Recall This Book

177 A Hosts' Special: Ferry and Plotz Choose Books in Dark Times (EF, JP)

For our pandemic-era Books in Dark Times (our first ever Special Series!) Elizabeth and John discussed books that were keeping us afloat, barely afloat, way back in April 2020. Memory lane, ...

2026-08-20

Zazzage

176 Laura Jockusch on Jewish Revenge after the Holocaust (JP)

After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts a...

2026-08-06

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175 The Caste Pod: a Crossover episode with Ajantha Subramanian (JP)

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podc...

2026-07-16

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174 Anna Terwiel Offers A Moment of No to the Prison-Industrial Complex (JP)

Punishment makes nobody safer, imprisonment only impoverishes us as a society. And yet, we lock up our own, more and more for worse and worse reasons. What might finally inspire us to run the equation...

2026-07-02

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173* Novel Dialogue Crossover: Aaron Gwyn goes West (Sean McCann, JP)

RTB's sister podcast, Novel Dialogue, spoke recently with Aaron Gwyn. He is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynne’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All...

2026-06-18

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172 David Cunningham on Contesting Confederate Monuments (JP)

David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his...

2026-06-04

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171 Elizabeth Bradfield's Books in Dark Times (JP)

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her bo...

2026-05-21

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170 What Waltham Does When the Water Rises: Rachel McKane and Danielle Jacques (JP)

Permafrost melts, desert cities boil, inland lakes dry up; but Waltham too in its own way has become one of the dark places of the earth. Adverse manmade climate change is seeping into basements every...

2026-05-07

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169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system ge...

2026-04-17

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168 What's Global about Sven Beckert's Capitalism (Paul Kramer, JP)

John is joined by the brilliant and affable Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt (The Blood of Government) to discuss Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin, 2025) by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History...

2026-04-02

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167* Addiction with Gina Turrigiano (EF, JP)

In Recall This Book's second episode (January 2019) John and Elizabeth spoke with their brilliant Brandeis colleague, the MacArthur-winning neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano, about a number of different ...

2026-03-26

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166 Imperial Depths: Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen on the Roman Prison System (JP)

The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose...

2026-03-12

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165* Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: A Novel Dialogue Crossover Conversation

In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarch...

2026-02-19

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164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in W...

2026-02-05

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163* The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)

As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama of Celebrity, her tour-de-force account of how star...

2026-01-29

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162 Carlo Rotella's Books in Dark Times (JP)

For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Charac...

2025-12-18

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161 One Battle After Another: A West Newton Cinema Discussion with Peter Coviello and Ethan Warren (JP)

One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied ...

2025-12-04

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160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)

John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also...

2025-11-20

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159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)

In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to spe...

2025-10-30

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158 RTB Ben Fountain in Dark Times (JP)

Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie. Back in 202...

2025-10-16

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Recall This Book

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