ThoughtCast®

ThoughtCast®

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ThoughtCast® episodes

  • Kwame Anthony Appiah: the Cosmopolitan Philosopher

    Note: Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the New York Times column, “The Ethicist”, has just won (in the summer of 2024) the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize. A high honor.

    This program was broadcast on WCAI, an affiliate of WGBH, Boston.

    In this interview from 2004, New York University Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism on ThoughtCast!

    Born in England and raised in Ghana, Appiah is half English and half African. And perhaps because of this, he’s fascinated with the concept of identity, and the power it wields over people. But rather than wage identity politics, Appiah encourages us instead to be good global citizens, interested in and accepting of each other. In short, cosmopolitan. But also, at least a little bit “contaminated”… Appiah’s written a book on the subject: it’s called Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

    Click here: to listen. (42 minutes)

    42 min
  • Harvard Critic Helen Vendler on Emily Dickinson

    Sadly, Helen Vendler has just died on April 23, 2024, at ninety years of age. I’m so glad I got a chance to meet her.

    Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, Prairie Public Radio, WABE in Atlanta and on KUT in Austin, Texas.

    When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson’s more famous poems. They’ve stayed with her over the years, and today, she talks with ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh about one poem in particular that’s haunted her all this time. It’s called I cannot live with You-

    According to Vendler, who has written the authoritative Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, it’s a heartbreaking poem of an unresolvable dilemma and ensuing despair.
    Click here (18 minutes) to listen!

    This interview is the first in a new ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing — be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus — that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them.

    Up next – esteemed novelist and short story writer Tom Perrotta discusses Good Country People,  a short story by Flannery O’Connor that’s particularly meaningful to him.

    19 min
  • Tales from Donegal, told in Kenny’s Bookshop

    Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas.

    In 1861 in Clonmany, on the Inishowen peninsula in the far north of County Donegal Ireland, Charles McGlinchy was born.  His was a windblown, rough world, wracked with beauty and hardship. A weaver by trade, and a bachelor, in his old age he realized he was the last of the McGlinchys, the last of his name. Night after night, he told his tale to an old neighbor, the schoolmaster Patrick Kavanagh, who wrote it all down. Patrick’s son Desmond found these copybooks after his father’s death, and offered them to Brian Friel, the renowned Irish playwright, who then edited the manuscript into a book called The Last of the Name.
    This same book is what Desmond Kenny, of Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway, chose to discuss in our interview. When asked to pick a piece of writing that’s had a tremendous impact on him, he wandered the rich shelves of the shop, musing over all the books he’s known and loved. We spoke after hours in the family run book shop, which recently celebrated its 70th anniversary.

    Click here: to listen to this ThoughtCast interview (18 minutes).

    19 min
  • Behind the Scenes at Law and Order

    https://youtu.be/QhGC2VP0ZHg?rel=0

    Watch the shooting of the Law and Order episode “Blood Libel” from its 6th season.

    The famous show featured Sam Waterston as Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, Jerry Orbach as Senior Detective Lennie Briscoe, Jill Hennessy as Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid, Benjamin Bratt as Junior Detective Rey Curtis, S. Epatha Merkerson as Lieutenant Anita Van Buren and Steven Hill as District Attorney Adam Schiff.

    This story was originally broadcast on WNYC TV.
    Click here to listen!

    4 min
  • Rediscovering James Joyce in Dublin with editor Maurice Earls

    Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin,Texas.

    James Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, and it was from Dublin that he fled as a young man, to Trieste, in order to write Ulysses, perhaps the key novel of the early 20th century.
    But before he left, he began to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, as most of us will remember, is a rite of passage not only for its main character, the sensitive, acute Stephen Dedalus (the alter ego for Joyce himself), but also for the impressed and impressionable reader.
    When I asked the scholar, bookseller and editor Maurice Earls to pick a piece of writing to discuss that’s had a tremendous impact on him, it was this novel that he chose.

    Just hours before an author event was to take place in his small, singular independent bookstore Books Upstairs, ThoughtCast spoke with Earls about “A Portrait” at length. The conversation brought me back to my own strong feelings about this book, which had a tremendous impact on me as well, many years ago.

    Click here (24 minutes) to listen!

    25 min
  • Charles Simic’s the choice at San Francisco’s Dog Eared Books!

    Sadly, since this interview was recorded, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has died at the age of 84.

    Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas.

    Kate Rosenberger is one of those rare people who collects independent book stores in San Francisco the way the rest of us collect antique door stops, or unusual African masks. Her most recent acquisition is Alley Cat Books, but she also owns Phoenix and Red Hill Books, and we met at Dog Eared Books, her fourth store, in the Mission district.

    When asked to discuss a piece of writing that’s had a profound impact on her, Kate chose Charles Simic’s poem Gray-Headed Schoolchildren. Born in Serbia, Simic came to the US as a teenager, but went on to write his poems in English, win the Pulitzer prize, and become the U.S. Poet Laureate. His poetry is often stark, perhaps reflecting his formative years, spent surviving World War II.

    Note: This interview is the sixth in a ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing — be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus — that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them. Prior interviewees include author Tom Perrotta, poetry critic Helen Vendler, and other independent bookstore owners – from Ireland!

    Click here to listen (11 minutes.)

    12 min
  • The History of the New England Forest
    The forests of New England are, remarkably, a success story. They’ve recovered from attack after attack. The early settlers hacked them down, by hand, for houses, fences and firewood. Later on, the insatiable sawmills of a more industrial age ate up the lumber needed for our expansion.
    11 min
  • The history and future of the New England Forest

    Note: an audio version of this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and by KPIP in Missouri.

    The forests of New England are, remarkably, a success story. They’ve recovered from attack after attack. The early settlers hacked them down, by hand, for houses, fences and firewood. Later on, the insatiable sawmills of a more industrial age ate up the lumber needed for our expansion.

    Today, the forests contend with acid rain, invasive plants and exotic beetle infestations — evidence of our ever more global economy. And the future of these forests? Going forward, that’s a story that’s largely ours to shape, and narrate.

    If only these trees could talk … Well, we have the next best thing – Donald Pfister, the Dean of Harvard Summer School, curator of the Farlow Library and Herbarium, a fungologist (the more erudite word is mycologist), and the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany at Harvard University.

    In this Faculty Insight interview, produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard Extension School, he tells the tale of the New England forest from as far back as the glacial Pleistocene era.
    To help illustrate this tale, we’ve made grateful use of high resolution images of some dramatic landscape dioramas, which are on display at Harvard’s Fisher Museum, in Petersham, Massachusetts.
    And finally, for an audio version of this story, click here: to listen (9:47 mins).

    10 min
  • The End of Our Universe among other timely topics…

    Note: this program was broadcast on WGBH‘s sister stations WCAI & WNAN, on Sept. 9, 2007, and picked up by KPVL, a Pacifica station, on July 2, 2013!

    Want to know how the world is going to end? Just ask Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. If it’s our own universe you’re talking about, well, it’s called the big crunch, and it’s going to be hot hot hot! But if it’s the multiverse, that infinitely expanding, infinitely varied and infinitely populated sea of universes, well, guess what — there is no end. Isn’t that reassuring??

    Vilenkin is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, and also the author of a new book, called Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. He’s also a former zookeeper. And – lest I forget – he was blacklisted by the KGB…
    Click here: to listen. (29:45 minutes)

    30 min

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