The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle these debates but provokes more questions. We have lost our way, it seems, since people on all sides invoke free speech and then try to silence those they disagree with. Historian Fara Dabhoiwala of Princeton University reminds us that free speech has always been contested, and that it became a political and social value only recently. We invited him to discuss his new book What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

Dabhoiwala examines how free speech started as a risky and radical concept, and how it evolved through centuries of political battles to become central to democracy only at a certain point in history. As Professor Dabhoiwala explains, speech rights have come and gone long before campus protests, debates over what talk show hosts can say, and whether there ought to be limits to speech that’s defined as dangerous, offensive, or unpatriotic. If we hope to find a way out of our current predicament, we should study this history carefully – with Professor Dahhoiwala as the perfect guide.

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Step into the unsettling world of E.T.A. Hoffmann with translator Peter Wortsman to explore “The Sandman”—a tale that haunted Freud enough to spark his famous psychoanalytic analysis of “The Uncanny,” examining familiar things that unsettle and disturb us for no clear reason. What makes this bizarre story so deeply disturbing, even today? And how does Hoffmann’s genius, in all of his writing, continue to shape the way we think about the unfamiliar, and the blurry line between human and machine? Our guest for this show is New York-born Peter Wortsman, a renowned translator of Kafka, Kleist, Musil and others, playwright, and author, whose travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin won the Independent Publishers Book Award.

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Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Ham’s Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores the friendship of an ape and his trainer to examine what we do with animals in the name of progress. Drawing on careful research and echoing the existential questions of Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” Ham’s Heaven takes us on a journey that is as thrilling as deeply moving—a testament to the bonds that define us, and the progress that so often divides us.

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What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides, Strevens explains the remarkable success of science’s “irrational” method to settle debates, regardless of philosophical, religious, or aesthetic preferences. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—our host Uli Baer’s all-time favorite non-fiction book—, Karl Popper, and others, Strevens shows how science became the most effective tool for uncovering the secrets of nature.

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How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to have hope in dark times, and how political hope differs from naïve optimism, faith in progress, or passive reliance on a hidden logic that will save us in the end. Goldman, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Principle of Political Hope (Oxford University Press, 2023), where he reveals hope to be an indispensable aspect of much continental and American political thought, especially in the works of Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Ernst Bloch, Richard Rorty, and others. Our conversation on Goldman’s study of hope ends with three concrete lessons to counter hopelessness, cynicism, and despair.

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We need Emily Dickinson’s startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinson’s poetry, to explore some of Dickinson’s poems in an extra-long podcast. “It’s astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still ‘awed beyond my errand’ by how Dickinson’s poems let us experience something viscerally, at the edge of comprehension,” Cameron remarks in this conversation that forgoes clichés and favors critical acumen. By closely considering a few poems, Cameron explains how Dickinson speaks from placeless places and from within experiences outside of language, how her poems create wonder, and how her poems link without merging the mundane, the erotic, and other incommensurate dimensions of life. Sharon Cameron’s book include: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre; Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles; and, most recently, The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago University Press, 2024), on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens.

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What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by “experts,” influencers, and gurus. But these one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain. 

In How to Fall in Love With Questions, Elizabeth Weingarten finds inspiration in a few famous lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and then takes this insight – to love the questions themselves – to modern science to offer a fresh approach for dealing with the uncertainty in our lives. What if our questions—the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose—are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with seemingly unsolvable questions, not as a quick fix but to deepen our sense of being fully alive. Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of others, including a part of my own story after the events of 9/11 in New York City when I first turned to Rilke’s letters, to chart a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty.

Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions challenges us to unlock our minds and embark on the kind of self-discovery that’s only possible when we feel most alive—that is, when we don’t know what will happen next.

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British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the inner workings of Parliamentary politics. I spoke with Ruby Lowe about how today’s conception of free of speech emerged during the English Civil Wars, the intimacies between political adversaries in these debates, and how Milton’s crucial role in this media revolution informs his most seductive literary characters, including the devil, God, Adam, and Eve.

Dr. Ruby Lowe is a Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne and the John Emmerson Research Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, in Australia. Her forthcoming book is The Speech Without Doors: John Milton and the Tradition of Print Oratory.

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The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this podcast, recorded live at the New York Institute of the Humanities, Michael S. Roth, the long-time President of Wesleyan College, explains how he navigates sharp disagreements on campus, what he means by “safe enough spaces,” and how to understand what is happening on campus in relation to our democracy.

Michael S. Roth is the 16th president of Wesleyan University, since 2007. Formerly president of California College of the Arts (CCA), Roth is known as a historian, curator, author and public advocate for liberal education. His many books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014); Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (Yale University Press, 2019); and The Student: A Short History (Yale University Press, 2023). This conversation was recorded with a live audience at the New York Institute for the Humanities, which is directed by Eric Banks and hosted by the New York Public Library. I want to thank Eric Banks for the invitation to speak with President Roth, and the fellows of the New York Institute for a lively discussion included here.

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What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche’s work that help navigate today’s concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time.

Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist’s Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia.

Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold.

Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast:

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