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 co-authored Social Problems  article, “Contesting Commemorative Landscapes” which  first got him thinking about monument removal, he posits that “expungement, amplification, and repositioning” are three ways contemporary communities contest the monuments of the past.. The conversation from there ranges onward through various kinds of contested removal, ending with Cesar Chavez and his ongoing de-monumentalization.

David is author of  There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK,, a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission  and recently has been engaged in exploring political signalling in public art and monuments, including a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals in Protestant and  Catholic communities and in the interface areas that connect them in Belfast. His earlier Recall This Book episodes include on racialized policing in the US, on January 6th , and also on the 2024 presidential election–and a conversation with Glenn Patterson, author of Lapsed Protestant  about the mural culture and politicized spaces of Belfast and Northern Ireland.  

 

Listen to and Read the episode here. 

Mentioned in the episode

By David Cunmningham himself: “What Richmond got Right about taking down Confederate Monuments” and a 2023 article coauthored with Christina Simko, “Montgomery’s Monumental Truths” 

On place vs space there is wonderful work by Pierre Nora and Henri Lefebvre.

Interface  zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman.

The lucid John Guillory article  (mentioned but not discussed) is “Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities.” 

 Confederate generals whose statues were erected essentially to glorify  the KKK famously include Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. Private parks built up to collect Confederate monuments (with an underlying  anti-government bias) include North Carolina’s Valor Memorial Park, and in Texas the SS American Memorial Foundation’s military retreat space now adorned with removed Confederate statues. In Bentonville, this park glorifies a Confederate statue that has now been (dubiously) linked to Governor James H. Berry.

The MOCA/Brick reimagined MONUMENTS Exhibition includes work by Kara Walker and Bethany Collins. 

https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm

Sylva North Carolina Confederate plaque debate. 

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant and the Nietzschean problem of “creative forgetting.” 

The idea of Productive creative cognitive dissonance is drawn from MLK’s idea of “creative tension.”

Hajar Yazdiha, Struggle for the People’s King

How long will the Chavez National Monument last? The statue at UC Fresno is already gone…” Is The Trail of Tears a historical site the same way Confederate statues are? 

Denmark Vescey’s Garden by Ethan J. Kytle   and, Blain Roberts 
Zore Neale Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God

171* Elizabeth Bradfield 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 books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.

Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?

Mentioned in the episode:

Listen and Read Here

RTB 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 feels the pinch. Adverse manmade climate change is seeping into basements everywhere, and a wonderful new research project, “Building Collective Resilience via Collective Memory” (that website launches very soon) counts some of the ways.

John is joined by two Brandeis colleagues who spearheaded the project and supplied some of the local interviews that bring climate change dynamics vividly to life. Rachel McKane is Assistant Professor of Sociology with interests in community-based approaches to environmental justice through networks of solidarity and mutual aid, and articles in such journals as Environmental Research Letters, Environmental Justice, Environmental Sociology, and Local Environment.

Danielle Jacques is at work on a dissertation exploring the social and spatial dynamics of the renewable energy transition. We also hear from Mark and from Colleen (about peaches!) in this episode.

Mentioned in the episode

Follow the project’s growth at Building Collective Resilience via Collective Memory. Or read about its origins in a local newspaper story here.

John Dittmer, Local People

Victorian neighborhood class proximity maps of London include the famous Booth “poverty maps.”

Yuki Kato, Gardens of Hope.

Bill McKibben, Oil and Honey.

Listen to and read the episode here.

Recall This Book 169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)


On March 26, JP published “Arendt on Oases” the last of three short pieces about Hannah Arendt in Public Books (following “Against Anticipatory Despair” and  “Arendt’s Refugee Politics”).

Listen here to the article read aloud, an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

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

John is joined by the brilliant and affable Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt (The Blood of Government)  to discuss Capitalism: A Global History,  by Sven Beckert,  Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. With Christine A. Desan (Recall This Book adores her) he is the co-director of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. This builds on his marvelous previous work about the global cotton trade.

John wants to know about the importance of the state as money-maker and underpinner of markets. Paul asks about the key historical ruptures; the conversation goes back a millennium to traders in Aden and in China. Together Paul and Sven speculate on the role violence plays inside the “free” market that capitalist exchange established and now somewhat remarkably sustains. The singular turning-point of the late 19th century (which Sven decided to present in three interwoven chapters) comes in for sustained attention.

Mentioned in the Episode

Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014)

Ursula Le Guin “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” (National Book Foundation Medal speech 2014)

Ferdinand Braudel Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (1979)

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)

Listen and Read here.

167* Unpacking 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 facets of addiction. The conversation seems as timely as ever.

What makes an addiction to a morning constitutional different from–or similar to–an addiction to Fentanyl? What are the biological and social factors to consider? Should the addict be thought of in binary terms, or addiction as a state that people move into and out of? They contemplate these questions through biological, anthropological, and literary lenses, drawing on Marc Lewis, Angela Garcia, and Thomas de Quincey. Late in the episode, there’s also a Sprockets joke. Then, in Recallable Books, Gina recommends David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure, Elizabeth recommends When I Wear My Alligator Boots by Shaylih Muehlmann, and John recommends Sam Quinones’s Dreamland.

synthetic_opiates_schaumann

Discussed in this episode:

Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

Angela Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande

Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar

David Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good

Shaylih Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands

Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Listen here, or read transcript here.

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-built institutions? To others,  we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial  but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils? 

Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that.  In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote  The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and   Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system  system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.

Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.

Mentioned

Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)

Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker

The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist) 

Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated  The Dawn of Everything (2021).

G Geltner Medieval Prison

Spencer Weinreich’s work on  solitary confinement) 

Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961) 

Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners

Who  Would Believe a Prisoner?  Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson. 

Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners) 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead 

Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon. 

Listen and read here

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-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”

Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”

Mentioned in the Episode

Read Episode

Listen to Episode

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 Western Europe and North America generlaly and France especially, the infamous fin de siecle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus–like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.

Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930’s–but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating “Franco-French War” about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1844)

George Eliot’s (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)

Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?

The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation–and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.

The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.

Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.

America’s racial “one drop” rule.

Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

Listen and Read Transcript here.

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 stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans.

They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting star making to the culture industry, to fans, or to star themselves, Sharon makes the case that all three forces together constitute a celebrity creation machine.

Continue reading “163* The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)”

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 Characters from the Rust Belt and most recently has come out with What Can I Get out of This? along with some sparkling related pieces about AI in the classroom.

Carlo is always worth listening to, in dark days… and darker ones, too. He starts by praising sagas, makes a case for stories of disagreeableness and plugs a remarkable book about preaching, deception, and the urge to belong.

Continue reading “162* Carlo Rotella’s Books in Dark Times (JP)”

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 West Newton cinema.

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

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 of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called “We Refugees“, he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins.

Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off!

Listen and read here.

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) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International  (1999) and Where Are We Now?  but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).

Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places–and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering “the one word that gets you killed”? 

Continue reading “159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)”

158* 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.

Continue reading “158* Ben Fountain in Dark Times (JP)”

157 Mangrum’s Comical Computation (JP)


When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedyhas provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them “collective repertoires”) for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.

Continue reading “157 Mangrum’s Comical Computation (JP)”

156* Recall This B-Side: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”

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 a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon).

Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as  The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart will have you thinking again.

Continue reading “156* Recall This B-Side: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart””

155 Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt’s Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her  widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza)  to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing.

Lesley and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances  and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough.

Continue reading “155 Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt’s Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)”

154* Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson (Elizabeth Miller, JP)

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides,  Kim Stanley Robinson  has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.

All of that, though, only prepared the ground for The Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.

Continue reading “154* Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson (Elizabeth Miller, JP)”

153. What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair” in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

Half a century ago, in “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent–not just in how America’s campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance.

Continue reading “153. What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)”