He did much of the research for What it Took to Win: a History of the Democratic Party, in the Manuscript Reading Room at the Library of Congress. “I don’t believe in heaven, but, if there’s a heaven for historians, this would be right in the center of it.” Plus some thoughts on the late Richard Hofstadter … Continue reading »

The Wall Street Journal’s language columnist plays with our format, offering Word Word Word – and more elegantly still, the same word for each segment: orange. Then he makes a painful disclosure: “I myself am color-blind, and so I’m not completely attuned to all the nuances of it.” Hey, Beethoven was deaf, and he got the … Continue reading »

An esteemed historian (This Republic of Suffering) and president emeritus of Harvard, she suggests that the widespread misuse of “disinterested” to mean “uninterested” rather than “objective” reflects a broad undervaluing of objectivity, open-mindedness, and intellectual honesty. Seldom has so bleak an insight given me such delight. Continue reading »

The author of How to be a Stoic describes that philosophy’s central precept: “We should live according to nature.” Happily, this demands less involvement with squirrels than you might think. A conversation at the Society for Ethical Culture, with music from David Gracia, Margaret Determann, and Barbara Carlsen. Continue reading »

Holland’s seventeenth-century emphasis on trade rather than conquest helped build a culture of tolerance: everybody’s money is good. The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers a sort of moral defense of capitalism in a conversation at the Fraunces Tavern Museum: look out the window and see what he’s describing. Music from … Continue reading »

She burst onto the scene with The Gnostic Gospels – and aren’t you glad there’s a scene onto which a historian of religion can burst? A rare scholar who speaks lucidly to civilians like me, she is the author most recently of Why Religion?.  Music from Stephanie Coleman. Continue reading »

Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle; Donald Trump had Roy Cohn. A look at some teacher-student relationships by a Pulitzer-winning historian, director of medical humanities at the NYU School of Medicine. Music from Amiri and Rahiem Taylor. A conversation at NYU Langone Health. Produced with Dr. Ruth Oratz. Continue reading »

“It’s the short words that are the hardest,” he tells the English Speaking Union. Love? Death? No. Shorter. Run and go. “I worked on the verb to run and it took me nine months, and one of my colleagues spent over a year on the verb to go.” Life at the Oxford English Dictionary, plus music from … Continue reading »

Until the 1920’s, a diagnosis of diabetes was a death sentence. The invention of insulin changed that, and – not incidentally – saved his life. It also made him value the social stability needed to produce it. A conversation with this professor of history at Queens College, author of Behemoth: A History of the Factory … Continue reading »

  As a child, he loved the Coney Island Aquarium but, “as with all good things, eventually one develops very complicated feelings.” Is the aquarium a benign collection of wonders or a shameful treasure-house of imperialism? And either way, how’s the gift shop? A conversation at the Princeton Public Library with the classicist and author … Continue reading »

  Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah elegantly summarizes the problem of human knowledge: “There’s nothing that you must know, and there’s too much that’s worth knowing.” So how do you decide what to read next? Or should you just grab a six-pack and head for the beach? A conversation at the Princeton Public Library, with songs … Continue reading »