Discover shows related to Think About It, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
Free Speech 72: What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala
Thursday, October 9, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:09:38
The speech debates have not abated, and itâs clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle these debates but provokes more questions. We have lost our way, it seems, since people on all sides invoke free speech and then try to silence those they disagree with. Historian Fara Dabhoiwala of Princeton University reminds us that free speech has always been contested, and that it became a political and social value only recently. We invited him to discuss his new book What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Dabhoiwala examines how free speech started as a risky and radical concept, and how it evolved through centuries of political battles to become central to democracy only at a certain point in history. As Professor Dabhoiwala explains, speech rights have come and gone long before campus protests, debates over what talk show hosts can say, and whether there ought to be limits to speech thatâs defined as dangerous, offensive, or unpatriotic. If we hope to find a way out of our current predicament, we should study this history carefully â with Professor Dahhoiwala as the perfect guide.
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Book Talk 69: Uncanny E.T.A. Hoffmann with Peter Wortsman
Thursday, October 2, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:30:43
Step into the unsettling world of E.T.A. Hoffmann with translator Peter Wortsman to explore âThe Sandmanââa tale that haunted Freud enough to spark his famous psychoanalytic analysis of âThe Uncanny,â examining familiar things that unsettle and disturb us for no clear reason. What makes this bizarre story so deeply disturbing, even today? And how does Hoffmannâs genius, in all of his writing, continue to shape the way we think about the unfamiliar, and the blurry line between human and machine? Our guest for this show is New York-born Peter Wortsman, a renowned translator of Kafka, Kleist, Musil and others, playwright, and author, whose travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin won the Independent Publishers Book Award.
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Book Talk 68: Hamâs Heaven with Ori Gersht
Thursday, September 11, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:07:00
Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Hamâs Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores the friendship of an ape and his trainer to examine what we do with animals in the name of progress. Drawing on careful research and echoing the existential questions of Kafkaâs âReport to an Academy,â Hamâs Heaven takes us on a journey that is as thrilling as deeply movingâa testament to the bonds that define us, and the progress that so often divides us.
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Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
Episode 141
Tuesday, July 29, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:07:01
What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides, Strevens explains the remarkable success of scienceâs âirrationalâ method to settle debates, regardless of philosophical, religious, or aesthetic preferences. Drawing on Thomas Kuhnâs The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsâour host Uli Baerâs all-time favorite non-fiction bookâ, Karl Popper, and others, Strevens shows how science became the most effective tool for uncovering the secrets of nature.
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Book Talk 66: Political Hope, with Loren Goldman
Monday, May 19, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:26:13
How to find hope in these times? I spoke with political scientist Loren Goldman about the principle of political hope: why we should have hope, how to have hope in dark times, and how political hope differs from naĂŻve optimism, faith in progress, or passive reliance on a hidden logic that will save us in the end. Goldman, who is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Principle of Political Hope (Oxford University Press, 2023), where he reveals hope to be an indispensable aspect of much continental and American political thought, especially in the works of Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Ernst Bloch, Richard Rorty, and others. Our conversation on Goldmanâs study of hope ends with three concrete lessons to counter hopelessness, cynicism, and despair.
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Book Talk 65 Emily Dickinson, with Sharon Cameron
Friday, April 18, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:40:29
We need Emily Dickinsonâs startling originality today more than ever. This is why I sat down with Sharon Cameron, one of the greatest commentators on Dickinsonâs poetry, to explore some of Dickinsonâs poems in an extra-long podcast. âItâs astonishing that after forty years of reading Dickinson, I am still âawed beyond my errandâ by how Dickinsonâs poems let us experience something viscerally, at the edge of comprehension,â Cameron remarks in this conversation that forgoes clichĂŠs and favors critical acumen. By closely considering a few poems, Cameron explains how Dickinson speaks from placeless places and from within experiences outside of language, how her poems create wonder, and how her poems link without merging the mundane, the erotic, and other incommensurate dimensions of life. Sharon Cameronâs book include: Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre; Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinsonâs Fascicles; and, most recently, The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago University Press, 2024), on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens.
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Book Talk 64 How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty
Episode 135
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:14:07
What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by âexperts,â influencers, and gurus. But these one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain.Â
In How to Fall in Love With Questions, Elizabeth Weingarten finds inspiration in a few famous lines from Rainer Maria Rilkeâs Letters to a Young Poet, and then takes this insight â to love the questions themselves â to modern science to offer a fresh approach for dealing with the uncertainty in our lives. What if our questionsâthe ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purposeâare not our tormentors, but our teachers? Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with seemingly unsolvable questions, not as a quick fix but to deepen our sense of being fully alive. Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of others, including a part of my own story after the events of 9/11 in New York City when I first turned to Rilkeâs letters, to chart a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty.
Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions challenges us to unlock our minds and embark on the kind of self-discovery thatâs only possible when we feel most aliveâthat is, when we donât know what will happen next.
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Free Speech 71: Ruby Lowe on John Miltonâs Definition of Free Speech
Episode 137
Monday, February 17, 2025 ⢠Duration 01:21:52
British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet Areopagitca (1644) to Paradise Lost (1667), Milton participated in debates regarding censorship and the right of the public to access the inner workings of Parliamentary politics. I spoke with Ruby Lowe about how todayâs conception of free of speech emerged during the English Civil Wars, the intimacies between political adversaries in these debates, and how Miltonâs crucial role in this media revolution informs his most seductive literary characters, including the devil, God, Adam, and Eve.
Dr. Ruby Lowe is a Lecturer in the History of Ideas at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne and the John Emmerson Research Fellow at the State Library of Victoria, in Australia. Her forthcoming book is The Speech Without Doors: John Milton and the Tradition of Print Oratory.
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Free Speech 70: Michael S. Roth on the Rise of Student Protests, the Fall of Some College Presidents, and Why Liberal Education Matters
Episode 135
Saturday, September 28, 2024 ⢠Duration 01:14:04
The campus protests over conflict in Israel and Gaza have engulfed universities, and led to the resignation of several university presidents. In this podcast, recorded live at the New York Institute of the Humanities, Michael S. Roth, the long-time President of Wesleyan College, explains how he navigates sharp disagreements on campus, what he means by âsafe enough spaces,â and how to understand what is happening on campus in relation to our democracy.
Michael S. Roth is the 16th president of Wesleyan University, since 2007. Formerly president of California College of the Arts (CCA), Roth is known as a historian, curator, author and public advocate for liberal education. His many books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014); Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatistâs Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (Yale University Press, 2019); and The Student: A Short History (Yale University Press, 2023). This conversation was recorded with a live audience at the New York Institute for the Humanities, which is directed by Eric Banks and hosted by the New York Public Library. I want to thank Eric Banks for the invitation to speak with President Roth, and the fellows of the New York Institute for a lively discussion included here.
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Book Talk 63: Nietzsche Now! with Glenn Wallis
Episode 135
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 ⢠Duration 01:15:26
What would Nietzsche say⌠about todayâs divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzscheâs work that help navigate todayâs concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time.
Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchistâs Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia.
Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold.
Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast:
BĂŠatrice Longueness on Immanuel Kantâs What is Englightenment?
Melissa Schwartzberg on Jean-Jacques Rousseauâs The Social Contract
Glenn Wallis on Kahlil Gibranâs The Prophet
Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Menckenâs Notes on Democracy
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