Episodes

  • 138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)

    138c Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie (with David Cunningham)
    Nov 23 2024
    Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (U California Press, 2005). His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory. David's vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George ("Segregation....forever") Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory. Notes of hope? Well, David has faith in extant political institutions and even bureaucracy (long live the deep state) to blunt the force of Trump's onslaught; movement politics of the left may also prove capable, as they were in the 1930's of rising up in response to a ferocious successful mobilization on the right. You can also listen to earlier conversations with Vincent Brown and Mark Blyth. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    24 mins
  • 138b Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock (with Vincent Brown)

    138b Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock (with Vincent Brown)
    Nov 22 2024
    Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture. What exactly happened and will happen? Well, Vince has sympathy for Bernie Sanders Boston Globe op-ed about the Democrat's neglect of working-class and Gabriel Wynant's "Exit Right" abut the need to remake left-wing politics. He also takes seriously Thomas Piketty's theory of the rise of "Brahmin Left". That's a topic explored in the Recall This Book series on the Brahmin left ( Jan-Werner Muller, Matthew Karp and Thomas Piketty). Any hopeful note to end on? Well, bad government breeds righteous opposition. From Ronald Reagan we got...Minor Threat and the Bad Brains. Tune in tomorrow to hear John speak with David Cunningham; the previous conversation, already up on New Books Network, was with Mark Blyth. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    21 mins
  • 138a An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)

    138a An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)
    Nov 21 2024
    Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins
  • 137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals Dream and That Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)

    137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals Dream and That Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)
    Oct 31 2024
    In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just YouTube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. So, David discusses with John his interest in using dreaming as a window into consciousness. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams... David details the "flattening and impoverishing effect on the natural sciences" wrought by 20th century behaviorist paradigms. He also expresses skepticism about the likelihood of AI ever achieving more than a "zombie" state; it now and perhaps always will profoundly differ from animals' varied experiences of our shared world. The biological commonality that most strikes David is the idea it is logically inconceivable that there might be a dreamer devoid of consciousness or sentience. Dreaming, he argues may be the key to acknowledging animal's "moral considerability"--the right to have their consciousness, sentience and in the deepest sense their standing taken into account. . Finally David admits to a feeling of tragedy in writing this book: he has had to engage with experimentation that crosses boundaries in animal treatment in order to make the case for those boundaries. He understands his decision as tragic because either way--to engage or to ignore the science--would be to lose something. Mentioned in the episode: New Wave of "inner space" SF authors who focus on the alien nature of humanity itself: J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and John's hero Ursula Le Guin. Recallable Books: Susana Monso, Playing Possum a newly translated book on the ways that animals mourn their beloveds. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals (both 1872) are two of the crucial 19th century texts begin to think of animals as complete subjects. That makes Darwin an early theorist of biosemiosis. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 mins
  • 136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)

    136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)
    Oct 17 2024
    Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring. Mentioned Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing (2019) Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k (2016) Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…. (1997) Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (2012) New Thought (philosophy? religious movement?) Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859) Orison Swett Marden, How to Succeed (1896) David Riesman et al. The Lonely Crowd (1950) Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1945) Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (1982) Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. (2007; concept of”self-belabourment”) Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019) Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2015) Recallable books Epictetus, Handbook (125 C.E.) Sheil Heti, How Should a Person Be (2012) Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904) Read Here: 38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    30 mins
  • 135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)

    135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)
    Oct 4 2024
    You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here. Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction. When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke. Mentioned in the episode Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse." The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him. Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded. "When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral) Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962 Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion? Head on over to Part 1 of episode 135. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 mins
  • 135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)

    135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)
    Oct 3 2024
    Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction. When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke. Mentioned in the episode Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse." The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him. Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded. "When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral) Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962 Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion? Head on over to Part 2 of episode 135. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 mins
  • 134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue Conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)

    134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue Conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)
    Sep 19 2024
    Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.” Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.” Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to Novel Dialogue's traditional "signature question": A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six. Mentioned in this Episode: By Anne Enright: The Gathering (2007; Booker Prize) The Forgotten Waltz (2011) The Green Road (2015) The Portable Virgin Taking Pictures Yesterday’s Weather Granta Book of the Irish Short Story Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood No Authority Also mentioned: Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking about This Sally Rooney on the social life of the young on the internet, e.g. Conversations with Friends Christopher Hitchens, “Booze and Fags:” Transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    45 mins