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 »
Category Archives: Scholars
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 »