There’s a friendly hour’s conversation here about racial matters and moods. It’s been going on in a bookstore for about 35 years. What’s new this time, late in the portentous year of 2021, is first, ...

Mark Blyth is the butcher’s son from Dundee, now the American professor of political economics, still with the Sean Connery burr in his voice. Sounds like a working stiff; seems to think like one. Not ...

Glasgow on the Clyde is not the end of the story, but you can see the end from Glasgow: it’ll be more “blah, blah, blah,” says Greta Thunberg, the merciless teenage critic the world has ...

Boston politics has taken a turn. The Last Hurrah was 65 years ago – the classic obituary novel about those noisy Irish rascals who ran City Hall for much of the twentieth century. That era ...

This show was originally broadcast on March 11, 2021. The CRISPR challenge is back—first to grasp, then how to apply the biggest scientific breakthrough of our century so far. You remember CRISPR: nature’s own repair ...

Prison time can be the strangest interval in a long life: it is experienced, year by year, as a slow-burning hell on earth, often revalued later as productive, enlightening, redemptive turn-around time. Chris Hedges has ...

Jonathan Franzen might just be the last of the fine-grained, big-book portraitists of “the way Middle America lives”—specially the intimate deceptions that family relations are made of. Franzen is a realist with an edgy American ...

Who else could be said to make you smarter, just listening to the sound of his music? Only Mozart, that we know. For 300-and-some years now, he has set the standard for whatever lies beyond ...

Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their countries, at the level of Mark Twain, say, Voltaire, or Emerson! In his ...

It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we said, was our test for the age of viruses. At summer’s end the ...