Recall This Book

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (U California Press, 2005). His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory.David's vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George ("Segregation....forever") Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory.Notes of hope? Well, David has faith in extant political institutions and even bureaucracy (long live the deep state) to blunt the force of Trump's onslaught; movement politics of the left may also prove capable, as they were in the 1930's of rising up in response to a ferocious successful mobilization on the right.You can also listen to earlier conversations with Vincent Brown and Mark Blyth.Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.What exactly happened and will happen? Well, Vince has sympathy for Bernie Sanders Boston Globe op-ed about the Democrat's neglect of working-class and Gabriel Wynant's "Exit Right" abut the need to remake left-wing politics. He also takes seriously Thomas Piketty's theory of the rise of "Brahmin Left". That's a topic explored in the Recall This Book series on the Brahmin left ( Jan-Werner Muller, Matthew Karp and Thomas Piketty).Any hopeful note to end on? Well, bad government breeds righteous opposition. From Ronald Reagan we got...Minor Threat and the Bad Brains.Tune in tomorrow to hear John speak with David Cunningham; the previous conversation, already up on New Books Network, was with Mark Blyth.Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025).Mark sees 2008-9 as a true economic and political volta, one that the world has been busily ignoring to its peril in the years since. Early on, Mark mentions his 2016 article "Global Trumpism." Piketty's "Brahmins vs Merchants" explains the diploma divide. The top two employers in America are Amazon and Walmart, both warehouses for foreign goods coming for American consumers. Mark invokes the business cycle theory pioneered by Nikolai Kondratiev known as Kondratiev waves. He also invokes Piketty's "R over G"; that if return on investment among the rentier class exceeds growth, inequality will grow and grow.In the short term, Mark sees immense financial gains mainly for the top but for the middle and bottom as well. The Republicans are in a pole position to capitalize on this. Higher ed is a legitimate site of concern: Blyth points to the Agenda 47 commitment to hamstringing private and public universities in various ways.Is there hope? Well, sort of. US carbon emissions will make less of an impact on global warming than you might think--and yes it is still the most creative and technologically advanced country. Cheers!Tune in tomorrow to hear another perspective from Vincent Brown, and finally from David Cunningham.Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just YouTube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. So, David discusses with John his interest in using dreaming as a window into consciousness. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams...David details the "flattening and impoverishing effect on the natural sciences" wrought by 20th century behaviorist paradigms. He also expresses skepticism about the likelihood of AI ever achieving more than a "zombie" state; it now and perhaps always will profoundly differ from animals' varied experiences of our shared world.The biological commonality that most strikes David is the idea it is logically inconceivable that there might be a dreamer devoid of consciousness or sentience. Dreaming, he argues may be the key to acknowledging animal's "moral considerability"--the right to have their consciousness, sentience and in the deepest sense their standing taken into account. . Finally David admits to a feeling of tragedy in writing this book: he has had to engage with experimentation that crosses boundaries in animal treatment in order to make the case for those boundaries. He understands his decision as tragic because either way--to engage or to ignore the science--would be to lose something.Mentioned in the episode:New Wave of "inner space" SF authors who focus on the alien nature of humanity itself: J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and John's hero Ursula Le Guin.Recallable Books: Susana Monso, Playing Possum a newly translated book on the ways that animals mourn their beloveds. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals (both 1872) are two of the crucial 19th century texts begin to think of animals as complete subjects. That makes Darwin an early theorist of biosemiosis. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring.Mentioned Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing (2019) Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k (2016) Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…. (1997) Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (2012) New Thought (philosophy? religious movement?) Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859) Orison Swett Marden, How to Succeed (1896) David Riesman et al. The Lonely Crowd (1950) Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1945) Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (1982) Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. (2007; concept of”self-belabourment”) Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019) Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2015) Recallable books Epictetus, Handbook (125 C.E.) Sheil Heti, How Should a Person Be (2012) Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904) Read Here:38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here.Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction.When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke.Mentioned in the episode Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse." The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him. Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded. "When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral) Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962 Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion?Head on over to Part 1 of episode 135. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction.When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke.Mentioned in the episode Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse." The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him. Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded. "When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral) Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962 Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion?Head on over to Part 2 of episode 135. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.”Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.”Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to Novel Dialogue's traditional "signature question": A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six.Mentioned in this Episode:By Anne Enright: The Gathering (2007; Booker Prize) The Forgotten Waltz (2011) The Green Road (2015) The Portable Virgin Taking Pictures Yesterday’s Weather Granta Book of the Irish Short Story Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood No Authority Also mentioned:Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking about ThisSally Rooney on the social life of the young on the internet, e.g. Conversations with FriendsChristopher Hitchens, “Booze and Fags:”Transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable--and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic's "Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief" begins with his grief for the unexpected and early loss of his mother: "I stopped grieving or at least the grief diminished, yet the reason didn't really change. It's not like that my mother stopped mattering to me or that I stopped loving her, but still this change in grief somehow seemed reasonable." What are philosophers and the rest of us to make of this durable insight?John is lucky to be joined in this discussion of Beri's thoughts on grief by by his new Brandeis philosophy colleague, Katie Elliott. She is not afraid to complicate things further, proposing to Beri that we distinguish between the immediate affective intensity of the initial loss and persistent negative emotions towards the fact of the loss, even when that initial affective heat of loss has faded. Beri reponds that emotions are "thinking with feeling" and we maybe want to be skeptical about splitting the two.Beri sees two aspects of grief: "On the one hand, the vision of loss that is constituted by grief and on the other hand, a vision of grief from a empirical or as some philosophers, like to say, a creature construction perspective." It is wrong to make a pragmatist case for the sheerly functional advantages of getting over grief, and also a mistake to see (like Sigmund Freud) grief as a kind of work, a task, to detach oneself from the mourned object.John asks what it means that he personalizes his sensation of grief, focussing not on the lost beloved, but on the way the beloved, or the lost beloved, remains present to him, a loss felt inside himself. Beri invokes Iris Murdoch's warning against the "fat relentless ego" (The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, p 50) intruding itself--when what really should be at stake is the lost object of one's grief. Beri closes by suggesting that grief doesn't happen to us in the way digestion happens (purely involuntary). Sure, grief is not strictly controllable, and yet because it is reasons responsive rather than simply somatic, it is me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades.Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own).Although there is plenty of subtle racism in policing as well, there can be a brutally frontal quality to white-power policing: just look at the racial disparity in the stubbornly astronomically number of fatal shootings by police. David and Daniel ask how much of the current system of racial and class disparity can be traced back to slavery or to subsequent 19th century racial logic, and howw much arises from the confluence of other forces.The conversation notes the widespread white participation in 2020 protests–did we ever expect to hear Mitt Romney chanting “Black Lives Matter”?– and what this might suggest about the possibilities for actual change. It also touches on the roles of the media and institutions such as police unions and the erosion of federal oversight of local police departments.Mentioned in this episode: Klansville, USA (cf. the PBS show of the same name that drew heavily on the book; and an interview David did on the topic of today’s Klan) Kerner Commission Report (1968) Ethical Society of Police (cf. this compelling local post-Ferguson PBS documentary that speaks with St. Louis African-American police officers) Recallable Books Walter Johnson, “The Broken Heart of America” (2020) James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963) Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (2015) Listen and Read Here: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices