The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

Latest Episodes:

Episode 86: Oliver Milman Mar 18, 2022

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“A world without insects would be a particularly horrifying, grim place,” environmental journalist Oliver Milman tells us on the latest episode of The World in Time, “and certainly not a place we would want to live in—and indeed it wouldn’t be a place we would be able to live in.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Oliver Milman, author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World,” about the many types of food that we would no longer be able to enjoy without bugs and whether we should be relieved by the existence of robot bees. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 85: Roosevelt Montás Mar 04, 2022

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“In my sophomore year of high school, I came upon a remarkable book in a garbage pile next to the house where we rented an apartment in Queens,” scholar Roosevelt Montás writes at the beginning of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” “It was the second volume of the pretentiously bound Harvard Classics series, and it contained a set of dialogues by Plato that record the last days of Socrates’ life. This first encounter with Socrates was a fortuitous as it was decisive. There is probably no better introduction to the life of the mind than Socrates’ defense of his philosophic activity in these dialogues.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Roosevelt Montás, author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” about what came after Montás read Plato for the first time and why he considers access to a liberal education so vital. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 84: Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy Feb 18, 2022

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“Existing biographies of Thomas Jefferson,” the historian Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy writes in The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, treat the retired president’s singular founding of a university “as merely an epilogue, while institutional histories give little consideration to the biographical context…Beginning at the age of seventy-three—having lived already far beyond the average life expectancy of the period—he spent the last decade of his life preoccupied with the quest to establish the University of Virginia. He wrote out the minutes of the Board of Visitors, estimated the number of bricks required for each building, and on his last visit to the university even unpacked boxes of books intended for the library. Despite ill health and excruciating pain in his right hand, he produced architectural drawings and drafted legislation. Ignoring his impending bankruptcy, he donated his own money to begin a fundraising campaign and hosted dinners for members of the university community. Because the university was so much of his making, its history is inseparable from Thomas Jefferson’s life.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, author of The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University about Jefferson’s influence on public education and how to balance this legacy with his place in historical memory as an enslaver. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 83: Joseph J. Ellis Feb 04, 2022

Show notes

In order to understand the American Revolution, historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, “we must be capable of thinking paradoxically. The American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution. Which means it succeeded because it failed.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, about the words, paradoxes, and local influences that powered the American Revolution. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 82: David Wengrow Dec 22, 2021

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“If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers,” David Wengrow, an archaeologist, and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, write at the beginning of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with David Wengrow, coauthor of The Dawn of Everything, about these answers and what they mean for the future of a humanity facing ecological catastrophe. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 81: Geoffrey Wheatcroft Dec 03, 2021

Show notes

“About twenty years ago,” the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft says on the latest episode of The World in Time, “Umberto Eco said he was amused by a survey in which a quarter of British schoolchildren thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. But in fact in a way that is what he has become. He has become something outside conventional history. This is demonstrated by his portrayal in popular culture. It dawned on me in recent years: if you go to a movie called Lincoln, it will be hero-worshipping, and respectful in the Spielberg manner, but it will stick quite close to historical fact. But if you go to a movie called Churchill…or Darkest Hour…they are complete travesties that bear no resemblance whatsoever to historical fact. And nobody minds.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 80: Nicholas Crane Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

The journey at the heart of this week’s episode of The World in Time is “the most important story of our age” for writer and explorer Nicholas Crane. “We’re in the grips now of both a Covid-19 pandemic and rapid climate change, which are putting greater demands on international science than anything that’s gone before us. And if you track back through time and ask yourself, When did international collaboration on a scientific challenge begin?, you end up in 1735 in a port in western France on a ship called Portefaix bound for the Caribbean and South America.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Nicholas Crane, author of “Latitude: The True Story of the World’s First Scientific Expedition,” about the legacy of that voyage. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 79: Charles Foster Oct 15, 2021

Show notes

For 150,000 years “humans didn’t behave much like us,” the veterinarian, philosopher, and legal scholar Charles Foster writes in Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. “They weren’t, to use the phrase beloved and hated by archaeologists, ‘behaviorally modern.’ Probably they didn’t adorn their bodies, bury their dead with grave goods, make bladed or bone tools, fish, move resources significant distances, cooperate with anyone to whom they weren’t closely related, and probably they weren’t organized enough to kill large animals. Then something big happened. The speed with which it happened, and the amount that happened in Africa, are contested. That it did happen is not.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Foster discuss what exactly happened, and the history of humans having a more romantic relationship with science. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Charles Foster, author of Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 78: Michael Knox Beran Oct 01, 2021

Show notes

“They were, by and large, descended from the well-to-do classes of colonial and early republican America, from New England merchants and divines, from Boston Brahmins and Anglo-Dutch Patroons,” Michael Knox Beran writes of the figures at the center of WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy. “But the Civil War and its attendant changes altered their place in life, and they emerged from the crisis as something different from what their forebears had been: as both a class and a movement, self-consciously devoted to power and reform. What to call them? The term WASP—White (or Wealthy, if redundancy is to be avoided) Anglo-Saxon Protestant—fumbles their background, betraying the sociologist’s inclination to use a term like Anglo-Saxon when the plainer, more obvious English one would do. (In this case, English.) For there is nothing especially Saxon or Angle about America’s WASPs. Insofar as they embody any English strain, it would be the Norman. Like the Normans, the WASP oligarchs possessed a corrosive blood-pride, one that they could only with difficulty reconcile with their sense of themselves as suffering idealists, groping their way through dark places in the hope of glimpsing the stars.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Michael Knox Beran discuss the history of the WASPs: their politics, geography, influence, and predicted obsolescence. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Michael Knox Beran, author of “WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode 77: Philip Hoare Sep 17, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Philip Hoare discuss Albrecht Dürer’s brilliance, what his art meant to people throughout history, and the centuries-long ubiquity of his woodcut of a rhinoceros—an animal the artist had never seen. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Philip Hoare, author of “Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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