Recall This Book

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? What do a badly characterized, racist novel and an imaginatively metaphoric biology article from the 1970s have to do with that? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth find out all of that and more in this discussion with Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley … Continue reading "Episode 11: Xenophobia and Ethno-Nationalism, 1973 to today (Quinn Slobodian)"

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? What do a badly characterized, racist novel and an imaginatively metaphoric biology article from the 1970s have to do with that? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth find out all of that and more in this discussion with Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley … Continue reading "11 Xenophobia and Ethno-Nationalism, 1973 to today (Quinn Slobodian)"

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Bonus!  Available only on our website,  Episode 10X includes a brief RTB discussion  about Exit Zero, a stunning “auto-ethnography” that raises fascinating questions about what it means when people retell stories or anecdotes about their own lives as a form of evidence that helps explain their overall worldview. Update: For more on autofiction, check out this essay on … Continue reading "Episode 10: Life, Writing, and Life Writing with Helena DeBres"

Bonus! Available only on our website, Episode 10X includes a brief RTB discussion about Exit Zero, a stunning “auto-ethnography” that raises fascinating questions about what it means when people retell stories or anecdotes about their own lives as a form of evidence that helps explain their overall worldview. Update: For more on autofiction, check out this essay on … Continue reading "10 Life, Writing, and Life Writing with Helena DeBres"

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Helena DeBres had so many brilliant insights about the ethics and the future of life writing that the final third of our discussion overflowed the bounds of our ordinary format. So we present that final conversation to you here as a bonus episode–well, episodelette. Elizabeth, John and Helena here discuss Christine J. Walley’s “autoethnography” Exit Zero: … Continue reading "10x Bonus! “Exit Zero” and Life Writing"

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Evita, Thatcher and HRC walk into a glass ceiling…In this episode, John and Elizabeth are joined by MIT anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger to discuss women in political power in Argentina, Mongolia, the UK, the United States and beyond.  At the conversation’s heart: Manduhai analyzes  the legacy  of “female quotas”  in Soviet-era politics, as well as … Continue reading "Episode 9: Women in Political Power; with Manduhai Buyandelger"

 Evita, Thatcher and HRC walk into a glass ceiling…In this episode, John and Elizabeth are joined by MIT anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger to discuss women in political power in Argentina, Mongolia, the UK, the United States and beyond. At the conversation’s heart: Manduhai analyzes the legacy of “female quotas” in Soviet-era politics, as well as … Continue reading "9 Women in Political Power; with Manduhai Buyandelger"

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We frequently worry that we live in a “distracted age.” But perhaps the human condition is always to live “almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another” (Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism”). Join John’s conversation with Marina Van Zuylen of Bard College. Van Zuylen, the author of The Plenitude of Distraction, makes … Continue reading "Episode 8: Distraction, a Conversation (Marina Van Zuylen and John Plotz at Harvard’s Mahindra Center)"

We frequently worry that we live in a “distracted age.” But perhaps the human condition is always to live “almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another” (Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism”). Join John’s conversation with Marina Van Zuylen of Bard College. Van Zuylen, the author of The Plenitude of Distraction, makes … Continue reading "8 Distraction, a Conversation (Marina Van Zuylen and John Plotz at Harvard’s Mahindra Center)"

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On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books.  Fresh on the heels of our conversation with Madeline Miller, author of Circe,  John Plotz has a talk with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble … Continue reading "Episode 7: Samuel Delany in conversation with John Plotz (Nevèrÿon, Triton, Gertrude Stein and more….)"