The Hauenstein Center Collection

Gleaves Whitney is joined by Winston Elliott, Editor-and-Chief and President of the "Imaginative Conservative", and the Free Enterprise Institute, to discuss Homer's "The Odyssey".

#85: Amity Shlaes by The Hauenstein Center at Grand Valley State University

Author Steve Luxenberg discusses with us his new book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation.

Author David Roll comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss his newest book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic.

Danielle Allen, bestselling author of the book Our Declaration comes to our Beyond Aporia podcast to talk about the origins of the Declaration of Independence, and what it means for the country today.

President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss the current political situation in Washington, as well as the origins of one of our most beloved documents, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Bestselling author Lynne Olson comes to our new Common Ground Podcast, Beyond Aporia, to speak about her books Last Hope Island and Those Angry Days.

This week, we hear from Gerald Russello, editor of The University Bookman, a publication founded in 1960 by the traditionalist conservative Russell Kirk. The University Bookman, like most conservative magazines and journals, is a site where, implicitly or explicitly, there is a debate about what the word “conservative” even means. A couple weeks ago, The Washington Post profiled a number of magazines on the right that have been forced, by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, to stake a claim: is Trump conservative? Is the Republican Party conservative? Who really gets to decide? Gerald Russello provides an interesting perspective on this question because the publication he edits, the University Bookman, is really a review of books and culture. It doesn’t respond directly to the news cycle and rarely takes up specific matters of policy. I asked Gerald whether his and the publication’s bird’s eye view of Trump and the Republican Party helps him see the current debate over conservatism differently. I ask whether he thinks his publication is really political at all. Or whether it’s simply cultural—and if so, what does cultural conservativism even mean, since it too is a term bandied about so often that it could signify lot of different things. I start by asking Gerald what function Russel Kirk hoped the University Bookman would serve when he founded it in 1960, and whether that function has changed as the times have changed.

This week, we hear from Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Coleman is a public historian. As you’ll hear in her lecture, her work is to take the findings, the interpretations, of academic historians and bring them to life for the public—as she says, to make the work relevant to contemporary audiences. She says in her talk that, inevitably, new generations will make new meanings of past events: Baby Boomers will understand the causes and significance of the Civil War differently than will millennials. In her talk, Coleman addresses some of these changes. She starts by considering the ways in which the causes of the civil war have been vastly misunderstood: she helps make sense of that old refrain you used to always hear from self-appointed civil war buffs, that the war was really about states rights after all. Coleman addresses that reading, and then talks about her work at the civil war museum.

This week, we hear from Maggie Doherty, a critic and teacher at Harvard University. Maggie writes often for publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and N Plus One; her criticism often focuses on writers and feminists around the middle of the 20th century—familiar names are Mary McCarthy and Kate Millet. Maggie’s literary criticism blends questions of politics into her writing; she manages to marry the literary and the political in her writing in a careful and very helpful way. In our conversation, I ask Maggie about her recent articles on Mary McCArthy and Kate Millet, as well as a book she’s working on. The book is titled The Equivalents, and it’s about a group of five women writers and artists who met at the Radcliffe Institute in the early 1960s. We talk particularly about one such Radcliffe writer, Tillie Olsen, and the insights she advanced into the ways writing is really work: that is, is labor. We talk about writing as work, and the economic situation—that’s to say economic contingency and precariousness—that writers and academics face today.

This week, we hear from Sophie Pinkham, a writer and academic who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics. Sophie has recently published some review essays, primarily in The Nation, about the Russian Revolution and the legacy of communism in the West. One of her main concerns is the manner in which a given historian’s politics will affect their reading of the history and legacy of communism. Of course, it’s true that a historian’s reading of the past will inevitably be determined, at least to some extent, by their politics: a conservative will understand an event and its significance differently than a progressive. But Sophie Pinkham makes quite clear why the political assumptions behind this or that reading of the rise of Lenin, say, are uniquely important for us to understand and make clear. Sophie and I talk about Anne Applebaum’s recent book Red Famine, for instance; we talk in particular about Applebaum’s effort to insist that communism and Nazism are equally bad, and I ask Sophie what she thinks about this proposed equivalence, and what she thinks, generally, about the often unstated assumption held by many critics often in the center and on the right that socialism inevitably leads to tyranny. Since it’s the centenary of the Russian Revolution, I ask Sophie what new or revised meanings we might take from the events of 1917.

This episode focuses on the role of the public intellectual, or even the academic, in cultural debate. We hear from Dan Drezner about the difference between public intellectuals and thought leaders, and what happens when we have too many of one over the other. In our conversation, Dan addresses the importance of expertise in cultural debate and discourse; he considers why respect for expertise seems on the decline. But perhaps it’s not on the decline everywhere. In the latter half of this episode, we hear from Jo Livingstone about the ways she brings her academic expertise to bear on her criticism at The New Republic. In 2015, Jo received a PhD at NYU. She is an expert in medieval studies and literature, and she makes use of some of that expertise to the benefit of her readers.

This week, as an installment in our end-of-year retrospective series of episodes, we’re going to hear from Jonny Thakkar as well as from Cate Zaloom, co-founding editor of Public Books. I talked with Jonny and Cate at the beginning of the year. Each of them co-founded publications that exist somewhere between the academy and the world of cultural criticism. Both of their publications are young: Jonny co-founded his in 2008, Cate hers in 2012. Both The Point and Public Books, then, have risen to prominence in what seems like, what feels like, a new renaissance in little magazines. We’re going to hear from Jonny and Cate about what they’ve hoped their publications could contribute to this moment. We’ll also hear about how their publications stand out, what they do that other magazines and publications don’t do. From Jonny, we’ll hear about the importance he and his fellow editors place on bringing a kind of humanistic thinking, a kind of broadly philosophical approach, to cultural criticism. From Cate, we’ll hear about the way in which her publication has sought to bring more academics, more scholars, into cultural criticism, in order to bring to bear many recent advances in scholarships on public debate.

This week we hear Ian Millhiser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, debate "Citizens United" with Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Hauenstein Center hosted the debate in 2015; the issues the debate addresses are still relevant today. Here’s a quick brush up: In "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission," the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures made by corporations and labor unions in elections. Those in favor of the decision say it’s a victory for political speech in this country; opponents say it gives corporations and the rich unlimited power over the democratic process. On December 7th, just a day ago, Andy Kroll suggested in Mother Jones that Citizens United has a lot to do with this tax bill the GOP has gotten through Congress. Kroll claims that the very political culture which supports and provides foundation for the Citizens United decision also justifies what he takes to be the worst aspects of this tax bill. Kroll writes “When I say that Citizens United explains the GOP’s tax-bill frenzy, I really mean the big-money political climate that Citizens United helped create and, broadly speaking, embodies.”

This week we hear from Jo Livingstone, the culture staff writer at The New Republic and a recent PhD in English at New York University. I mention Jo Livingstone’s PhD because that’s a major topic of our conversation. Livingstone’s writing at The New Republic has the kind of agile, supple thinking and prose you’d want from a critic who has her thumb on the pulse of culture, but she blends that style of criticism with the erudition, the specialized knowledge, of a scholar. You can spot this blend in Livingstone’s recent writing on white nationalists, whose attempt to reach back into a kind of imagined and popularized medieval past Livingstone is eager and more than able to critique. Throughout our conversation, Jo and I discuss what it took for her to make the jump from the academy to the world of cultural criticism and magazine writing. We talk a lot about what makes a good academic writer and a good cultural critic. We talk, as well, about the plight of adjunct faculty and the ways in which the distinction between scholarship and cultural criticism seems to be blurring.

This week, we hear Dan Varner, President and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit, deliver a Wheelhouse Talk. Varner leads efforts to support 900+ local businesses in Detroit with a reliable workforce, and helps empower trainees with skills for workplace success. Before joining Goodwill, Dan served as the CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, a partnership of city organizations working to improve Detroit’s public education system.

In this episode, the historian Hank Meijer talks about the work and influence of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican from Michigan who, at the dawn of the Cold War, worked with Democratic administrations to build congressional support for huge foreign policy endeavors, including the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the United Nations.

This week we hear from Andrew Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University. Andrew is currently hard at work on a book about Karl Marx. I asked him to come on the podcast because the name Marx seems to be in the air right now. It’s not just that we’ve come up the centenary of the Russian Revolution. People seem to want to talk about, or at least debate once again, the merit of Marx’s ideas and the form of economic and cultural analysis that he inaugurated. Consider the many books that have recently come out, like China Mieville’s "October," re-assessing the October Revolution and wondering if it inevitably led to Stalinism; consider also the many articles and essays in periodicals not just like Jacobin and the Nation, but also The New York Times, reintroducing Marxist concepts into the national debate as a way to assess and critique what is called neo-liberalism.

In this episode, we hear from Juliet Fleming, Professor of English at New York University and author, most recently, of "Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida," out from the University of Chicago Press. I ask Juliet to defend Derrida against skeptics both inside and outside the academy. She talks about what she says when she is called upon, at cocktail parties and in academe, to "explain" Derrida. We talk about the use and importance of Derrida's thought generally. We talk about his politics, as well as his contemporary followers and interpreters, and also his legacy.

In this episode, we hear from Erik S McDuffie, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois. Just the other day, the Hauenstein Center posted a call for papers for the fourth "Finding the Lost Region" conference to be held on June 6th, 2018. The problem the conference seeks to address is the lack of institutional support for the study of Midwestern history. Why don't more historians, and more cultural critics generally, acknowledge and discuss the importance of the Midwest to American history, culture, politics? In his talk, Erik S McDuffie argues that the Midwest plays a crucial role not just in African American history but in the history of black diaspora. A major focus of his talk: Garveyism, and the revolutionary role played by women such as Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X.

Today, we hear, to begin with, a portion of a recently released documentary about President Gerald R. Ford. The documentary premiered on National Geographic. The portion we are about to hear was presented to a packed audience at the Hauenstein Center on October 3, 2017, as part of the Center’s Character and the Presidency Series. A sponsor of that series is also a producer of the Ford documentary: he’s former ambassador to Italy Peter Secchia. Secchia and President Ford were friends. Following the screening, Secchia gave brief remarks about President Ford’s character; he says he’s always thought that Ford’s presidency should be taken a bit more seriously by historians, and that Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon was a testament, in fact, to his character. That’s the view explored in the documentary. After Secchia’s address, we hear from David Brooks, who needs no introduction—everyone’s familiar with his widely read column in the New York Times as well as his bestselling book The Road to Character. Brooks talks with presidential historian Ronald White about character and the presidency generally. They ask what qualities a good leader, a good president, should have. Their discussion is moderated by Gleaves Whitney, director of the Hauenstein Center.

Today we hear from Rebekah Warren, a Michigan state senator from the 18th district. Considered by some to be the most liberal member of the Michigan State Senate—after all, Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, is in her district—Senator Warren is in fact known for her ability and her willingness to reach across the aisle. By working effectively with Republicans on the senate, Warren has been able to champion bipartisan legislation on human rights and the environment.

Today, we hear from Andrew Spear, a professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University. More specifically, Andrew is an epistemologist. His primary interest is in knowledge—he asks how we come to our beliefs about the world; how we come to know things, or believe that we know things; how we justify our beliefs. I wanted to talk with Andrew because I wanted to know how his work as an epistemologist has responded to our present anti-epistemological political moment: “fake news,” Kellyanne Conway's “alternative facts.” All facts are politicized; what one chooses to believe seems entirely dependent on one’s politics. Andrew and I talk about the dangers of this state of affairs. One such danger: to become addicted to what Andrew calls, quite aptly, epistemic porn. In this episode, Andrew offers a definition of epistemic porn. We discuss the implications of the definition, as well as the definition itself.

In today’s episode, we offer a conversation between Janet Napolitano—21st Governor of Arizona, former secretary of homeland security, and current president of the University of California system—and Christine Todd Whitman, 50th governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the EPA. The pair talk about how they each got involved in politics at the local and state level, and what it ultimately took to win their gubernatorial races. They discuss what life was like once they got into office: how their leadership styles evolved and adapted to the demands of their roles.

Today, we hear from Martha Jones, the Society of Black Almuni Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and formerly a professor at the University of Michigan. Jones brings some of her experience especially at that latter institution to bear on our topic today: politics on college campuses. We’re lucky she does. There’s been a lot of talk about campus politics, on both the left and right. On the right, we often hear about so-called liberal snowflakes who can’t bear to hear arguments that they don’t agree with, so they attempt to banish conservative speakers from their campuses and threaten to undermine the principle, the right, of freedom of expression. And on the center-left, we hear from some critics that identity politics is the problem: that students are so obsessed with the dynamics of personal identity and are thus incapable of or uninterested in the hard work of coalition building, sustained organizing, especially on the left. This latter position was stated pretty succinctly by the liberal critic Mark Lilla recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article titled “How Colleges Are Strangling Liberalism.” Martha Jones and I reference that piece because it does sum up the critique from the center-left quite well, and it relates to Lilla’s widely discussed and debated piece in the New York Times, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” We also address the future of free expression on campus: where Jones thinks that debate is headed, and how, in the wake of Charlottesville, it’s entered the mainstream.

Today, we hear from Scott St. Louis not so much about the Common Ground Initiative itself, or about the Hauenstein Center. Instead, we hear from Scott about his decision, at least right now it’s his decision, not to work exclusively down the traditional career path of a tenure-track professor in the humanities--more specifically, down the path of a professor of history. It’s a significant decision to Scott because, for a long time, that’s precisely what he wanted to do: earn a tenure-track professorship in conventional fashion. But the academic job market for folks in the humanities, history or otherwise, isn’t right now, well, even a market. There are so few jobs; the jobs that do exist are generally adjunct professorships, which are contingent, pay very little, offer pretty much no benefits. There are so many terrific PhDs on the market who are forced to take these jobs. And there are just as many graduate students working right now who are facing the reality that, when they try to enter the academic job market, there might be even fewer positions available, and fewer prospects for doing any kind of fulfilling work in or around the academy. I wanted to talk with Scott to learn how his plans, his ambitions, have changed. I wanted to ask about the future he imagines for himself and strives for as a devoted historian. If the conventional path down the tenure track isn’t necessarily viable, what’s next for him? What’s next for any students of the humanities like him?

This week, we’re bringing you the first installment of a new series for the podcast. We’ll offer some clips taken from lectures given as part of the Hauenstein Center’s Wheelhouse Talk Series. In that series, Gleaves Whitney, along with the program manager of the Cook Leadership Academy, Chadd Dowding, invite leaders from the community—sometimes professors at Grand Valley, or folks in politics or law or business, to come and talk to undergraduate and graduate students about leadership. Now, speakers can take these talks in many directions: their goal is, simply, to bring to bear their own experiences on the question—what does it mean to be an ethical, effective leader. Sometimes speakers lay out a set of points or principles. But often, they talk about something more personal. Sometimes, and often in a really moving way, speakers use their talks as occasions to think about what it means to lead a good life.

From the archive! A conversation between Cornel West and Robert George. When they came to the Hauenstein Center in 2014, West and George were both professors of philosophy at Princeton. Beyond that, the two shared, and still share, quite little in common. West was and is a progressive political philosopher, race theorist, and democratic socialist. George is a conservative Catholic philosopher of jurisprudence and natural law. We hosted the two at the Hauenstein Center because they had established a reputation at Princeton as unlikely friends. They team-taught a class in which they read with students the works of St Augustine, Alexis de Tocqueville, WEB Du Bois, and others. We asked the two to come out and essentially model the kind of dialogue and debate that they have in class: we wanted them to show us how two politically opposed thinkers could examine a host of issues, maintain disagreement about most of them, but still in the end learn from one another.

From the archive! The Hauenstein Center hosted a debate in 2008 between Christopher and Peter Hitchens. Gleaves Whitney, director of the Hauenstein, did his best to moderate the brothers as they exchanged their quite distinct views about the Iraq War and the existence of God. The event was held in a large Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the crowd sometimes got involved.

This week, we hear from Kate Medina, Executive Vice President, Associate Publisher, and Executive Editorial Director at Random House. Kate describes her career at Random House, where she’s worked with such writers as EL Doctorow, John Irving, Anna Quindlen, John Meacham, Nancy Reagan, and many others. She tells us what it takes to work in publishing: an entrepreneurial spirit, for one, plus a commitment to creative, intimate relationships—even friendships—between writers and editors. Our conversation starts with Kate describing her first encounter with James Joyce’s "Ulysses" while she was a student at Smith, and how it inspired her, ultimately, to become an editor.

Here's the second half of our conversation with Sam Anderson, critic at large at the New York Times Magazine. Last episode, we heard about how Sam became interested in magazine writing and criticism, and how he tends to approach texts and subjects. In this episode, we hear about Sam’s gradual shift from doctoral work at NYU to writing from time to time for Slate and then full time at New York Magazine, where he wrote mostly about sports before becoming book critic. We also get back to the question of whether Sam is a generalist. That topic allows us to address some of Sam’s favorite subjects: the people he’s written about and is endlessly fascinated by: we move from Dostoesky to Michelangelo, Samuel Beckett to Mark McGuire, the baseball player. We touch on all these folks because there’s something about each of them—their work, their stories—that preoccupies Sam. But what is it? We ask that. We consider some of the themes around which Sam’s writing tends to orbit. I ask whether he feels he has some real writerly mission, some main idea to get across, main insight to relate.

For this week: the first half of our convesation with Sam Anderson, critic at large at the New York Times Magazine. We talk about Sam’s time as an undergraduate at Oregon State and LSU, how he became a sort of auto-didact. We talk, as well, about his early admiration for old New Yorker writers like James Thurber and E.B. White. Sam describes life as a PhD student in English at NYU, where he started to pitch articles to magazines almost entirely in secret. Sam describes his habits as a reader and critic, what he sees in Jacques Derrida’s command not to “double the text,” and how criticism itself should be a creative act.

In this episode, we hear from Teresa Mathew, a journalist and writing fellow at The Atlantic’s City Lab, who writes a good deal about religion and race, particularly about the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, in India as well as America. We discuss some of the cultural differences between faiths in India, as well as between the same faith, Catholicism, in India and America. Teresa considers what it means to inherit a faith and culture and tradition, as well as what it’s like to fear losing them. Teresa also talks about what it’s like to work as a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, and wonders how on earth anyone can be good at Twitter.

In our last episode, you heard three writers and editors on the left debate and discuss with three writers and editors on the Right. In this episode, you’ll hear the second part of that panel conversation. We begin with the left’s response to the right’s remarks about the possibility of fusion, or of coalition building—both within the ranks of one’s political movement, and outside those ranks. In this episode, we first hear from Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin Magazine, then Sarah Leonard and David Marcus of THE NATION. Then, on the right, we hear Ingrid Gregg, then Winston Elliot of The Imaginative Conservative and Dan McCarthy of The American Conservative. We hear from these speakers, we also get some good questions from the audience, including one from David Sehat, past guest on the podcast and host of Mindpop.

On May 5th, right in the middle of the Hauenstein Center’s Conservative / Progressive summit, three writers and thinkers on the right met with three on the left to discuss the significance of election 2016. What did the victory of Donald Trump, as well as the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left, mean for American politics? Was the center being pulled apart, and could that, in their view, be a good thing? It comes as no surprise that our panelists, separated ideologically, don’t agree about many points of politics or, as we in fact hear in this episode, culture. Still, they do have in common a critique of the so-called neoliberal center, or at least most of them share a similar distrust for it. They haggle over some of the key differences between their respective positions. They also talk about the opportunities they see in building new coalitions post-2016, and how they go about articulating the alternatives to the political status-quo for which they advocate. Panelists include: Sarah Leonard at The Nation Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin David Marcus at The Nation Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative Ingrid Gregg at the Archbridge Institute Winston Elliott III at The Imaginative Conservative

In this episode, we hear from Keisha Blain, a professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, senior blog editor at the African American Intellectual History Society, and editor of the Global Black History section of "Public Books." Keisha Blain has, as much as any scholar, redefined what it means to be a publically engaged academic in the 21st century. She’s senior blog editor at the African American Intellectual History Society, and has contributed significantly to the fast rise in significance and influence of that organization among historians and folks interested in the history of African American thought. She is also one of the co-founders of the #Charelstonsyllabus, a movement on Twitter that offered a detailed reading list, crowdsourced among historians, to offer a detailed history of racial violence in the US. That syllabus drew a ton of attention, at the New York Times and elsewhere. We talk about Charleston syllabus, as well as the Trump 2.0 syllabus, which Blain also co-authored. We also discuss what it’s like for Blain, as a professor on a college campus, to lead class discussions about race as well as gender. We take up the common refrain heard in magazines and in the mainstream media that students these days are “liberal snowflakes” who can’t bear to consider ideas opposed to their own. Blain offers her own take on this issue.

In this special episode, guest interviewer Winston Elliott talks with Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College, about his work at St John’s, and about the unique kind of liberal arts education offered there.

Today we hear from Peter Kalkavage, a tutor at St John’s College and author of The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Peter and I discuss his writing about philosophy and music. Reading Peter’s writing, you can tell that one of his aims isn’t just to think about music as a fine art, but to think about music as itself a way of thinking. His approach allows him to write about and think through music in some surprising or perhaps just unfamiliar ways: he asks how music contributes to the formation of one’s opinions, one’s beliefs about the world. But then he also writes about music in ways that are familiar, but that require a great deal of imagination and precision. Peter asks why music, particularly classical music and sacred music but also some rock n roll thrown in, why music makes us feel certain ways, gives form to our emotions—in a sense, helps us feel our own emotions.

Today we hear from Jon Lauck, a Midwestern historian and the author, most recently, of "From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism." The book get its title from a line in the first chapter of "The Great Gatsby." Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a Midwesterner who’s decided to go East to New York to learn the Bond business. He’s just returned to America from World War I, and notes that, “Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe.” That’s an attitude plenty of Midwesterners seem to take to their region of birth—at least, that’s one perspective about the Midwest we often encounter in American fiction and literary criticism. Jon Lauck’s book examines this trope, one might call it a cliché; as does Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, who says that Lauck’s book “exposes the origins of this extraordinarily potent cliché.” Robinson liked the book; so did other Midwesterners such as Tom Brokaw, who writes that his own prarie roots “roots have served me well in the intellectual and concrete canyons of the eastern seaboard and it is good to be reminded why.”

In this episode, we hear from Chadd Dowding, program manager of the Cook Leadership Academy at the Hauenstein Center. I ask Chadd how he goes about identifying emergent leaders in their early 20s and how he helps them develop their projects and initiatives. I also ask Chadd how the students he works with, especially those involved in politics, have responded to election 2016. We also hear from Micaela Cole and Matthew Oudbier, two student-fellows in the academy. Micaela is on her way to getting an undergraduate degree in political science, and Matt is about to start a phd program in philosophy. I ask how they define leadership in their respective fields. And they clue us in on the ways they’re trying to orient their work to the changing political climate in America.

This week, we hear from Jess Row, a Pushcart Prize and PEN/O’Henry award winning author who Granta named a "Best Young American Novelist" in 2007. Row's novel "Your Face in Mine" imagines a world in which racial reassignment surgery is a possibility, even a commonplace. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner writes that "Your Face in Mine" "puts [Row] on another level as an artist. He doesn’t shy away from the hard intellectual and moral questions his story raises, or from grainy philosophical dialogue, but he submerges these things in a narrative that burns with a steady flame. There’s some Jonathan Lethem in Mr. Row’s street-level awareness of culture. There’s some Saul Bellow in his needling intelligence."

In this episode, we hear from David Sehat, an intellectual and cultural historian of the United States at Georgia State University. I ask Sehat about one of his main skills as an historian: that is, his ability to identify certain myths about American history circulated—one might even say peddled—by politicians in order to prop up certain ideological or political agendas in the present. We also discuss Sehat’s excellent podcast MINDPOP, and the extent to which he brings his past experiences to bear on the questions he asks about American history.

In this episode, we hear from Clifford Siskin, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English and American Literature at NYU, as well as Director of the Re:Enlightenment Project. Siskin discusses his recent book "System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge."

In this episode, we hear from Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and contributor to the Washington Post. Daniel identifies some key differences between the kind of thinker we might consider a “public intellectual,” and the one now commonly referred to as a “thought leader.” In our conversation, Daniel explores the differences between the public intellectual and the thought leader as he’s defined them. Dan also discusses the relationship between thought leadership and plutocracy, and explains why he thinks the Marketplace of Ideas has become what he calls the Ideas Industry.

Today we hear from Scott St. Louis, program manager of the Common Ground Initiative at the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University. Scott explores what it would mean for the left and right to find, or even pursue, “common ground” in a time of political hyper-polarization, such as ours.

In today's episode, we hear from Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freud Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, on the promises and perils of anger in civic life.

Today, we hear from John Waters, Professor of Irish Studies at New York University, about the Easter Rising--that is, the 1916 rebellion of Irish nationalists and republicans against British rule in Ireland. John discusses the Rising and its aftermath; he also explores the role of Irish literary and cultural leaders, such as WB Yeats, in developing a certain kind of Irish nationalism that fueled revolutionary zeal.

This week, we hear from Katie Gordon, Program Manager of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute as well as Interfaith Services Coordinator with the Division of Inclusion and Equity at Grand Valley State University. In this episode, Katie discusses the current state of religious relations in America, and what it means to promote interfaith understanding.

In this episode, we hear from David Parsons, a social and cultural historian of 20th century America at New York University and host of The Nostalgia Trap. David discusses some of the historians and critics he’s had on The Nostalgia Trap. He also describes why he moved from being a fan of Rush Limbaugh as a kid to being a committed leftist at UC Santa Barbara, a shift he has not reversed. Finally, David talks a bit about what it’s like being a young scholar in the academy, and whether he thinks it’s incumbent upon scholars in the digital age to try to present their work to the public.

In this special episode of the podcast, we post for you an event hosted at the Hauenstein Center, in partnership with Grand Valley State University’s Division of Inclusion and Equity, that commemorated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On January 17th, 2017, two prominent writers and commentators, Nikole Hannah Jones of the New York Times, and Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal, met at the Hauenstein Center in front of a packed audience of students, faculty, and members of the community for a dialogue about race and the American Dream. The central aim of the conversation was to explore the progress that has been made since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the challenges that continue to exist, in the pursuit of a more equitable society.