Zionism has been the question that keeps changing. Once it was: How to build a safe home for the Jews of the world? Today its more nearly: How to build a safe neighborhood around the ...

Were on a hometown spree along the famous Fenway in the heart of Boston. Fenway Park is where the Red Sox play, John Updikes lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Fenway Court, built around the ...

Were taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Bakeryes, the multifarious writers writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the pacifist historian of World War II in his book Human Smoke; hes

Were sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: its a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for it

The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. Hes here to tell us all that were in a 40-year ...

Were calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first centurycould she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitlers Germany and Stali

Were going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, were enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but shes more than ...

We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dantethough he fled the writing of prose for the l

The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project ...

Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as ...