The Way We Live Now

Author Simon Winchester explains how he came to write the life of Joseph Needham, the British scientist who became fascinated by China's culture and history. He recollects his encounter with Needham's multi-volume epic, 'Science and Civilization in China,' and explains how he came to narrate Needham's extraordinary life journey from his early interest in languages and biology to his profound influence on the Western perception of China. This recording was made in 2009, at an event in New York hosted by the National Committee on US-China Relations in conjunction with publication of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China by NCUSCR member Karen Christensen.

We are re-releasing this podcast because it was recorded over the phone with Congressman Seth Moulton, who was actually at the U.S. Capitol one week after the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. Remarkably, he took the time to speak to me about trains while he was on his way to vote on the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Seth Moulton is still a congressman in Massachusetts, a straight-talking politician we're lucky to have representing us, upholding democracy and US values. In the podcast, you’ll hear Congressman Moulton’s conviction about the role that trains, and high-speed trains, can play in the future of the United States. This interview helped inspire us to launch the new Train Time podcast and newsletter at Substack.

Is a restaurant a third place? Can it be one? Mark Firth, known for the restaurants he cofounded in Brooklyn and now owner of the Prairie Whale in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, explains the rewards and challenges of creating a welcoming social space as well as dishes made with locally grown ingredients. Mark left Brooklyn to farm in the Berkshires, then bought a building on Main Street Great Barrington and turned it into an attractive and lively eatery. He also explains how he and others in the food industry deal with seasonality and cranky customers, and with alcohol. This show will be of interest to diners and to anyone in the food and beverage industry.

Show Notes

“The Restaurateur Who Helped Build an Empire—and Gave It All Up

Prairie Whale Restaurant, Great Barrington, Massachusetts

After her death by suicide in 1963, the young American poet Sylvia Plath became a feminist icon, a mythically brilliant and doomed figure. Her last poems, published after her death in a format edited by her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, established her reputation and made her a commercial success, but it was her tumultuous personal life, rather than her work, that got most attention. Hughes became known as the philandering husband of Sylvia Plath as well as poet, and poet laureate. Why, however, all these years later, are biographers and critics still writing about her? Carl Rollyson argues that Plath’s greatness as a poet has been overshadowed. In this podcast, he explains to Karen Christensen, a Plath skeptic, how he is setting the record straight in a series of books about Plath.

Carl Rollyson is a prolific biographer as well as a critic who writes and podcasts extensively about the art of biography. His next book is Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History (University of Virginia Press). Read more about him here.

CarlRollyson.com

Amongst Carl’s books about Plath:

The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2: 1955-1963

The most recent and most comprehensive biography of Ted Hughes is by Jonathan Bate. Here is Carl’s review.

Karen Christensen welcomes fellow lifetime literature students Bob Blaisdell and Kia Penso (Class of ’81) for a feast of fandom on the writing of Anthony Trollope. Blaisdell and Penso have been fans of Anthony Trollope since they first read his work as literature majors at UC Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies. They talk about what makes Trollope’s novels so engaging: the courage of his female characters; his humor; the ease and suppleness of his narrative voice. Their conversation touches on Trollope in history and in relation to other literary eras and places, never losing sight of the uniqueness of this singular author’s character, vision, and artistic practice. They also talk about another Trollope fan, Marvin Mudrick, and what they learned about reading, and life, from that remarkable teacher.

Bob Blaisdell is the editor of The Wit and Wisdom of Anthony Trollope (Blackthorn Press) and of dozens of Dover anthologies of literature. He's the author of Creating Anna Karenina and Chekhov Becomes Chekhov (Pegasus), biographical studies of Tolstoy and Chekhov in the midst of their creative works, and Well, Mr. Mudrick Said … A Memoir (Berkshire Publishing Group). He lives in New York City and teaches at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY).

Kia Penso grew up in Jamaica, and as a freshman at the University of California at Santa Barbara was led by luck into the classroom where the literary critic Marvin Mudrick taught the writing of narrative prose. She was admitted to UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, and there she became a literature major for life. She has a PhD in English from UCSB and a MS in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She writes about literature and about the Caribbean. She supports her reading, writing, and painting habits by editing reports for large international financial institutions. Kia believes that everyone should have the right and the opportunity to develop creatively at any time in life.

Writing and directing a film about Plymouth after World War II led to Jill Craigie’s marrying Michael Foot, a major figure in 20th-century British politics. Craigie’s biographer Carl Rollyson tells the illuminating story of a first lady of the back bench. “She was a William Morris socialist. And what I mean by that is socialism wasn't just abstract ideas. You know, people should be equal or there should be, you know, free public health or things. She was a William Moore socialist, which meant you had to try to make every day beautiful. The plates you ate on, the clothes you wore, the house you lived in, anything you could do on a daily basis was part of her socialism.” He discusses the consequences of Jill’s being raped by the writer Arthur Koestler, a friend of Foot’s and a literary “great man,” which was kept secret for decades.

Carl Rollyson is a prolific biographer as well as a critic who writes and podcasts extensively about the art of biography. He is writing a book about presidential biographers that I am very much looking forward to, and we’ll be doing another podcast about his biographies of Sylvia Plath (not a favorite of mine, so I’m eager to hear why he keeps coming back to her).

To be a Woman is available as an ebook, in paperback, and as an audiobook read by Helen Lloyd.

Carl and I spoke about Jill Craigie and women’s biographyon Carl’s podcast, too. You can listen here.

Jonathan Watts, global environment writer at the Guardian, introduces James Lovelock, the maverick British scientist whose life story is told in The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory. Lovelock was 101 years old when he began collaborating with his biographer. He talked about his work for the British secret services as well as NASA and Royal Dutch Shell, and about the brilliant women he had collaborated with and been inspired by. In the conversation with Karen Christensen, who published Lovelock’s own encyclopedia account of the Gaia Theory, Watts explains that “Jim was somebody who was able to appeal to an extraordinary spectrum of people in these polarized times. It's hard to imagine somebody who had an appeal on the left, on the right, with scientists doing very, very deep, groundbreaking science, particularly in atmospheric chemistry, but who was also able to appeal almost as a green guru to new age thinkers. That spiritual side, embracing and immersing yourself in nature, is also a very important part of appreciating and wanting to care for the environment.”

The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory is published in the UK by Canongate , and in the US by Greystone Books. Review: “A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair.” Jonathan Watts is The Guardian's global environment writer and a founder and editor of Sumaúma.com, a trilingual newsletter based in the Brazilian Amazon.

Today’s interview is with Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University in Philadelphia, whose book Everything but the Coffee includes a chapter about Starbucks’s claim to provide us with third places. As he tells it, the Starbucks story is also our story, the story of human aspirations and fears, illusions and delusions. It tells us about the limits of American influence, and about the way we’ve taken comfort in green-washing instead of tackling environmental issues head-on. It’s the story of how a corporation can build its brand on the mere idea of community and sociability. “Starbucks has come to own our expectation of what a coffee shop is. What I would argue is that Starbucks, in distorting the notion of third place, made it even harder for us to find…. When we're arguing over whether a Starbucks store is a third place, when that's the argument, we've lost.”

Diplomacy expert Richard Higgott discusses “The Strongman Problem” in terms of what it means for the collective problem-solving required to deal with war, climate change, pandemics, cyber-insecurity, and economic inequality. This means that traditional international relations research needs to look beyond institutions and policies to consider the impact and personality types of individual leaders, male and female, in order to reckon with the danger posed by today’s “strongmen.” He points out, for example, that zero-sum “strongman” leaders tend to prolong wars and violence. This conversation took place shortly after the 2024 election of Donald Trump in the US, when Professor Higgott was in Hungary, a country led by one of Trump’s fellow “strongman” leaders.

Just weeks after the COVID-19 shutdown here in Massachusetts, at the end of March 2020, Ray Oldenburg and I were interviewed for a Boston radio segment about the loss of third places. Journalists would find Ray via his publisher or the university, and he’d been passing them along to me. That was, to my knowledge, the last time a journalist was able to interview Ray, and you can hear him in this brief clip.