“It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all,” says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “There are three or four different factions, each with their own military wing, competing for control of Syracuse. Plato is watching all this from Athens in what must have been a state of horror, because he understands he was partly to blame, or at least that some people were blaming him for what was taking place. And the Seventh Letter—by far the longest, most detailed, the richest source of evidence for my story—is extremely defensive in an effort to extricate Plato from this morass.”

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“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “For instance, giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and other human beings, properly understood, that’s human attention. It also involves daydreaming and taking care of a child and burying your dead—those are attentional activities. It’s been hard for us to keep track of that fact about ourselves as we have increasingly asked ourselves to be more and more seamlessly integrated into these continuous, twenty-four seven data flows and communication entertainment networks. We worry about machinic attention—that it is inextricable from the way we feel bad; that there are authentic pandemics of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, despair; and that our politics is weirdly fractious and dysfunctional.”

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“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.”

In this encore episode from 2022, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.

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“Handel gets to Dublin and he’s trying to put together musicians, he’s looking for singers and lo and behold, there is Susannah Cibber who has turned up in Dublin to try to restart her career at exactly the time that Handel is there,” says Charles King in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Handel enlists Cibber in the cast, but she doesn’t read music. Anything she sings has to be plunked out on the harpsichord for her. The place of the premiere is at a charitable event; it’s going to support the indigent and folks in the hospital, the jail—it is not in a cathedral. The premier of Messiah is not even in a church but in a music hall and this new music hall is also trying to develop its own reputation. There were some well-established, very famous theaters in Dublin. This is not it. This is an up-and-comer but they’ve booked Handel for this new piece of music that he’s going to premiere.”

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“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, about Greenblatt’s new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, a history of the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, cobbler’s son turned gentleman-scholar, turned spy in Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, turned playwright and poet who collaborated with Shakespeare. In Greenblatt’s telling, Marlowe’s career, cut violently and mysteriously short, is almost as improbable and tragic as that of his most famous creation, Doctor Faustus.

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“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.”

In an extended, three-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this episode of The World in Time considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Novelist and essayist Alexander Chee joins Donovan Hohn to talk about chapter four, “The Counterpane,” in which Queequeg and Ishmael, having just met, spend the night together. Melville scholar and historian Aaron Sachs closely reads the ideological, philosophical, political, and ecological implications of chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” wherein we find Ishmael and Queequeg tethered to each other by a hemp line, Ishmael aboard the Pequod, Queequeg balancing perilously atop the carcass of a slaughtered whale. Finally, novelist Caleb Crain goes swimming around in the Platonic mysteries of chapter 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Both Chee and Crain propose that the entire novel, dedicated to Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.”

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“Religion gives people certainty and it gives people solace,” says Brenda Wineapple in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And according to

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Brenda Wineapple, longtime member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, about her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, which narrates and excavates the history of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. That case, tried and adjudicated in 1925, was, in Wineapple’s estimation, the “trial of the century,” pitting Clarence Darrow, the renowned labor lawyer, against William Jennings Bryan, the “boy orator” and three-time Democratic presidential nominee. As Wineapple’s book reveals, many of the conflicts that animated the courtroom drama in Dayton, Tennessee—between democratic majority rule and academic freedom, between the pursuit of scientific truth and the consolations of faith—are with us still, a century after the verdict in the Scopes trial was delivered.

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“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in,” says Elizabeth Kolbert in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “We are extremely tied up as humans for whatever reason. We have obviously evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place. We are surrounded by species that all have long and rich evolutionary histories. They also have extraordinary talents that we can only appreciate by actually learning something about them. That parasitic wasp—it’s just another sort of pesky wasp or whatever. But if you delve into its life cycle, you find that every species has its own form of genius.”

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“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab,” says novelist and critic Charles Baxter in this episode of The World in Time. “Like Ahab, he is speaking from a great height. He begins his sermon by issuing orders. He tells all the congregants to sit down. And, you know, they have to listen to him. What other choice do they have? But what is important to me in ‘The Sermon’ is that he—how can I put this? He is the person who wants to bring a sense of proportion. And Ahab is the person who wants you to give up any sense of proportionality. It’s almost impossible to put things into perspective with Ahab. Father Mapple kind of supplies a warning and a possible lens for a reading of the entire novel. What Mapple is saying in his sermon, starting from the Book of Jonah, is that we have to learn humility. It is no use to flee from God. God will find us. And the last paragraph of ‘The Sermon’ is one of the most beautiful things, I think, that Melville ever wrote.”

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