Think About It
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Think About It
Think About It engages today's leading thinkers in conversations about powerful ideas and how language can change the world.
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143 episodi
Free Speech 72: What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala
The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle...
Book Talk 69: Uncanny E.T.A. Hoffmann with Peter Wortsman
Step into the unsettling world of E.T.A. Hoffmann with translator Peter Wortsman to explore “The Sandman”—a tale that haunted Freud enough to spark hi...
Book Talk 68: Ham’s Heaven with Ori Gersht
Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Ham’s Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores...
Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to unde...
Book Talk 66: Political Hope, with Loren Goldman
How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to...
Book Talk 65 Emily Dickinson, with Sharon Cameron
We need Emily Dickinson’s startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on...
Book Talk 64 How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty
What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by “experts,” influencer...
Free Speech 71: Ruby Lowe on John Milton’s Definition of Free Speech
British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous...
Free Speech 70: Michael S. Roth on the Rise of Student Protests, the Fall of Some College Presidents, and Why Liberal Education Matters
The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this...
Book Talk 63: Nietzsche Now! with Glenn Wallis
What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Gre...
Book Talk 62: Stefanos Geroulanos on "The Invention of Prehistory"
What does it mean to be human? What do we know about the true history of humankind? In this episode, I spoke with historian and NYU professor Stefanos...
Book Talk 61: Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H.L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"
A century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior...
Book Talk 60: Cleo McNelly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"
Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American l...
Free Speech 69: Campus Misinformation with Bradford Vivian
State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: u...
Book Talk 59: Reading the Classics with Louis Petrich
Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian...
Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman
What Is to Be Done?
In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this q...
Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)
Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at ho...
Book Talk 56: Roosevelt Montás on "Great Books"
Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture...
Book Talk 55: Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"
Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 18...
Book Talk 54: Anne Fernald on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"
Halfway through Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith mutters to himself: "Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication.” It’s easy to wr...
Book Talk 53: Paul Edwards on Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark"
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and in the for...
Book Talk 52: Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"
When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of ex...
Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde
Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his hea...
Book Talk 50: John Waters on James Joyce's "Dubliners"
James Joyce’s 1914 collection of fifteen short stories, Dubliners, is righty considered one of the greatest literary achievements of Western modernity...
Book Talk 49: “The Good Life” with Dora Zhang
“The good life” and “the American Dream “remain powerful animating principles in popular culture, politics, and also our individual psyches. I spoke w...
Book Talk 48: Charlie Louth on Rainer Maria Rilke
Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such p...
Book Talk 47: Wendy Lee on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"
Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice delights, charms and entrances reader since its anonymous publication in 1813. The Bennett sisters need to mar...
Book Talk 46: Marlene Daut on the Haitian Revolution in Literature
To learn more about the Haitian Revolution in fiction, I spoke with Professor Marlene Daut specialized in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American...
Book Talk 45: Paul Mendes-Flohr on Martin Buber's "I and Thou"
Today we talk a lot about a need for genuine dialogue, and for conversations across partisan divides and differences. What is a true, authentic, and m...
Book Talk 44: Samantha Hill on Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt's 1967 essay on "Truth and Politics" centers on the uneasy relation between truth-telling and politics. Lying has always been part of p...
Book Talk 43: Mark Wunderlich on Rainer Maria Rilke
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the order of angels?" This angsty cry opens poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies -- one of the greatest p...
Book Talk 42: Rafael Walker on Kate Chopin's "The Awakening"
Kate Chopin's absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who questions her life choices, an...
Great Books 41: John Collins on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"
The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels ever written and a masterpiece of American fiction. Midwesterner Nick Carraway spends a summer on Long...
Great Books 40: Mary Chapman on Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance"
The first Asian American writer to publish stories in the US, Sui Sin Far could have “passed” for a white woman but during a time of intense Sinophobi...
Great Books 39: Robert Dale Parker on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, the first known Indian poet, and th...
Great Books 38: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams,...
Great Books 37: J. Gerald Kennedy on Edgar Allan Poe
To understand Poe, inventor of the detective story, tales of terror, and progenitor to Hitchcock, Stephen King and much of Netflix's programing, I spo...
Great Books 36: Doon Arbus's "The Caretaker"
Something different today: I was lucky to speak with writer Doon Arbus about her debut novel, The Caretaker, published September 2020 by New Direction...
Great Books 35: Susan Weisser on Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the great love stories of all time, but it's also the story of a woman who speaks her truth even whe...
Great Books 34: Vivek Chibber on Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto"
Marx has never left us. In our era of populism, political polarization, and the pandemic, concerns central to Marx such as economic inequality, the co...