inadequate to the mystery, he looks elsewhere—to philosophy, literary history, the arts, and, as his journey ends, to Buddhism. The ad-free, unabridged version of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a bonus segment, an audio version of an essay on animal consciousness, by John Jeremiah Sullivan, that originally appeared in the Spring 2013 Animals issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Whither the Humanities? (With Zena Hitz, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and D. Graham Burnett) 12.06.2026 2h 4m

  “What in God’s name are the humanities,” Lewis Lapham asked in a commencement address he delivered at St. John’s College in 2003, “and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?” His answer—the humanities are not luxuries akin to “the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach” but liberating necessities—harmonizes with the answers proposed by the three guests on this special, two-part episode of The World in Time, which commemorates the anniversary of the Quarterly’s revival. Today’s three guests are all scholars—“card-carrying, old-school metaphysical humanists”—who have dared to do what Lewis Lapham did nearly two decades ago: launch a nonprofit that brings the humanities and the arts into the American agora, the public square.  Zena Hitz, tutor at St. John’s College, is the founder of the Catherine Project, a nonprofit that, through online seminars and reading groups, makes the study of “the great books” available for free to all. She is joined by two returning guests: Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, editor of the Substack magazine The Hinternet, and founder of the Hinternet Foundation, which seeks to “steward humanism into a machine-driven future”; and D. Graham Burnett, Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. A member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, Burnett is also the co-founder and director of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which offers to the general public courses and workshops that “deepen our shared understanding of attention’s relation to human flourishing.” In part two of today’s two-part episode, available for free and in full on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Hohn and Hitz add a new conversation to our intermittent and ongoing series of conversations about Moby Dick and the history of the sea, discussing the “The Doubloon,” chapter 99 of Melville’s novel. Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,”Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” and Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Francine Prose on Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen 05.06.2026 56m

  “Everyone expected this comet to hit and obliterate England in 1857,” says Francine Prose in this episode of The World in Time. “So a lot of the novel is about the pressure from this belief or non-belief that the comet is going to hit. And of course, Dickens, who’s sort of scientifically minded, dismisses it immediately. And Andersen, who is romantic—paranoid, fearful, the whole list of things which would make you believe you’re about to be obliterated by a comet—is completely convinced and can’t really accept Dickens’ attempts to reassure his household that this is not going to happen.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, editor at large of Lapham’s Quarterly, about her new novel Five Weeks in the Country, which, mingling historical fact with fiction, narrates five disastrous weeks that Hans Christian Andersen spent with Charles Dickens and his family in the summer of 1857. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Mary Beard on the Classics 22.05.2026 1h 6m

  “Fifth-century Athens still lingers even for us, and it’s a mythical golden age,” says Mary Beard on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And we imagine that all we can do is count ourselves lucky to be the inheritors of the Greek Miracle, all of the things that the Greeks invented: democracy, philosophy, and theater, among much else. I struggled with that when I was at university because it was almost cliché to say that the fifth- and sixth-century Athenians invented democracy, which is simply not true. It doesn’t take much to say, ‘Look, democracy isn’t like the iPhone or the steam engine.’ It isn’t invented in that way. Democracy is a process and people have been experimenting with that process all over the world–not just in Western Europe–for thousands of years.”  This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Mary Beard, best-selling historian and professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, about her new book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. “What is the point of the ancient classics?” Beard asks in the book’s introduction. “Why should we bother about what people did two thousand years ago or more: what they made, wrote, and thought? What can it all mean to us now?” In the chapters that follow, and in this episode of The World in Time, she shares her best answers, drawing from her own lifelong, wonder-struck study of the ancient world See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works” 08.05.2026 58m

  “‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think about what I read, what I write, and what I experience in life. It’s always about these three words. And you cannot separate them in a very clear way.”  This week, in a return of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and essayist Yiyun Li, author most recently of Things in Nature Merely Grow, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, about “The Try-Works,” chapter 96 of Melville’s novel, in which Ishmael teaches readers how to render whale blubber, falls asleep at the Pequod’s jawbone tiller, and, upon awakening, flies like a “Catskill eagle” into and out of the “blackest gorges” of the soul. The chapter’s closing paragraph is, to Li’s mind, possibly “the most gorgeous paragraph written.”  Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” and Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Adrienne Mayor on Geomyths 24.04.2026 55m

  “The oarfish is not only extremely long—I think they can be 20 feet long—but they have a very narrow, undulating body. They’re silvery, but they have a red crest all along their back. It really looks exactly like the sea monsters in ancient Greek vase paintings,” says Adrienne Mayor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It looks like an oarfish guarding the Golden Fleece. They live in very deep water, and they have fragile bodies. And if there’s an earthquake under the ocean, they’re damaged and they wash up on shore—that’s the only time most people see an oarfish, and it would look like a stereotypical dragon.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with folklorist, classicist, and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor about her new book, Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore. In 53 alphabetically arranged essays about “legends of the earth,” or “geomyths,” Mayor’s compendium draws upon oral traditions from all over the world and upon “historical and scientific discoveries that shed light on the remarkable phenomena featured in the legendary stories”—phenomena such as tsunamis, meteor impacts, lethal lakes, perpetual fires, fish that rain from the sky, and sand dunes that sing.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Robert Moor on Trees 10.04.2026 1h 27m

  “The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.”  This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Philip Hoare on William Blake and “Monstrous Pictures of Whales” 27.03.2026 1h 24m

  “The leviathan is both positive and negative,” says Philip Hoare on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The image is almost yin and yang: there is the behemoth, kind of a hippopotamus-elephant-rhinoceros, and the leviathan, which is a sea serpent, but has elements of a sperm whale skeleton that Blake had actually seen. So there is this struggle for good and evil. He acknowledged that you have to have heaven to balance hell and vice versa. But it seems the balance has been interrupted by the sea and he is too close to the power of the ocean.”  In this week’s two-part episode, Donovan Hohn speaks with Philip Hoare, author, most recently, of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Their conversation, like the book, is a séance that channels many ghosts—the ghosts of writers such as John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde; the ghosts of artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, Derek Jarman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andy Warhol, and Paul Nash; the ghosts of a great many historical and cultural figures. David Bowie and John Waters both make memorable appearances. But the conversation’s presiding spirit is artist, printmaker, poet, and proto-punk prophet of freedom William Blake. Part two of the episode resumes our intermittent and ongoing series on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the history of the sea. While considering Blake’s influence on Melville, Hohn and Hoare linger over chapter 55, “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”  Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Anne Fadiman on Essays, Personal and Historical 13.03.2026 1h 8m

  “An 1833 review of the only book of poetry Hartley Coleridge published in his lifetime praised the verse for embodying ‘no trivial inheritance of his father's genius,’ but also observed, ‘It is an old saying that the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.’ I have long been interested in what makes some oaklings thrive and others wither, because, in a minor way, I’m an oakling myself. My father was a critic and an essayist. My mother was a war correspondent. The upside of this print-smudged parentage was that I was raised in a home with seven thousand books, plenty of literary conversation, and empirical evidence that writing was something you could actually do for a living." This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist Anne Fadiman about the history of the essay since Montaigne and the art of making essays out of history; about teaching essay-writing to college students; and about what Virginia Woolf called “the Common Reader.” The conversation addresses the title essay—about a pet frog named Bunky—of Fadiman’s new collection, Frog and Other Essays, but Hohn and Fadiman spend the most time with two other essays—one that originally appeared in the Family issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, on poet and essayist Hartley Coleridge, who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, Samuel Taylor, and one first published in the Harvard Review, about the South Polar Times, a magazine whose editors, contributors, and original readers were all members of the polar expeditions led by Robert Falcon Scott. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Morgan Meis on Three Painters (Rubens, Marc, Mitchell) 27.02.2026 1h 23m

  “Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Because you’re going deeper into the painting.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist and critic Morgan Meis, author of a trilogy of books about the history of art, civilization, war, and much else. In The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Meis investigates a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. In The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy (2022), he turns to a masterpiece Franz Marc painted in 1913, three years before his death during the Battle of Verdun. And in The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood (2025), Meis explores Joan Mitchell’s The Grand Valley, a series of twenty-one paintings that Mitchell made between 1983 and 1984. Like the books, the conversation spirals outward into history and inward into the paintings under examination, all the while putting these three artists into conversation with other artists, writers, and philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Degas, Klee, and Monet, among others. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on the Offshore World 13.02.2026 1h 6m

  “The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going every hour,” says Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “But, basically, a free port is an island, a cordoned-off piece of land, where the rules are not the same as outside. In economics and history, we sometimes talk about onshore and offshore. Onshore and offshore don't really refer to shores or land. They just refer to legal regimes. A free port will be offshore, and if you walk ten feet through a gate, you’re back onshore. It’s fiction. It’s a legal construct.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. Their conversation charts and explores the offshore archipelago of freeports, detention facilities, and other extraterritorial zones with which over the past few centuries—on land, on sea, in space, on islands encircled by water and islands encircled by fences, within the borders of nation states and beyond them—we’ve stitched together our global economy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Episode 22: James Romm on Plato and Tyranny 30.01.2026 1h 10m

  “It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all,” says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “There are three or four different factions, each with their own military wing, competing for control of Syracuse. Plato is watching all this from Athens in what must have been a state of horror, because he understands he was partly to blame, or at least that some people were blaming him for what was taking place. And the Seventh Letter—by far the longest, most detailed, the richest source of evidence for my story—is extremely defensive in an effort to extricate Plato from this morass.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with James Romm, historian and classicist, about his new book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece. The conversation follows Plato on three journeys the philosopher made to Syracuse, the Greek city on the island of Sicily. There, during the reign of Dionysius I and then again during the reign of Dionysius II, Plato attempted to put philosophy into practice. Although his efforts to turn tyrants into philosopher kings ultimately failed, although Syracuse fell catastrophically into political terror and civil war, the history of Plato’s involvement in the city’s politics can, Romm argues, complicate and deepen our understanding of The Republic. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Episode 21: The Friends of Attention 16.01.2026 1h 15m

  “The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “For instance, giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and other human beings, properly understood, that’s human attention. It also involves daydreaming and taking care of a child and burying your dead—those are attentional activities. It’s been hard for us to keep track of that fact about ourselves as we have increasingly asked ourselves to be more and more seamlessly integrated into these continuous, twenty-four seven data flows and communication entertainment networks. We worry about machinic attention—that it is inextricable from the way we feel bad; that there are authentic pandemics of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, despair; and that our politics is weirdly fractious and dysfunctional.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with D. Graham Burnett, historian of science, and Alyssa Loh, writer and filmmaker, about a new book, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, collectively authored by Burnett, Loh, and other members of the Friends of Attention (among them Peter Schmidt, program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention). The Friends of Attention are a coalition of artists, writers, and scholars committed to liberating human attention from the extractive technologies of the “attention economy.” Hohn, Burnett, and Loh discuss the history of, and possible remedies to, the attentional crisis that Attensity! diagnoses and describes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Encore Episode: Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams 02.01.2026 46m

  “I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.” In this encore episode from 2022, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Episode 20: Charles King on Handel's “Messiah” 19.12.2025 1h 17m

  “Handel gets to Dublin and he’s trying to put together musicians, he’s looking for singers and lo and behold, there is Susannah Cibber who has turned up in Dublin to try to restart her career at exactly the time that Handel is there,” says Charles King in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Handel enlists Cibber in the cast, but she doesn’t read music. Anything she sings has to be plunked out on the harpsichord for her. The place of the premiere is at a charitable event; it’s going to support the indigent and folks in the hospital, the jail—it is not in a cathedral. The premier of Messiah is not even in a church but in a music hall and this new music hall is also trying to develop its own reputation. There were some well-established, very famous theaters in Dublin. This is not it. This is an up-and-comer but they’ve booked Handel for this new piece of music that he’s going to premiere.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Charles King about his new book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. King recounts the history—both sacred and profane, but mostly profane—of the composer’s most famous oratorio, tracing its humble origins and eventual fame to series of unlikely collaborations. Among Handel’s collaborator’s: King George I, King George II, the actor Susannah Cibber, choristers from the church run by Jonathan Swift, and Charles Jennens, the depressive heir to an iron fortune who conceived of the Messiah and compiled the devotional libretto that Handel set to music influenced by Italian opera. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Episode 19: Jeremy Eichler on “Time’s Echo” 05.12.2025 1h 20m

  “When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Episode 18: Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe 21.11.2025 1h 9m

  “Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, about Greenblatt’s new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, a history of the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, cobbler’s son turned gentleman-scholar, turned spy in Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, turned playwright and poet who collaborated with Shakespeare. In Greenblatt’s telling, Marlowe’s career, cut violently and mysteriously short, is almost as improbable and tragic as that of his most famous creation, Doctor Faustus. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
• Episode 17: Queequeg and Ishmael in Love (with Alexander Chee, Aaron Sachs, and Caleb Crain) 07.11.2025 2h

  “There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.” In an extended, three-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this episode of The World in Time considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Novelist and essayist Alexander Chee joins Donovan Hohn to talk about chapter four, “The Counterpane,” in which Queequeg and Ishmael, having just met, spend the night together. Melville scholar and historian Aaron Sachs closely reads the ideological, philosophical, political, and ecological implications of chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” wherein we find Ishmael and Queequeg tethered to each other by a hemp line, Ishmael aboard the Pequod, Queequeg balancing perilously atop the carcass of a slaughtered whale. Finally, novelist Caleb Crain goes swimming around in the Platonic mysteries of chapter 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Both Chee and Crain propose that the entire novel, dedicated to Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.