ThoughtCast®

Note: This interview has been picked up by the public radio stations WGBH, in Boston, its affiliates WCAI and WNAN, and WCVE in Richmond, VA. It was originally broadcast in 2008. In some ways, the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson is the Russell Crowe of the academic world: charismatic, unconventional, and definitely controversial. He's also a big fan of the British Empire -- and wants the United States to follow in its footsteps. That means it's our job to form colonies in hot climates, for years on end. But are we up for this? While Niall would like that to be the case, he doesn't really think so, because, he says, we're an empire "in denial" ... Click here: to listen to a 4 minute excerpt. Click here: to listen to the entire interview (15:30 minutes). And to listen to this interview with Niall Ferguson on the WGBH Forum Network, click here!

Poets Fanny Howe and Haleh Liza Gafori at the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Harvard Square

At the Modern Art Foundry in Astoria Queens, workers restore the Neptune Fountain, which was missing its hands, an arm and a foot.

The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s 1839 poem "The Village Blacksmith." Earlier this week, series director Andrea Cohen introduced the poets -- Carl Phillips and Penelope Pelizzon -- who read from their new collections. Carl read from Scattered Snows, to the North, and Penelope read from A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye. Next week, on December 9, 2024, two more writers will be featured. David Semanki will read from his debut collection of poems, Ghost Camera, and Jason Schneiderman will read from his latest collection: Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Click here: to listen.

Note: Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the New York Times column, "The Ethicist", has just won (in the summer of 2024) the Library of Congress' Kluge Prize. A high honor. This program was broadcast on WCAI, an affiliate of WGBH, Boston. In this interview from 2004, New York University Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism on ThoughtCast! Born in England and raised in Ghana, Appiah is half English and half African. And perhaps because of this, he's fascinated with the concept of identity, and the power it wields over people. But rather than wage identity politics, Appiah encourages us instead to be good global citizens, interested in and accepting of each other. In short, cosmopolitan. But also, at least a little bit "contaminated"... Appiah's written a book on the subject: it's called Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Click here: to listen. (42 minutes)

Sadly, Helen Vendler has just died on April 23, 2024, at ninety years of age. I'm so glad I got a chance to meet her. Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, Prairie Public Radio, WABE in Atlanta and on KUT in Austin, Texas. When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson's more famous poems. They've stayed with her over the years, and today, she talks with ThoughtCast's Jenny Attiyeh about one poem in particular that's haunted her all this time. It's called I cannot live with You- According to Vendler, who has written the authoritative Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, it's a heartbreaking poem of an unresolvable dilemma and ensuing despair. Click here (18 minutes) to listen! This interview is the first in a new ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing -- be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus -- that's had a significant influence on the interviewee, that's shaped and moved them. Up next - esteemed novelist and short story writer Tom Perrotta discusses Good Country People, a short story by Flannery O'Connor that's particularly meaningful to him.

Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. In 1861 in Clonmany, on the Inishowen peninsula in the far north of County Donegal Ireland, Charles McGlinchy was born. His was a windblown, rough world, wracked with beauty and hardship. A weaver by trade, and a bachelor, in his old age he realized he was the last of the McGlinchys, the last of his name. Night after night, he told his tale to an old neighbor, the schoolmaster Patrick Kavanagh, who wrote it all down. Patrick's son Desmond found these copybooks after his father's death, and offered them to Brian Friel, the renowned Irish playwright, who then edited the manuscript into a book called The Last of the Name. This same book is what Desmond Kenny, of Kenny's Bookshop in Galway, chose to discuss in our interview. When asked to pick a piece of writing that's had a tremendous impact on him, he wandered the rich shelves of the shop, musing over all the books he's known and loved, until he lighted upon this one, and knew it was the right choice. We spoke after hours in the family run book shop, which recently celebrated its 70th anniversary. Click here: to listen to this ThoughtCast interview (18 minutes).

Behind the Scenes at Law and Order! Watch the shooting of the episode “Blood Libel” from its 6th season.

Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin,Texas. James Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, and it was from Dublin he fled as a young man, to Trieste, in order to write Ulysses, perhaps the key novel of the early 20th century. But before he left, he began to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, as most of us will remember, is a rite of passage not only for its main character, the sensitive, acute Stephen Dedalus (the alter ego for Joyce himself), but also for the impressed and impressionable reader. When I asked the scholar, bookseller and editor Maurice Earls to pick a piece of writing to discuss that's had a tremendous impact on him, it was this novel that he chose. Himself a Dubliner, Earls is joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books. Of special interest to ThoughtCast listeners, he's also penned an essay on Helen Vendler's Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Just hours before an author event was to take place in his small, singular independent bookstore Books Upstairs, ThoughtCast spoke with Earls about "A Portrait" at length. The conversation brought me back to my own strong feelings about this book, which had a tremendous impact on me as well, many years ago. Click here (24 minutes) to listen!

Sadly, since this interview was recorded, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has died at the age of 84. Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. Kate Rosenberger is one of those rare people who collects independent book stores in San Francisco the way the rest of us collect antique door stops, or unusual African masks. Her most recent acquisition is Alley Cat Books, but she also owns Phoenix and Red Hill Books, and we met at Dog Eared Books, her fourth store, in the Mission district. When asked to discuss a piece of writing that's had a profound impact on her, Kate chose Charles Simic's poem Gray-Headed Schoolchildren. Born in Serbia, Simic came to the US as a teenager, but went on to write his poems in English, win the Pulitzer prize, and become the U.S. Poet Laureate. His poetry is often stark, perhaps reflecting his formative years, spent surviving World War II. Note: This interview is the sixth in a ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing — be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus — that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them. Prior interviewees include author Tom Perrotta, poetry critic Helen Vendler, and other independent bookstore owners - from Ireland! Click here to listen (11 minutes.)

Note: an audio version of this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and by KPIP in Missouri. The forests of New England are, remarkably, a success story. They've recovered from attack after attack. The early settlers hacked them down, by hand, for houses, fences and firewood. Later on, the insatiable sawmills of a more industrial age ate up the lumber needed for our expansion. Today, the forests contend with acid rain, invasive plants and exotic beetle infestations -- evidence of our ever more global economy. And the future of these forests? Going forward, that's a story that's largely ours to shape, and narrate. If only these trees could talk ... Well, we have the next best thing - Donald Pfister, the Dean of Harvard Summer School, curator of the Farlow Library and Herbarium, a fungologist (the more erudite word is mycologist), and the Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany at Harvard University. In this Faculty Insight interview, produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard Extension School, he tells the tale of the New England forest from as far back as the glacial Pleistocene era. To help illustrate this tale, we've made grateful use of high resolution images of some dramatic landscape dioramas, which are on display at Harvard's Fisher Museum, in Petersham, Massachusetts. And finally, for an audio version of this story, click here: to listen (9:47 mins).

The End of Our Universe with astrophysicist Alex Vilenkin. On ThoughtCast!

International News Coverage in America and the public's attention span

NOTE: Caroline Elkins is in the news again, with a new book called Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. In it she continues her searing research into first world abuse and torture of numberless Africans under their colonial control. How does history get rewritten? How do victimizers become victims, and the valiant turn into villains? As Harvard history professor Caroline Elkins has learned, this process can be a hazardous one. The Pulitzer prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya devoted many years to the study of the Mau Mau uprising in the early 1950s, and the British response, a model of counter-insurgency technique -- or so she thought. The Mau Mau were a group of native Kenyans who turned to violence and terror to drive out their colonial British masters, but as Elkins discovered, they weren't the only ones to use such tactics. Now a court case will decide where the truth actually lies, as you will hear in this Faculty Insight interview, produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard Extension School. For an audio version of this story, click here: to listen. (6:50 mins).

Natalie Goldberg, the well-known author and writing teacher, is also a painter and a practitioner of Zen.

Ron Brown works with his dance company Evidence.

Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston's NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Photo: courtesy US Marine Mammal Commission The endangered North Atlantic Right Whale is probably our closest cetacean neighbor. There are only about 350 of them in total, and they live precariously near to shore, along the Eastern seaboard, in a horrendously busy commercial shipping corridor that stretches from Nova Scotia to Florida. Scott Kraus, the vice president for research at Boston's New England Aquarium, and the head of its right whale research project, has studied these whales for decades, and the aquarium's efforts on their behalf have led to dramatic improvements in right whale habitat. Courtesy Rosalind Rolland/New England Aquarium But they remain nonetheless threatened -- primarily by us humans. ThoughtCast's Jenny Attiyeh met with Kraus at the New England Aquarium recently, to discuss his latest book, which he co-edited with his colleague Rosalind Rolland, called The Urban Whale. Click here (4 minutes) to hear Scott Kraus read a poignant passage he wrote (about a baby whale) from The Urban Whale. Click here (20 minutes) to listen! And click here (4 minutes) to hear Scott Kraus read a poignant passage he wrote (about a baby whale) from The Urban Whale.

Division of Labor: Women's Work was an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1995

ThoughtCast spoke to author and academic Rebecca Goldstein about her novel "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction".

The Dan Flavin Art Institute, overseen by Dia Center for the Arts, is filled with the florescent tubes that made Flavin famous.