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Recall This Book is a podcast exploring important books on a pressing topic. Each episode focuses on a contemporary problem or event and zeroes in on a book or books that shed light on it. We look backwards to see into the future: we can understand things about the future by choosing texts that shed a sideways light on our present situation, and attempt to shake up the terms of present debate by showing how a topic was approached in earlier times when a different version of this question had come up before. We aim to have lively barstool discussions--a warm but involved and potentially argumentative hashing out of the best way to think through difficult present-day issues. We bring on writers to talk about their own books, or scholars to talk about the books that are helping them navigate best the world in which we live.
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Our Summer series on the Brahmin Left, winding down as Fall approaches, was inspired by our bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. It starts from the assumption that a major realignment (or, rather, a “dealignment”) from the class-based politics of the mid-20th century is underway all over Europe and North America–and perhaps worldwide. What caused … Continue reading "64 Brahmin Left 4: Adaner and John wrap up with Elizabeth"
Our Brahmin Left investigation was inspired by Adaner and John’s eye-opening interview with Thomas Piketty. Piketty maintains that Left parties have abandoned the working-class for an increasingly highly educated voter-base. This has turned (or perhaps only threatens to turn) Left parties all over the developed world from champions of egalitarianism into defenders of the privileges and … Continue reading "63 Brahmin Left 3: Arlie Hochschild (AU, JP)"
This new series on the Brahmin Left was inspired by Adaner and John’s bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. Piketty maintains that Left parties have abandoned the working-class for an increasingly highly educated voter-base. This has turned (or perhaps only threatens to turn) Left parties all over the developed World (US, Western Europe, Australia/NZ … Continue reading "62 Brahmin Left 2: Jan-Werner Müller (AU, JP)"
This new series on the Brahmin Left was inspired by our bracing but terrifying interview with Thomas Piketty. So what even is the Brahmin Left? There seems to be little disagreement that a major realignment (or, rather, a “dealignment”) from the class-based politics of the mid-20th century is underway all over Europe and North America–and … Continue reading "61 Brahmin Left 1: Matt Karp on class dealignment (AU, JP)"
Elizabeth is joined by Elizabeth Bradfield, poet, naturalist and professor of poetry at Brandeis, in a conversation with the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014). Sean read his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an … Continue reading "60 Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time (EF, EB)"
Iraj Pezeshkzad‘s My Uncle Napoleon is a slapstick and at times goofy love story, but it is also in the best tradition of sly anti-imperial satire. Scholar Pardis Dabashi came to it late, but she has all the convert’s zeal as she links it to a literary tradition that’s highly theoretical, but also delightfully far-flung. … Continue reading "59 Recall This B-Side #4: Pardis Dabashi on “My Uncle Napoleon” (JP)"
John’s favorite avocation is editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers resurrect beloved but neglected books. Now comes a book that collects 40 of these columns (the Washington Post review was a big thumbs-up, and John talked about the B-side concept on Five Books). This week’s B-Sider is celebrated American novelist Caleb Crain (Necessary Errors … Continue reading "58 Recall this B-Side #3: Caleb Crain on Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters” (JP)"
Given this podcast’s love of neglected books, you won’t be shocked to know that John has a side-hustle–in which Elizabeth plays a significant part. He edits a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers like Namwali Serpell and Ursula Le Guin sing praises to a beloved but neglected book. Now, there is a book that collects … Continue reading "57 Recall this B-side #2: Elizabeth Ferry on “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley'” (JP)"
RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting … Continue reading "56 Recall This B-Side #1: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”"
Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us. David Ferry, “Resemblance” The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from time to time, especially from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just … Continue reading "55 David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld"
Crossover Month continues with a scintillating Australian fiction episode from Novel Dialogue, a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. If you like what you hear, please share the love by recommending it to friends, tagging @noveldialogue in your tweets, and subscribing to it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher. Helen Garner … Continue reading "54 Crossover Month #3: Novel Dialogue with Helen Garner (Elizabeth McMahon, JP)"
Crossover Month continues with something completely different, and only a little bit incestuous. Novel Dialogue is a new podcast hosted by the awesome Aarthi Vadde of Duke, and RTB’s own JP. John and Aarthi serve as the third wheel (or if you prefer the social lubricant) for a scholar and a novelist who sit down … Continue reading "53 Crossover Month #2: Novel Dialogue (Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Robbins, JP)"
Kim Adams and Saronik Bosu share an office at the English department of NYU–and now they also share High Theory a podcast where you can “get high on the substance of theory.” Their lovable podcast always identifies a single manageable topic and asks three magic questions (what is your quest? is not one of them). … Continue reading "52 Crossover Month #1: “High Theory” and the Pastoral (Kim, Saronik, JP)"
Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Power … Continue reading "51 Recall This Buck 3: Thomas Piketty on Inequality and Ideology (Adaner, JP)"
Continuing our conversation on the events at the Capitol and the end of the Trump era, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is forthcoming from Cambridge. His historical … Continue reading "50 Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy; or, Why Words Matter"
We first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, he came back for an extended conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something … Continue reading "49 The Capitol Insurrection and Asymmetrical Policing: David Cunningham (EF, JP)"
The eternal challenge (obsession) of translation: “how not to get lost in translation”. However, the award-winning translator and literary scholar at Emory University Lisa Dillman suggests that we may be missing the truly challenging and exhilarating part of translation in this endless and “elitist” obsession. In fact, not “losing” original meaning may not be what … Continue reading "48 Transform, Not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation (PW, EF)"
What’s a picture worth? How about the picture that allows scientists to grasp what’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent … Continue reading "47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization (GT, JP)"
What do children love most about books? Leaving their mark on inviting white spaces? Or that enchanting feeling when a book marks them as its own, taking them off to where the wild things are? To understand childhood reading past and present, Elizabeth and John talk with the illustrious and illuminating book historian Leah Price. … Continue reading "46 Leah Price on Children’s Books: Turning Back the Clock on “Adulting” (EF, JP)"
In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John speak with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about his 2020 book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series … Continue reading "45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence"
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