An episode from 1/12/2026: Tonight, I read from the oldest religious poetry from India, the collection of 1,028 ritual hymns known as the The Rig Veda. Specifically, I read from the most popular story found there, the defeat of the serpent Vrtra by the god Indra and the freeing of the waters of the world.

I begin by telling the story briefly and then sharing examples of the short references to it that are scattered all over the Rig Veda (from hymns 1.51, 1.56, 1.57, 2.19, 4.17, 4.30), which in themselves are indications as to how well-known the story was. Finally, I read a handful of hymns (1.32, 1.80, 4.19) in their entirety that tell the story in different ways.

The translation and commentary I read from is by Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton; it took years to find a good and decently priced used copy of these volumes, but I would recommend them to anyone interested in Hinduism, poetry, or religion.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 1/5/2026: Tonight, I read a handful of passages from Gilbert Muller’s William Cullen Bryant: Author of America. During his lifetime, Bryant (1794-1878) was the most popular poet in America as well as one of the country’s most trusted and influential editors and journalists.

Through Bryant’s own words and those of his contemporaries, I trace the story of that double-prominence, and the unease many felt over the fate of Bryant’s poetry against the pressures of politics. I also address how, since his death, Bryant has become almost entirely unknown and unread.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 12/28/25: What was it like to know Shakespeare, to stand in the theater and watch one of his plays, to be a neighbor who knew him as a teenager? What was it like to pass through London as a student or visitor or diplomat, and note in passing that you saw Shakespeare’s plays, or read one of his poems? So much of Shakespeare’s life is lost to us, but over the centuries his biographers have gathered the memories and rumors and legends that grew up around him, and tonight I read a few of them. They comes from Peter Ackroyd’s ⁠Shakespeare: The Biography⁠, which is easily the best book about Shakespeare and creativity that I’ve ever read.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: ⁠Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire⁠, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include ⁠Notes from the Grid⁠, ⁠To the House of the Sun⁠, ⁠The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old⁠, and ⁠Bone Antler Stone⁠. I've also edited a handful of books in the ⁠S4N Pocket Poems⁠ series.

Email me at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

An episode from 12/15/25: Tonight, I read from Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. In light of the events in Australia yesterday, I take the time not just to talk about what it meant to be a Jewish immigrant to America around the year 1900, but what it means to me to be a Jew right now.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 12/8/25: Note: A version of this episode was posted last week and quickly taken down when I realized the audio quality was poor. I have rerecorded it here; apologies to those listeners who heard the subpar version.

Tonight, I read from John Eliot’s Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. Gardiner talks about Bach’s Christian faith, how much we can expect listeners today to know about liturgical context of his music, as well as his intense attachment to the writings of Martin Luther. He also asks a fairly mundane question about Bach’s book-buying habits that humanizes the usually distant-seeming Bach quite a bit.

I open the episode with a quote from the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Bryant was also a newspaper editor, and he once wrote to a friend who was concerned how this work would affect his poetry, “I do not like politics any better than you do; but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation.”

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 12/1/25: Tonight, I read from John Eliot’s Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. Gardiner talks about Bach’s Christian faith, how much we can expect listeners today to know about liturgical context of his music, as well as his intense attachment to the writings of Martin Luther. He also asks a fairly mundane question about Bach’s book-buying habits that humanizes the usually distant-seeming Bach quite a bit.

I open the episode with a quote from the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Bryant was also a newspaper editor, and he once wrote to a friend concerned about how this work would affect his poetry, “I do not like politics any better than you do; but they get only my mornings, and you know politics and a belly-full are better than poetry and starvation.”

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 11/24/25: Tonight, I read from one of the best books on religion in ancient Egypt, Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Few have written so lucidly on the subject: Egyptians were actually obsessed with life and its renewal, not in wallowing death; the “monotheistic” reforms of Akhenaten were not visionary at all, but largely practical and pretty brutal; the essence of Egyptian religion was its ability to go on and on, adding to its own profuseness wherever it could, and resisting systemization and dogmas at every turn; and so on.

I open the episode with a quotation about William Blake from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of him.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 11/17/25: Tonight, I read a section from David Anthony’s book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. It is a wonderfully written account of the archeological and linguistic attempts to discover the origins of the Indo-European language families. The part I read from retells the famous story of Sir William Jones, the Welsh linguist and lawyer stationed in British India in the late eighteenth century, and the eureka moment he had upon realizing that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek (and so many other languages) are related. Anthony also sums up the political, nationalist (and, eventually, simply racist) uses to which this discovery was put.

I open the episode with some small remarks on Johann Sebastian Bach, and an anecdote found in Christoph Wolff’s Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 11/10/25: Tonight, I talk about literacy and education in the ancient world, both the fascinating aspects of memorization and of what “reading” meant back (it was much closer to reading shorthand today), and the precarious reality that anyone who underwent scribal training in Mesopotamia or Egypt might not even live long enough to see their education through. The book I read from is David Carr’s Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature.

I also begin the episode with a small passage on the life of CIA spymaster James Angleton, from Tom Mangold’s biography of him, Cold Warrior. What other podcast would combine these two into one satisfying episode?

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].

An episode from 11/3/25: Tonight, I read what is perhaps Walt Whitman’s greatest poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I also set it in the context of Whitman’s life as a poet: he wrote and published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 and was certain that the book would have an immediate cultural and national impact. When this didn’t happen, and while Whitman was preparing the second edition of Leaves of Grass only a year later, part of his response is expressed in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”—whose original title was “Sun-Down Poem.”

Here is the most vivid and memorable expression of what I’ve called Whitman’s Mystical Poetry, where he connects readers past and present with his own life. Rarely has an artist’s experience of disappointment and loneliness (and sense of wish-fulfillment) produced something like this.

I read from the first published edition of the poem, which can be found here.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.

Email me at [email protected].