“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.

“When you start looking at deeper, more accurate history,” writer Jared Yates Sexton says in this episode of The World in Time, “you start to realize that a lot of what we have learned through conventional history—and this is in public education, best sellers, documentaries, and television shows—a lot of the history that we have gotten is actually mythology. Take a look at the American Revolution. One of the things that you have been taught for all this time is that it was some sort of spontaneous passion of liberty and freedom in which all Americans turned against Great Britain. And, of course, this is not true.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Jared Yates Sexton, author of “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ben Jealous, author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing, about Jealous’ personal history and his career, and how both inform what he makes of our current moment.

“I think the mood in 1860 would have a haunting familiarity to people today,” Edward Achorn says at the start of this episode of The World in Time, discussing the setting of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” “The politics in the country seemed to have broken down. People were talking at each other. They were no longer listening to each other. They were increasingly using violence or looking toward violence as a way to settle their differences. So the whole political system was breaking down…There was a long, protracted fight over the selection of a House speaker, which is normally a pretty much rote action. There was a view…that Washington had become this festering swamp full of elites who didn’t have any sort of connection with common people in America.” And it was in this moment that Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown figure, became a presidential candidate.

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ed Achorn, author of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.”

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.

“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.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.”

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.

“If there was one thing that I would want people to take away from American Midnight,” Adam Hochschild says on this episode of The World in Time, “it’s the idea that democracy, despite all the different checks and balances and the separation of powers and whatnot written into our Constitution more than two hundred years ago, is fragile. It can easily be shattered and broken. It can easily be threatened.” And during the stretch of time covered in his latest book, which spans World War I and takes place on the American home front, “I really think a lot of the basic democratic freedoms that we take for granted in this country we lost during that period.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, about civil liberties, strikes, and Emma Goldman, among other subjects.

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.