172 David Cunningham on Contesting Confederate Monuments (JP)

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1. 

   E184 · 20 Aug 2026 · 25 min

   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, here we come! A book you might not think would be so comforting starts it off, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London “during the last Great Visitation in 1665.” Classroom resource for Great Plague of 1665-1666 here Probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, the Journal comforts Elizabeth by its similarities to our current situation, providing a…

2. 

   E183 · 6 Aug 2026 · 49 min

   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 as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system? To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking…

3. 

   E182 · 16 Jul 2026 · 58 min

   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 podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally. Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer…

4. 

   E181 · 2 Jul 2026 · 49 min

   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 another way, and come up with a different solution? Anna Terwiel joined John to discuss her remarkable new book, Prison Abolition for Realists, which charts a path away from paranoid (as documented by Eve Sedgwick) and purity politics in favor of an abolitionism that fuses "abstract normative theorizing" with attainable worldly goals. One name for this is agonistic abolitionism; it offers, as…

5. 

   E173 · 18 Jun 2026 · 46 min

   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 God’s Children, which won the Oklahoma Book award, and The Cannibal Owl. In his conversation with Sean McCann of Wesleyan (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism), we learn that Robert Lemmons is a real historical figure and so is Levi English. One way to grasp Gwyn’s…

6. 

   E178 · 21 May 2026 · 27 min

   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 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: Eavand Boland, “Quarantine”…

7. 

   E177 · 7 May 2026 · 35 min

   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 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. Danielle Jacques is at work on a dissertation exploring the social and…

8. 

   E176 · 17 Apr 2026 · 29 min

   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 get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)" Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John…

9. 

   E175 · 2 Apr 2026 · 40 min

   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 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…

10. 

    E174 · 26 Mar 2026 · 44 min

    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 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,…