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 »
Category Archives: Scholars
Episode 253: David Oshinsky
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 »
Episode 240: Peter Gilliver
“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 »
Episode 239: Joshua Freeman
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 »
Episode 226: Dan-el Padilla Peralta
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 »
Episode 166: Anthony Appiah
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 »
Episode 125: Azar Nafisi
Born in Tehran and educated in Switzerland and the University of Oklahoma, thus setting some kind of record for cultural contrast, she taught English literature at Tehran University and is now a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Like millions of admirers, I first heard of her with the publication of … Continue reading »
Episode 111: Peter Singer
His book Animal Liberation constructed an ethical framework for the animal rights movement. His ideas about euthanasia, altruism and world poverty have inspired both protest and acclaim – overwhelmingly the latter when we spoke at the Princeton Public Library. Plus, for your dancing and philosophizing pleasure, music from Jefferson Hamer. PERSON: David Oppenheim PLACE: Balliol … Continue reading »
Episode 89: Annette Gordon-Reed
During our first season, I was fortunate to have Annette Gordon-Reed on the show. Born in Livingston, Texas, in 1958, she teaches both law and history at Harvard. Her book The Hemingses of Monticello won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The day before we were to record, her person, the writer Christopher Hitchens, died after a … Continue reading »
Episode 27: Eric Foner
Historian Eric Foner is particularly admired for his writing on reconstruction. His most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, won pretty much every prize going including the Pulitzer and a—can this be right?—Cy Young Award. Probably a typo. He is our only guest to have written for robots, revising the scripts … Continue reading »
Episode 23: David Nasaw
A history professor at the CUNY graduate center, David Nasaw knows his two-fisted titans of 20th C. America. He’s written much praised biographies of William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie and, most recently, Joseph P. Kennedy. By the way: not a bootlegger. Kennedy. Well, Nasaw isn’t either. As far as we know. But he is a … Continue reading »
Episode 14: James Shapiro
James Shapiro is a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University. His newest book is Contested Will. PERSON: Ulysses S. Grant PLACE: A book warehouse on Long Island THING: A stone wall in Vermont Continue reading »