Episode notes
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. John’s interest in Menippean satire within science fiction leads him to ask about about the…
Podcast
Recall This Book
Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz · Arts & Books · English
Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.
More from Recall This Book All episodes →
-
E169 · 18 Dec 2025 · 22 min
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. Tacitus,…
-
E168 · 4 Dec 2025 · 31 min
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. Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about Paul Thomas Anderson and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many…
-
E167 · 20 Nov 2025 · 18 min
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…
-
E166 · 30 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 1 min
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 and frequent RTB visitor) 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…
-
E165 · 16 Oct 2025 · 22 min
158 RTB 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. Back in 2020's lockdown, RTB asked Fountain what was consoling and engaging him. American novels, especially those about Americans abroad (Joan Didion. say) have always done something special for him. Marilynne Robinson’s and James Baldwin’s work make us confront the reality that’s happening around us all the time, “a freaking massacre.” He carried the the (fictional but genuine) facts of Baldwin’s If Beale…
-
E163 · 18 Sep 2025 · 14 min
156 Recall This B-Side #1: 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…
-
E162 · 4 Sep 2025 · 55 min
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. Lyndsey 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. Lyndsey and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the…
-
E65 · 7 Aug 2025 · 44 min
154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson
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 Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on…
-
E160 · 3 Jul 2025 · 25 min
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.…
-
E159 · 7 Jun 2025 · 39 min
152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)
In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists' prior expectations. The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary…
Take it with you
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
