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“Hannah Arendt has been sanitized in a certain way now, as a kind of wise Jewish figure,” says Benjamin Moser on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In Germany, she’s probably the most read Jewish philosopher. Germany, with all its censorship of anti-Zionist viewpoints, has kind of adopted her. There’s a Hannah Arendt Strasse in every town in Germany. There will be, you know, a little statue of her as this nice Jewish lady. But this happens, unfortunately, to a lot of really explosive artists and writers. They get sanitized.”   Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. This series of conversations, A Broken World, attempts to make sense of both Arendt’s broken world and our own, and it addresses the controversies around her work by doing what every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly does—pluralize the voices.   In this third episode in the series, Donovan Hohn speaks with Benjamin A. Saltzman, professor of English at the University of Chicago, about his essay “The Silence of Agamemnon,” adapted from his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. In the second part of the episode, Hohn speaks with Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Susan Sontag, about his new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a portrait gallery of Jewish opponents and critics of Zionism, among them Hannah Arendt. The unabridged, paywalled version of the podcast, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes a segment on Ahmad Sadiq Saad and the Jews of Egypt.    Works Cited In order of mention.   I.F. Stone. “Holy War,” The New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967.   Benjamin A. Saltzman. “The Silence of Agamemnon,” Roundtable from Lapham’s Quarterly, Monday, October 19, 2026.   Benjamin A. Saltzman. Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026.   Benjamin Moser. “Appellation Texas contrôlée: The Bloody History of the Lone Star State,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2004.   Benjamin Moser. “New Books,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2009.   Sholem Aleichem. Wandering Stars. Translated by Aliza Shevrin. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.   Grigoris Balakian. Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918. Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.   Mahmood Mamdani. Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. New York: Doubleday, 2009.   C.P. Cavafy. Complete Poems. Translated and introduced by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.   Benjamin Moser. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.   Benjamin Moser. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: Ecco, 2020.   Benjamin Moser. The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters. New York: Liveright, 2023.   Benjamin Moser. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History. New York: Doubleday, 2026.   Benjamin A. Saltzman. Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.   Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages. Edited by R.D. Perry and Benjamin A. Saltzman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.   Hannah Arendt. On Revolution. Introduced by Jonathan Schell. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.   Hannah Arendt. “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, Winter 1959.   Fred Moten. “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain.” In The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.   Robert Penn Warren. Who Speaks for the Negro?. Introduced by David W. Blight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.   Ralph Ellison. “The World and the Jug.” In Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.   Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.   “Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts,” live at Olin Auditorium at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, October 28–29, 2011.   John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays. Edited by Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.   Lewis H. Lapham. “Revised Text,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2004.   Lewis H. Lapham. “The Road to Shaaraim,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1988.   Hannah Arendt. Men in Dark Times. Boston, MA: Mariner Books Classics, 1970.   Omer Bartov. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.  (Continued on our website.) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’”   Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. In her own times, the controversies sometimes tested Arendt’s friendships. Or shattered them. This series of conversations, A Broken World, attempts to make sense of both Arendt’s broken world and our own, and it addresses the controversies around her work by doing what every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly does—pluralize the voices.    In this second episode in the series, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jennifer Szalai, essayist and nonfiction book critic for The New York Times, about her article “Hannah Arendt is Not Your Icon,” and with Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, about his new book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, which examines the nature of friendship through the lens of Arendt’s biography and her thinking on the subject. On the unabridged, paywalled edition of the podcast available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Berkowitz and Hohn turn to the present-day implications of Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Truth and Politics,” first published in The New Yorker in 1967. WORKS CITED (In order of mention.)   Jennifer Szalai. “Hannah Arendt Is Not Your Icon,” New York Times, December 5, 2025.   Donovan Hohn. “Episode 39: A Broken World: Annie Dillard and Lewis H. Lapham.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 25, 2026.   Roger Berkowitz. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2026.   “Voices: On Hannah Arendt,” Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, October 6, 2026.   Curtis White, “Song of a Lost World,” Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, October 2, 2026.   Hannah Arendt. “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 18, 1967.   Hannah Arendt. “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, Winter 1959.   Hannah Arendt. “Zionism Reconsidered,” The Menorah Journal, Autumn 1945.    Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Introduced by Amos Elon. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.   Roger Berkowitz. “Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’,” New York Times, July 7, 2013.   Jennifer Szalai. “Buying Tomorrow,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2011: The Future.   “Remembering Lewis H. Lapham,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2024.   Raoul Peck, director. I Am Not Your Negro. Velvet Film, 2017.   Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Thomas Wild. New York: Library of America, 2025.   James Baldwin. “Autobiographical Notes.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.   Thomas Paine. Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. Edited by Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.   Jennifer Szalai. “How Empathy Became a Threat,” New York Times, July 18, 2025.   Donovan Hohn. “Episode 38: Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 11, 2026.   Adolf Eichmann. Memoirs: Part One. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2000.   “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” LIFE, November 28, 1960.   “Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II,” LIFE, December 5, 1960.   Bettina Stangneth. Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. Translated by Ruth Martin. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.   Isaac Chotiner. “Is Zionism’s Moral Crisis About Roads Not Taken—Or Original Sin?,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2026.   Hannah Arendt. “Eichmann in Jerusalem—I,” The New Yorker, February 9, 1963.   Hannah Arendt. “Eichmann in Jerusalem—II,” The New Yorker, February 16, 1963.   Deborah E. Lipstadt. The Eichmann Trial. New York: Schocken Books, 2011.   David Cesarani. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer.” Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006.   Margarethe von Trotta, director. Hannah Arendt. Heimatfilm, 2013.   Roger Berkowitz. The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.   Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.   Donovan Hohn. “Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, August 1, 2025.   Hannah Arendt. Responsibility and Judgement. Edited and introduced by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.   Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2021: Friendship. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn commemorates the life and work of Annie Dillard, member of the Quarterly’s editorial board, frequent contributor to its pages, and friend for half a century of Lewis H. Lapham, who first began editing Dillard’s essays in the early 1970s. Hohn shares passages from Dillard’s work along with audio of remarks, delivered in the year 2000 on the 150th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine, in which Dillard explained how she came to write for Lapham and why she kept writing for him. Hohn also shares a pair of letters that Dillard and Lapham exchanged in August 1974, following her return from the Galápagos. The episode doubles as the prologue to a new series of conversations that we are calling A Broken World, the title for which comes from a new book by Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. As introduction to the series, this episode concludes with the unabridged audio of the keynote address that Lewis Lapham delivered at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011. Further Reading “Dear Lewis, Dear Annie,” Lapham’s Quarterly website, September 17, 2026. “Voices: Annie Dillard, In Memoriam,” Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, September 23, 2026. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. Photo credit: Bowels of the Earth – Water, by Naoko Fukumaru, 2020. Earthenware, urushi lacquer, resin, and 23.5K gold. Kintsugi transformation. 12 cm. © Naoko Fukumaru. Courtesy of the artist. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page.  Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”   This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and literary critic Namwali Serpell about her new book, On Morrison, in which Serpell takes readers on a guided, chronological tour of Toni Morrison’s fiction and criticism. The conversation touches on Morrison’s literary modernism; her surprising affinities with Vladimir Nabokov; her water imagery; her enchanting way with metaphor; her transformation of historical materials; her religious faith; her study of Greek tragedy and African literature; her participation in “the canon wars”; her ardent commitment to the freedoms conferred by the First Amendment, and her equally ardent opposition to what—in her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, published in the Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly—Morrison called “dead language”: language that “thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential,” and “cannot form or tolerate new ideas.”   The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with an epilogue about Morrison’s Paradise, the final novel in the trilogy—Morrison’s Divine Comedy—that begins with Beloved.   Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To subscribe to our new digital archive, visit the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack. To make a gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Then writer and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Harper's Magazine digital archive and co-founder of Aboard, a software consultancy, joins Hohn for a conversation about the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, whether technologists can move fast without breaking things, the gold rush origins of Silicon Valley, what Lewis Lapham would have made of our new Gilded Age, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and much else. Further Reading Paul Ford. “What Is Code?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 11, 2015. Paul Ford. “My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes,” Wired Magazine, June 15, 2023. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Before he was twenty, George Washington had bought and sold and parlayed himself into nearly three thousand acres of prime land,” William Hogeland writes in Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion That Opened the West. “If he could amass enough land this way, he might build plantations, grow tobacco, marry well, become a burgess, join the Ohio Company, maybe even buy an officer’s commission in the British army. … Prospects were lengthening, and the view lay westward.”   This third installment of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, brings together a pair of conversations about the westward and eastward beginnings of American empire. The episode begins with a conversation between Lewis Lapham and William Hogeland about the conquest of the Ohio River Valley. Then, Lapham sails the Atlantic with Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.    The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a reading of “The Battle at Fort Necessity: The Battle at Fort Necessity: How a Young George Washington, Fortune-Seeking in the Ohio Country, Helped Start the Seven Years’ War,” an excerpt from Hogeland’s Autumn of the Black Snake, performed by the author.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “As they travel across the South Pacific and stop at all these different islands, he records the islanders’ languages, he observes their customs, he describes their appearances, their jewelry, their tools, their houses, and brings back such detailed accounts that they, to this day, are regarded as the best accounts of Polynesian culture before and around first European contact. He doesn’t demonize, but he also doesn’t romanticize. He very clearly says: Good and evil is in all societies. We find all these different shades of human life and human experiences in all societies.”   This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with returning guest Andrea Wulf, about The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, a narrative and intellectual biography of the German polymath George Forster—a botanist whose investigations of the breadfruit disclosed the history of Polynesian migrations; a prose stylist whose account of Cook’s second voyage helped invent the genre of travel writing; an intellectual pugilist who quarreled with Rousseau and Kant and influenced Coleridge and Von Humboldt; a revolutionary whom Friedrich Engels called “the German Thomas Paine.”   The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes an epilogue about Forster’s Parisian exile during the tumult of the French Revolution.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two years ago today, Lewis Lapham’s voice joined all those other departed voices of the past. This summer we’ve been welcoming his voice back to the microphone of the present, and today, in commemoration of the anniversary of his death, we are sharing this bonus episode. In the first years of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called The American Ruling Class, released in 2005. On August 1, 2026, The American Ruling Class is coming to the Criterion Channel. Lewis wrote much of it, narrated much of it, and starred in much of it, playing himself, or a version of himself—a wise, mirthful, sardonic mentor in pinstripes guiding a pair of greenhorn youths who set out to uncover the secrets of the American ruling class. This episode collects audio excerpts from the film.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“America’s founding is not just your conventional heroic struggle for noble ideas and ideals,” says historian Holger Hoock on today’s episode of The World in Time. “It is also a profoundly violent civil war—America’s first civil war—and a civil war in the British Empire.”   This second, war-torn episode of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, collects historical dispatches from the battlefields, excerpting two conversations that Lewis Lapham recorded: one with Hoock about his 2017 book Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, the other with Joseph J. Ellis, from 2022, about The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783.   The ad-free, unabridged Substack edition of the episode concludes with an audio version of an essay adapted from Peter C. Mancall’s new book, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000 to 1680, the most recent and chronologically earliest addition to The Oxford History of the United States, other volumes of which include Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty and Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. Titled “The Mystic River Massacre,” Mancall’s essay takes readers and listeners into a violent colonial prologue to the country’s violent, revolutionary birth. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse America had become. We’ve got Frenchmen, we’ve got Spaniards, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Irish, we’ve got all these different Scots, how are we going to hold together? We’re not a nation. Lincoln says, Well, we have an answer to that, and it’s that good old Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal.”     On June 7 of this year, news came that the American historian Gordon S. Wood had died at the age of 92. In commemoration of him, this episode presents in its entirety a conversation Wood recorded with Lewis H. Lapham in 2017 about Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.   Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, draws from archival conversations that Lewis H. Lapham recorded with scholars and historians of the American Revolution, occasionally complementing those archival conversations with new ones. As introduction to the series, this episode begins with an excerpt from a 2018 conversation about These Truths, Jill Lepore’s single-volume history of the U.S. It concludes with an audio version of “‘As Though They Were Blood of the Blood’: Jefferson’s Declaration and the Problem of American Identity,” an essay adapted from the foreword Gordon S. Wood wrote to Ted Widmer’s new book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A series from The World in Time, beginning Friday, July 3, 2026. Voices heard here: Lewis H. Lapham, Jill Lepore, Gordon S. Wood. Illustration: The 1795 flag that flew from Fort McHenry and inspired Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“We have language. That’s the best tool we have for understanding the consciousness of another,” says Michael Pollan on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You can go pretty far with it, as Proust himself showed, but that is, in the end, the function of art: to translate one consciousness into another. That’s the only way we know how to do it right now, and it’s pretty powerful, but there’s still a remnant, some residue that can never be translated. Even Proust, who wrote millions of words and was a great believer in the power of words, said consciousness is not a verbal construction. He didn’t think that consciousness was made of words. The visual arts can tell us things, too. A Rothko painting conveys so much consciousness. That’s the importance of art—helping to ferry us from one island of consciousness to another.”   This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Michael Pollan, award-winning author and journalist, about his new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, in which Pollan explores one of our most complex and enduring mysteries: the “hard problem” of consciousness. Initially, he seeks the headwaters of consciousness in neuroscience, computer science, and in science that bridges computers and biology, but, midway through the book, and midway through this episode, suspecting that “third-person” science might be inadequate to the mystery, he looks elsewhere—to philosophy, literary history, the arts, and, as his journey ends, to Buddhism.   The ad-free, unabridged version of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a bonus segment, an audio version of an essay on animal consciousness, by John Jeremiah Sullivan, that originally appeared in the Spring 2013 Animals issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“What in God’s name are the humanities,” Lewis Lapham asked in a commencement address he delivered at St. John’s College in 2003, “and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?” His answer—the humanities are not luxuries akin to “the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach” but liberating necessities—harmonizes with the answers proposed by the three guests on this special, two-part episode of The World in Time, which commemorates the anniversary of the Quarterly’s revival. Today’s three guests are all scholars—“card-carrying, old-school metaphysical humanists”—who have dared to do what Lewis Lapham did nearly two decades ago: launch a nonprofit that brings the humanities and the arts into the American agora, the public square.   Zena Hitz, tutor at St. John’s College, is the founder of the Catherine Project, a nonprofit that, through online seminars and reading groups, makes the study of “the great books” available for free to all. She is joined by two returning guests: Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, editor of the Substack magazine The Hinternet, and founder of the Hinternet Foundation, which seeks to “steward humanism into a machine-driven future”; and D. Graham Burnett, Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. A member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, Burnett is also the co-founder and director of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which offers to the general public courses and workshops that “deepen our shared understanding of attention’s relation to human flourishing.”   In part two of today’s two-part episode, available for free and in full on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Hohn and Hitz add a new conversation to our intermittent and ongoing series of conversations about Moby Dick and the history of the sea, discussing the “The Doubloon,” chapter 99 of Melville’s novel. Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,”Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” and Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Everyone expected this comet to hit and obliterate England in 1857,” says Francine Prose in this episode of The World in Time. “So a lot of the novel is about the pressure from this belief or non-belief that the comet is going to hit. And of course, Dickens, who’s sort of scientifically minded, dismisses it immediately. And Andersen, who is romantic—paranoid, fearful, the whole list of things which would make you believe you’re about to be obliterated by a comet—is completely convinced and can’t really accept Dickens’ attempts to reassure his household that this is not going to happen.”   This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, editor at large of Lapham’s Quarterly, about her new novel Five Weeks in the Country, which, mingling historical fact with fiction, narrates five disastrous weeks that Hans Christian Andersen spent with Charles Dickens and his family in the summer of 1857. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.