https://thoughtcast.org: Recent Episodes
Jenny Attiyeh
The Octagon Tower on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan was the city’s first municipal insane asylum. Today it’s a proud ruin, having survived partial demolition, fire and abandonment. And in a novel approach, the tower has been preserved in its dilapidated state. A reminder of its haunted history.
Note: I reported on this story for WNYC TV in the late 1990s.
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This time of year, when the relieved earth shrugs off stale dirt and dead leaves, it pauses, recalling. Then, as it lets out a long, low breath, it slowly releases moisture, a glut of color. Everything is growing.
But only for a spell, for soon enough the earth will turn, and then the relentless heat will shrivel these green thirsty things, and the ground will grow hard, and withdraw again.
Click here: to listen (2:40 minutes).
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A small house on Staten Island tells the tale of the friendship between Guiseppe Garibaldi, the famed Italian revolutionary, and Antonio Meucci, a candle maker who just might have invented the telephone. Take a tour of the Garibaldi Meucci Museum with WNYC’s Jenny Attiyeh, on ThoughtCast!
Click here to listen!
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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.”
On the evening of December 8, 2025, series director Andrea Cohen introduced Henri Cole, whose new book of poetry is called The Other Love, as well as William Logan, whose most recent collection is Rift of Light.
This is the last poetry reading of the fall 2025 season.
Click here: to listen.
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This archival WNYC TV “Cultural Minute” takes a tour of the Steinway Store in Midtown Manhattan — which, unlike so many traditional city landmarks, is still in business. Watch to see how these famous pianos are actually built!
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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!
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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.”
On the evening of May 5, 2025, series director Andrea Cohen introduced Fanny Howe, author of Night Philosophy and a reader from the first Blacksmith House reading in 1973, and also Haleh Liza Gafori, whose most recent translation of Rumi is Water.
This is the last poetry reading of the spring 2025 season.
Click here: to listen.
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At the Modern Art Foundry in Astoria Queens, workers restore the Neptune Fountain, which was missing its hands, an arm and a foot. The statue, which spouted water in Snug Harbor on Staten Island, has been returned to its former home. Watch how these expert craftsmen brought it back to life!
Note: This program was broadcast in the mid 1990s on the PBS station, WNYC.
Click here to listen!
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Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, and also on KUT, in Austin, Texas!
Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Mrs. Fletcher, Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers, speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and inspires him: Flannery O’Connor.
His relationship with her borders on kinship, and he admires and admonishes her as he would a family member, with whom he shares a bond both genetic and cultural.
When asked to choose a specific piece of writing that’s had a significant impact on him, Tom chose O’Connor’s short story Good Country People, but then he threw in two others — Everything that Rises Must Converge and Revelation. As Tom explains, these three stories chart O’Connor’s careful trajectory, her unique vision, and her genius.
Click here (30 minutes) to listen!
This interview is the second 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: Harvard Classicist Gregory Nagy on Homer’s Iliad, and the final, fatal battle between Hector and Achilles.
The post Tom Perrotta on Flannery O’Connor — a literary affinity appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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.
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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).
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Watch the shooting of the Law and Order episode “Blood Libel” from its 6th season.
The famous show featured Sam Waterston as Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, Jerry Orbach as Senior Detective Lennie Briscoe, Jill Hennessy as Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid, Benjamin Bratt as Junior Detective Rey Curtis, S. Epatha Merkerson as Lieutenant Anita Van Buren and Steven Hill as District Attorney Adam Schiff.
This story was originally broadcast on WNYC TV.
Click here to listen!
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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.
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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!
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I reported this story on the struggle to cover international news in the late 1990s for Freedom Speaks, a TV program on the media run by the Freedom Forum, and I thought with a ground war now raging in Europe and threatening to destabilize the “world order”, it’s worth a revisit. But remember — this is archival. Even so, does it have anything to teach us about the way Americans view the wider world?
Click here: to listen (3 minutes).
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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 […]
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Natalie Goldberg, the well-known author and writing teacher, is also a painter and a practitioner of Zen.
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Ron Brown works with his dance company Evidence.
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Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! 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 […]
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Division of Labor: Women's Work was an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1995
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ThoughtCast spoke to author and academic Rebecca Goldstein about her novel "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction".
The post Rebecca Goldstein: the atheist with a soul appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
The Dan Flavin Art Institute, overseen by Dia Center for the Arts, is filled with the florescent tubes that made Flavin famous.
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The three Peabody sisters, Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia, were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the 19th century.
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The dinosaurs return to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
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Note: The WGBH sister stations WCAI and WNAN broadcast this interview, and it also received a 5 star review on PRX! Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky tackles King David of the Bible – the shepherd, poet, warrior and adulterer – in his “Life of David.” Is David a legend? A real, flesh and blood warrior […]
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What does the word rock mean? Simple enough question. But how did the term originate? Where -- and why? Find out the answer on ThoughtCast.
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Buffalo Dance
From the secret Kiva
past collapse
they stomp and sing
the story
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On a beautiful spring day in the mid 1990s, I meandered the streets of Red Hook, when it was still a rundown Brooklyn neighborhood. I met its first art gallery owner, and the two longshoremen who ventured inside.
The post Red Hook, Brooklyn, before the Gentrification appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Mrs. Fletcher, Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers, speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and inspires him: Flannery O'Connor.
The post Tom Perrotta on Flannery O’Connor — a literary affinity appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Dershowitz is back in the spotlight, but he's been here before, on ThoughtCast!
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In his book "Why Does the World Exist?" science writer Jim Holt takes us on a jaunty tour of being and nothingness, existence and emptiness, quantum tunneling and the uncertainty principle - on ThoughtCast!
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KCRW's Michael Silverblatt, the host of the literary talk show Bookworm, speaks with Jenny Attiyeh at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Silverblatt is the real thing -- an authentic, genuinely interested interviewer who reads not only the latest book his guest has come to discuss, but the writer's entire body of work.
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Watch Chanticleer, the celebrated all male vocal ensemble, backstage, on ThoughtCast!
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ThoughtCast Reflects on the Legacy of John McCain. His performance in the January 2000 New Hampshire Presidential Primary Debate, just weeks before he defeated George W. Bush in that state’s primary – the first in the nation – is worth reviewing.
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John McCain, the maverick Republican Senator from Arizona, was diagnosed with brain cancer a year ago now, so there’s not much time left for this remarkably resilient politician to take a final stand. Will McCain live long enough to vote for — or against — Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee? He did vote […]
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This documentary, broadcast on WNYC TV, charts the creation of "Les Enfants Terribles", a dance opera by the composer Philip Glass and the choreographer Susan Marshall.
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Lydia Ratcliff: Vermont Farmer, Stubborn Survivor, on ThoughtCast
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The remarkable rise of Donald Trump, fueled in large part by his determination to keep immigrants out of his Greatening America, has caused many to re-examine the key concerns of the controversial political scientist Samuel Huntington.
The post Samuel Huntington — on Immigration and the American Identity appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
The press barely noticed former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith's bid for the presidency in 2000, so entranced were they over the newly candid Arizona Senator John McCain as he crisscrossed Bob Smith's state in the "Straight Talk Express."
The post Lessons from a Former Failed Bid for the Presidency? appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Now that we're faced with Al Gore's Inconvenient Sequel, it is tempting to ask, again: What if he had actually won the Presidential election back in 2000? I had the chance to interview the Vice President for NHPTV in the autumn of 1999, prior to the New Hampshire Presidential Primary.
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Art therapy: a place for self-expression while in pain.
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The mercurial Tom Hoving, former director of the Met Museum, discusses art forgeries, and how to spot them, on ThoughtCast!
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Note: this interview has been picked up by the public radio station WGBH, in Boston, and its sister stations WCAI and WNAN. Sadly, Bob died in March of 2017. This interview was quoted in The New York Times obituary. The venerable New York Review of Books was launched amidst a newspaper strike in the winter […]
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Taos artist Paul Pascarella lives in a spectacular spot, one many famous painters have discovered in the past - Agnes Martin, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keefe, Marsden Hartley, Rebecca James, Andrew Dasburg.
The post Paul Pascarella – An Artist of the Mesa and the Mountain appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Andres Serrano: Works 1983-93 opened at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho in early 1995. It was a mid-career retrospective, and I went there to interview the controversial artist for the PBS station WNYC TV. His infamous “Piss Christ”, among other ecclesiastical subjects, was prominently featured, as well as images of Ku Klux […]
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The January 6th debate was moderated by Tim Russert, the host of NBC's Meet the Press, and featured Arizona Senator John McCain, conservative political activist Alan Keyes, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, publisher Steve Forbes, Christian pro-life spokesman Gary Bauer and George W. Bush.
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New Hampshire's Presidential Primary was scheduled for February 1st, 2000, and was less than a month away when a Democratic Presidential Primary Debate took place in Durham, New Hampshire, pitting Vice President Al Gore against former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley.
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I’ve had the pleasure of leading a Beacon Hill Seminars Writing Workshop this autumn. Sadly it’s almost over, but I wanted to let you all know about this marvelous resource in the Beacon Hill area.
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Arianna Huffington, the author, journalist and founder of The Huffington Post, spoke with Jenny Attiyeh at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
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The comedian, writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh speaks with Jenny Attiyeh at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books about If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now, her first novel.
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My grandfather liked to dare me to walk to the cemetery at night, up the mud road from our house, past the orchards, the looming cows, past the tumbledown barn into the open, empty fields. From there I could almost see the mounds rising against the bluff. Grampa urged me on. Early settlers were buried here in unmarked graves, and nearby lay the headstone of a young boy, killed by Indians. As I turned and headed rapidly for home, I could hear Grampa chuckling in the dark.
The post My Ghost Town: A Vanishing Personal History appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
I interviewed George W. Bush during the New Hampshire Presidential Primary, when he was still a newcomer to the country at large, just the free and easy (and sober) Governor of Texas, the oldest son of the former President, George Bush Senior.
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Beacon Hill has it all, we like to think. Its own chiropractor, its own pharmacy, its own chocolate shop. And now, it even has its very own writers' circle.
The goal of the brand new Beacon Hill Writing Group is to provide a warm, welcoming environment that will motivate its members to write each week, and to share their work in a safe, non-critical setting.
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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 theory of cosmic evolution is a relatively new addition to the field of cosmology, and attempts to answer the questions of who we are, where we are, and how […]
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You’re about to hear a story about the bear whisperer of Lyme New Hampshire, Ben Kilham, and the abandoned black bear cubs he has rescued, rehabilitated and released back into the wild.
Some of these cubs have formed such strong bonds with Ben, that even when they’re fully grown, they still treat him as a member of the family, so to speak, and allow him special access to their bear secrets and behavior.
The post Black Bear Orphans and the Man who Reads Their Minds appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station and by KPIP in Missouri. You’ve heard the news. Online education is the next big, disruptive thing. It’s taking on the establishment, and the hidebound, bricks and mortar institutions of higher learning must change – or shrink. EdX, Coursera, […]
The post EdX President Anant Agarwal’s Plan to Change the World appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: This interview and slideshow with Phoebe Kilham is featured on New Hampshire Public Radio Online. Phoebe Kilham is the soft-spoken younger sister of Ben Kilham, the renowned black bear behavioralist and bear cub rehabilitator, based in Lyme New Hampshire. But he couldn’t do this work without her, or the support of his wife, Debbie. […]
The post 20 Rescued Bear Cubs Nursed Back to Health appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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 […]
The post Charles Simic’s the choice at San Francisco’s Dog Eared Books! appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
How we respond to natural (and man made) disasters and manage environmental crises has become a subject of intense political debate during this latest round of "worst ever" fires in the state of California.
The post How to minimize disasters and manage crises – if possible! appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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 […]
The post The history and future of the New England Forest appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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 […]
The post Rediscovering James Joyce in Dublin with editor Maurice Earls appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Back in the day when Dwight MacDonald was a household name (on the Upper West Side, at least) his critique of “middlebrow” American culture, and its inflated self-regard, singed eyebrows. Today, do his arguments still sting? After listening to three academics discuss MacDonald’s Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, recently released by New […]
The post Louis Menand, John Summers and Dan Aaron take on Dwight MacDonald appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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 […]
The post Tales from Donegal, told in Kenny’s Bookshop appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
In this sixth installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with Allan Ryan, the director of intellectual property at Harvard Business School Publishing, a member of the American Bar Association’s Committee on the First Amendment and Media Litigation, and an instructor at Harvard Extension School. The subject is […]
The post Is WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a hero, or a villain? appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, a voluble, high-octane philosopher and Harvard professor, spoke at the Harvard Book Store recently about his latest creation: All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, which he co-wrote with Hubert Dreyfus, another professor of philosophy, this time at Berkeley. ThoughtCast was there, and made this […]
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Urban wildlife receive high-tech treatment at the Tufts Wildllife Clinic in Grafton Massachusetts, as Jenny Attiyeh of ThoughtCast reports.
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Note: the audio version of this interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, and also on KUT in Austin, Texas! In this fifth installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with the esteemed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy about one of the earliest and greatest legends of […]
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In this ThoughtCast, noted author James Carroll talks about his latest book, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”, at the Harvard Book Store, in Cambridge Massachusetts. The city of course serves as both holy ground and flash point for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and at times during their tumultuous histories, these three monotheistic religions have turned their city into […]
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Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard Extension School. This fourth interview of the series is with Shelley Carson, an associate of Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, a lecturer at Harvard Extension School, and also a blogger for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post! Carson’s scholarship focuses largely on the connection between […]
The post Creativity and Madness – with Shelley Carson appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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 […]
The post Harvard Critic Helen Vendler on Emily Dickinson appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard University Extension School. This third interview of the series is with Jocelyne Cesari, a level-headed yet astute specialist in contemporary Islamic society. Muslims who live in […]
The post Faculty Insight: Islam in the West – a clash of civilizations? appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
The second annual Boston Book Festival will be held on Saturday October 16th, and note bene, it’s free and open to the public! ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh will be hosting a discussion titled True Story: The Art of Nonfiction. As soon as it’s available, we’ll post the recording, but in the meantime, here’s the blurb: “Writing […]
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Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School. This second interview of the series is with nuclear strategist Thomas Nichols, who is a professor at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, […]
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Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard University Extension School. This first interview of the series is with Gene Heyman, a faculty member at the Extension School and a lecturer on psychology at […]
The post Is Addiction a Choice? Harvard’s Gene Heyman says yes! appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! The Cambridge Science Festival returns this week with Inspiring Minds: Meet Women in Science, a program at the Museum of Science that includes a talk by Randi Rotjan, a coral ecologist at the New England Aquarium […]
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Richard Hoffman The New England Poetry Club is apparently the oldest poetry reading series in the country. It was founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Conrad Aiken. This spring, it awarded its Sheila Motton Prize to Richard Hoffman for his book of poetry called Gold Star Road. Hoffman is the Chairman of […]
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Note: this interview was broadcast on WGBH, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, and was part of Classical KUSC ‘s A Tribute to Ernest, broadcast live from Walt Disney Concert Hall on 3/29/11. Ernest Fleischmann, the former General Manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, can be credited with turning this once provincial institution into […]
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The Center for the Humanities at Tufts University recently held a panel discussion on “The New Biology and the Self”, an apt topic for the likes of Steven Pinker, the Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Noga Arikha, a historian of ideas and the author of Passions and Tempers: […]
The post The “New Biology” with Steven Pinker, Noga Arikha & Melvin Konner appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: an audio version of this interview aired on WGBH radio in Boston! Henry David Thoreau is justly famous for his book Walden, which tells the story of the two years he spent living by the pond, in the Concord woods. But he also wrote a journal, which he started at age 20 in 1837, […]
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Note: this interview was broadcast on WGBH in Boston as well as on the WGBH Cape and Islands affiliate WCAI/WNAN! Jonah Lehrer, the precocious author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has come out with a new book called How We Decide. He spoke at the Harvard Book Store, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click here to listen […]
The post Jonah Lehrer on Emotional Hijacking and “How We Decide” appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: this story was picked up by WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, and also broadcast on the WGBH affiliate WCAI/WNAN, on the Cape and Islands! Wall Street on Drugs: What motivated these former masters of the universe? And why did they act like kindergartners? ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh speaks with James Poterba, the Mitsui Professor of Economics […]
The post The Dopamine Economy appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
This year’s Narrative Journalism conference, sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, was titled “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times.” With magazines folding and newspapers shrinking, these are hard days for narrative journalists: they need space, time and funding to do their work, all of which are in short supply in today’s web-driven media economy. ThoughtCast spoke […]
The post Turbulent Times for Truth Tellers? Just ask the Nieman Foundation… appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
The Cambridge Center for Adult Education recently hosted a talk with the architect Nader Tehrani (an associate professor of architecture at MIT, and the co-founder of the influential Boston-based architecture and design firm Office dA) whose work is on view, among other locations, at the Museum of Modern Art — Click here to listen (36 […]
The post Architects Nader Tehrani and Robert Campbell @ CCAE appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Calling for Acronyms! Here’s mine to start off — The “GEC“ — it sounds like a mix between guck, yuck, ick and eck. Like the noise you make in the back of your throat when you’re about to regurgitate, or cough up spume. And isn’t that what we’re doing now? Out comes the excess… Oh, […]
The post Has the Global Economic Crisis – or GEC – got us? appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: this interview was broadcast on the WGBH public radio affiliate WCAI, on the Cape and Islands! James Poterba What is the right expression to describe today’s economic nightmare? I’m sick of “mess” and “crisis” is too bland. What about “cesspool”? Well, I compromised with “pits” — feel free to add your own juicy descriptions […]
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They were a strange pair: Gertrude Stein, the avant-garde writer, salonniere and collector of art and artists, and her lover and companion, the querulous Alice B. Toklas, standing beakishly in the background. But together they formed a whole. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, a new book by journalist Janet Malcolm, explores this relationship, and the […]
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Scott McLemee, who pens the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, asked a few of us for a suggested reading list for the president-elect. I discovered that one contributor, Daniel Drezner, is a fellow Williams alum, who blogged about the column here. Other contributors were James Marcus, the editor-at-large for the Columbia Journalism Review; […]
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James Wood, the sincere, somewhat old-fashioned, unpretentious yet high-minded New Yorker literary critic, spoke at the Harvard Book Store recently about his new book, How Fiction Works. Click here: to listen (30 minutes). Also… ThoughtCast will be interviewing Wood shortly – hooray! – and we’re interested in your input! We’d like to discuss, among other […]
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Note: This piece has been picked up by KYOU Radio, in San Francisco, and it’s also been mentioned on Current.org and the PRPD site — thanks for that! Public radio could easily be described as a smashing success story. Take NPR, for example. From its counter-cultural roots in the early 1970s, it has grown to […]
The post Public Radio goes Hollywood! appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
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. 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 […]
The post Our American “Empire” with Niall Ferguson appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: This program was broadcast on the public radio station WCVE. Cyber law expert Jonathan Zittrain is one of the canniest thinkers out there, pondering the wide world of the web, and his new book is called The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It. It’s a call to arms. Before it’s […]
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Have you “friended” someone recently? Have you ever? Sooner or later, we’ll all start to friend, or be friended, if we are to inhabit the jolly online world of social networking. MIT Media Lab’s Judith Donath explains…. Click here: (4:17 minutes)
The post To friend or not to friend: Judith Donath on online social status appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices waxes lyrical on the term homophily, which isn’t actually a web word, but it’s a phenomenon playing itself out on the Internet. Click here for clarification! (2:20 minutes) And to listen to a discussion with Ethan Zuckerman on the Forum Network, click here!
The post Ethan Zuckerman’s homage to homophily appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Here are a few more thoughts on new words gleaned from life online — gathered at a Berkman Center conference on The Future of the Internet! Joshua Micah Marshall, who founded the influential site Talking Points Memo discusses the term “blogger”, a now old neologism that may have outgrown its usefulness, at least to him! […]
The post More Neologisms with TPM’s Josh Marshall appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
NOTE: Tim Wu has a new book out, called The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires! The term network neutrality was the brainchild of Tim Wu of Columbia Law School. So what does this term mean, and what power does it have? Click here: (2:23 minutes)
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Jimmy Wales, the founder of the free online encylopedia Wikipedia, shares his thoughts on the power of one incredibly successful neologism – that amazing name! Wikipedia is a name he’s “stuck with” — in a good way, of course! Click here: to listen. (2:13 minutes) And hear what else “Jimbo” had to say that day, […]
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Neologisms are defined as new words or phrases (or new uses of a word or phrase). And what better place to find them than at a gathering of netizens (itself a neologism) steeped in the new world of the “net”. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and […]
The post In Search of Neologisms with Esther Dyson appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
"Different Trains" tells the story of Steve Reich's childhood - his train trips between separated parents - and also the trains Jews were forced to take during the Holocaust.
The post The Borromeo String Quartet Meets Steve Reich! appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: a portion of this interview was broadcast on the WGBH public radio affiliates WCAI/WNAN! Whither the European Union? This is not a question we (in America) often ask ourselves. But perhaps we should. As we now live in an era of borderless commerce – and threats – it might be wise for us to […]
The post The Future of Europe – with Alberto Alesina appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: This program was broadcast on WCAI, the Cape and Islands affiliate of WGBH. Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist and best-selling author of Einstein’s Dreams, is a man of unusual ability. Talented in both the sciences and the arts, he’s both left- and right-brained, a condition that confers challenges as well as benefits. Lightman has […]
The post Art & Science with Alan Lightman appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: this interview was reviewed on PRX and earned 4 stars! And it was broadcast on WRNC-LP, and the public radio stations WCAI/WNAN, the Cape and Islands affiliates of WGBH. Who are our public intellectuals today? What purpose are they meant to serve, and are they in fact serving it — or us? How public […]
The post Jack Beatty, Public Intellectual appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: This program was broadcast on WCAI, an affiliate of WGBH, Boston. Princeton 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 […]
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Note: this program was broadcast on WGBH‘s sister stations WCAI & WNAN, on Sept. 9, 2007, and picked up by KPVL, a Pacifica station, on July 2, 2013! Want to know how the world is going to end? Just ask Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. If it’s our own universe you’re talking about, well, it’s called […]
The post The End of Our Universe among other timely topics… appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: this program was broadcast on the WGBH public radio sister stations WCAI/WNAN, on the Cape and Islands, and on WRNC-LP! In this half-hour, ThoughtCast talks with two very different men, with one thing in common — a belief in humanism. Harvey Cox, the renowned Harvard Divinity School Professor and author of The Secular City […]
The post Faith and Philosophy with Harvey Cox and Simon Blackburn appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Note: this program was broadcast on WGBH‘s sister stations WCAI & WNAN, and on KUT News, in Austin, Texas! Jay Allison has egalitarian instincts. He’s a maverick, who’s made it his mission to put the “public” back into public media. As an independent producer of stellar public radio – and television – Jay’s been able […]
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As part of the Cambridge Science Festival, Noreen Grice, the operations coordinator of the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston, hosted a series of presentations that feature new research in astrophysics taking place in Cambridge. Specifically, she highlighted the work of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in Kendall Square, as well as […]
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Note: This interview was broadcast on WCAI/WNAN, and is also featured on WGBH’s Science Luminaries series, as part of WGBH Science City. The provocative Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser recently spoke about “The Evolution of Our Moral Intuitions” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. This ThoughtCast interview with […]
The post Marc Hauser on “Moral Minds” appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Say the word “Doc” and the technorati cognoscenti know exactly who you’re talking about. Doc Searls is the well-known blogger and co-author of the prescient “Cluetrain Manifesto,” which explains how the Internet has transformed corporate marketing. He’s also the senior editor of Linux Journal, and a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society […]
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Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, talks with ThoughtCast about the path from “participatory culture” to “participatory democracy.” He was the keynote speaker for this year’s Beyond Broadcast conference, held at MIT. He’s also an author, blogger and pop culture fan. Click here: to listen to the interview (8:12 minutes) And now, […]
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Paul Brannan, the Deputy Editor of BBC News Interactive, offers a candid assessment of the state of public broadcasting here in the US – and back home in London. It seems the BBC’s way ahead of us, as Paul, who spoke at the 2007 Integrated Media Association Conference here, explains. He’s an evangelist for “integrated […]
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Doug Kaye, who spoke at the 2007 Integrated Media Association conference, is the co-founder of the pioneering podcast on information technology called IT Conversations, the CTO of GigaVox Media, and the CEO of the Conversations Network. But Doug is hardly resting on his laurels, as you’ll hear in this ThoughtCast interview. (Oh yeah, he blogs […]
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WNYC Radio‘s Bill Swersey led a working group at the conference called “Public Radio and Open Source,” which came up with the idea for a watering hole (pubforge.org) where open source developers for public media can discuss problems and share solutions. Swersey speaks with ThoughtCast about the meaning of “open source” and the challenges public […]
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Click here: for CPB’s Sondra Russell, WGBH’s Ron Bachman and Chad Davis of KNME. (1:53 minutes). Click here: for Adam Rubin of Public Interactive, NHPR’s Jon Greenberg and Patrick Foster with Public Broadcasting Atlanta. (1:27 minutes). Click here: for Adrianne Mathiowetz of PRX, KUOW’s Elizabeth Hovantz and Julia Schrenkler with MPR. (1:46 minutes).
The post Two Questions: Redux appeared first on https://thoughtcast.org.
Number 1: How integrated is your media? Number 2: Is there anything about the way media is being integrated today that concerns you? The answers? Here are the first 8 of 17, all recorded at the 2007 IMA conference in Boston. Click here: for NPR’s Andy Carvin and KQED’s Tim Olson (1:44 minutes). Click here: […]
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WGBH President Henry Becton inaugurated the 2007 Integrated Media Association conference with a talk on the strengths and weaknesses of public broadcasting today. He speaks with ThoughtCast about the definition – and purpose – of public broadcasting, and how it’s responding to the pressing realities of the new online media landscape. Click here: to listen […]
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