“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale,” writer Wyatt Mason says in this episode of The World in Time. “It’s astonishing as you’re reading through. It’s proof of two kinds of life. It’s proof of the life of the creature itself. But it’s also proof of the life of the mind and the attention that we pay—meaning, we readers and we writers pay—through time to this creature, which is very different from the elephant because most of us never see one in our lifetimes. If we’re fortunate, we might, but for the most part, no. So they reside or they live in texts.”

With this episode, the second in an intermittent series on the literature, history, and science of the sea, The World in Time launches onto the waters of Moby Dick. The episode begins with excerpts from a pair of conversations Lewis Lapham recorded during his final years as host. First, Lapham speaks with Richard J. King about his 2019 book, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. In the second excerpted interview, recorded in 2022, Lapham talks with Aaron Sachs about Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. The episode concludes with a new conversation. Wyatt Mason and Donovan Hohn talk about the first time they read Moby Dick, about teaching Melville’s novel to incarcerated students enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative, and then, like a pair of sub-sub-librarians, they swim through two curious documents, “Etymologies” and “Extracts,” that precede the famous first sentence of Melville’s tragic Leviathan American novel.

“In a famous episode, he says his name is Nobody, which in a way is obviously a lie,” says writer, scholar, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn in this episode of The World in Time. “But in another way is sort of true because he has become a nobody, right? And another way to describe the sort of narrative arc of The Odyssey is: he has to go from being a nobody and reclaim his identity and be a somebody again. So, the question of the nature of identity—you know, he’s been changed by twenty years of aging, by trauma, by terrible suffering, and yet when he gets home, he has to ‘prove,’ quote-unquote, that he is the same person who left. And that, I think, raises one of the most fascinating questions of the epic—and this speaks to something we know about from our own lives—which is: is there a part of you that remains the same despite the changes that we undergo in life? And that’s the sort of paradox, I think, that’s at the center of the poem. Everybody changes in twenty years, and yet you feel the same in many ways. The Odyssey delves into these very profound questions.”

This week’s episode of The World in Time is the first in a series of episodes about The Sea (Summer 2013). Donovan Hohn speaks with Daniel Mendelsohn about his new translation of The Odyssey, traveling back to antiquity in search of the origins of the Homeric epic. Then, in archival audio from 2013, editorial board member Aidan Flax-Clark interviews Lewis H. Lapham about his childhood reading of Moby-Dick, about Lapham’s greenhorn voyages, and about a doomed shipwreck hunt in the early 1960s that Lapham wrote about for The Saturday Evening Post.

“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, and you have people, at least going back to the Paleolithic, consuming these. But you don’t have the system of commodities that makes drugs a particularly modern phenomenon. And what happens as they are commodified—which you could also describe in the same way as saying what happens as they are transformed into drugs, as ayahuasca, for example, is transformed into a drug—is that they’re pulled out of the cultural and ritual context in which they had once made sense, and turned into intoxicants, turned into substances, the purpose of which is to remove you from the burdens of your life.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn revisits the topics of Intoxication (Winter 2012) and Disaster (Spring 2016), speaking first with Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of the forthcoming book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, about the history of drugs and the history of California; about trips, long and strange, good and bad; and about Smith-Ruiu’s experiments—in philosophy and literary nonfiction as well as in psychopharmacology. Later in the episode, Hohn speaks with poet Rachel Richardson about California on fire; about the ways technology gives us a distorted, fishbowl view of disasters, natural and otherwise; about the documentary poetics of C.D. Wright; and about the classical Greek poetic form of the cento, two contemporary examples of which Richardson shares from her new collection, Smother.

“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be able to develop a reputation as a real writer. And that’s something he really wants, too. And arguably, his breakthrough—which I argued that he achieves in the West first—is coming to recognize that those two aren’t mutually exclusive, that that’s a false choice, that he can actually do both, and do both quite well, and that what he thought was a weakness could be a strength.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode all about Mark Twain. First, he speaks with Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, about how Twain’s time in the far West shaped his indelible literary voice and helped give birth to stand-up comedy. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan about why Twain appears to be undergoing a cultural revival, and about how tracking Twain’s travels in newly-digitized archives led to Sullivan’s discovery of a lost Twain eulogy—and its lost writer, Adele Amelia Gleason. Finally, to conclude the episode, Sullivan shares with World in Time listeners yet another long lost passage, this one written by Twain himself, which Sullivan recovered while searching through a database of digitized Indiana newspapers.

“They would take you around, introduce you to all of their contacts, translate for you, and help you put together the story,” says scholar-journalist Kira Brunner Don in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And I often felt like, you pay them, of course, a day rate, but there was this understanding that real news was made by American journalists who flew in and told you what was what. All of us were depending on journalists from the country, or writers from the country, who knew it far better than we did and really had the context and the sensibility. But there was this unspoken rule that they’ll be biased. I really felt like I wanted to create something that instead focused on the actual voices of the people who live in the countries we’re covering.”

This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode. First, he speaks with Kira Brunner Don, former executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, about the making of our first issue, States of War, from Winter 2008, and about the magazine Brunner Don edits now, Stranger’s Guide. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with Nathan Brown, translator of Verso’s new dual-language edition of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, about the history of Baudelaire’s magnum opus. Brown gives us a guided tour of “Recueillement,” the Baudelaire poem read at Lewis Lapham’s memorial service, which Brown has translated anew for Lapham’s Quarterly, under the title “Introspection.”

“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the city had given it to artists and designers and said, You can live there, don’t burn it down. And so they carved out these incredibly beautiful spaces for themselves. But this was before the tech revolution, when the Mission was still kind of wild and free, and it wasn’t all the glass cubes and people in tech. It was a great city to live in then. There was a kind of freedom there. Certainly compared to what I’d come from. My good fortune was that I wasn’t around a lot of hippies giving acid to two-year-olds. The book takes place during the Vietnam War. We went out and protested McNamara. My husband was the one who scaled the Pentagon, the walls of the Pentagon. We were very idealistic. Maybe unrealistically idealistic, but hey, I’ll take it.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, author of 1974: A Personal History, about the San Francisco she remembers from her youth, about her relationship with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Tony Russo, about the final defeat of 1960s counterculture, and about the eerie echoes of Prose’s favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

“Lewis was always engaging with some important piece of literature from the past,” says historian and classicist Emily Allen-Hornblower in this episode of The World in Time, edited from audio recorded at the memorial service held for Lewis H. Lapham in September 2024. “You can be chatting about the insanity of the current political landscape and quickly things would shift to how history repeats itself, how humanity simply does not learn. And Thucydides or Cicero would rear their heads. To quote Cicero, ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ Lewis understood that without the past, we lose the ability to think productively or even understand the present. He made himself a warrior for the humanities, putting up a splendid fight on behalf of the arts and letters. ’Til the end.”

In this second of two episodes this week, we are joined once again by Lewis, first in the tributes and remembrances of his friends and colleagues and then in his own voice. Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis introduces the proceedings. Former Harper’s Magazine literary editor Ben Metcalf recalls Lapham the mentor. Emily Allen-Hornblower reads from Homer and Baudelaire. Actor Alec Baldwin reads Mark Twain’s essay “At the Funeral.” Actor Christopher Lloyd performs Prospero’s epilogue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Producer and director Sandy Gotham Meehan shares a letter by Flaubert. In audio from our archives, Lewis Lapham reads from “’Round Midnight,” his preamble to Music, the Fall 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.

“I’m an essayist, not a podcaster,” says Lapham’s Quarterly acting editor Donovan Hohn, “but then the same could be said of Lewis, who took the form and the medium of the podcast and did with it what he’d done all of his adulthood: have conversations with people whose voices he wished to hear. Seasoned listeners to The World in Time may rest assured that similar conversations will resume shortly. This episode, my first behind the microphone, won’t be a conversation, but it will be a duet. I’ll be sharing the microphone some with Lewis Lapham.”

This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts two episodes devoted to the life, career, and memory of our founding editor, Lewis H. Lapham. In this first episode, Hohn announces the Quarterly’s plans for Summer 2025, shares excerpts from a keynote address Lapham delivered at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011, pays tribute to Lapham the essayist, and gives an account of the months preceding and following Lewis’ death in July 2024.

“The Greeks knew that many problems have no solution,” journalist Robert D. Kaplan says on this episode of The World in Time, about his inspiration for writing “The Tragic Mind.” “They knew that leaders and people in their daily lives often face only bad choices. And yet the world at the same time is beautiful. The Greeks could admit a beautiful world and that the world ultimately could not be fixed. In this book, I define tragedy not as the triumph of evil over good, or the common misfortunes of life that we all face, or vile crimes against humanity…Tragedy is about the difficult choices that we all make between one good and another good where, whichever you choose, you will cause suffering.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Robert D. Kaplan, author of “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power,” about his career reporting on wars and revolutions around the world, the myth of American exceptionalism, and what ancient thinkers like Euripides understood about thinking tragically.

Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Among Shakespeare scholars,” journalist Elizabeth Winkler writes at the beginning of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” “the Shakespeare authorship question—the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name—does not exist; that is, it is not permitted. As a consequence, it has become the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. In literary circles, even the phrase ‘Shakespeare authorship question’ elicits contempt—eye-rolling, name-calling, mudslinging. If you raise it casually in a social setting, someone might chastise you as though you’ve uttered a deeply offensive profanity. Someone else might get up and leave the room. Tears may be shed. A whip may be produced. You will be punished, which is to say, educated. Because it is obscene to suggest that the god of English literature might be a false god.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Elizabeth Winkler, author of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” about the history of the authorship question and the writers and scholars who have clashed over doubting the Bard.

Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.