Yesterday
Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as Angie Hobbs argues in this clear-sighted book Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, ... Show More
1h 18m
Yesterday
Douglas Greene, "In Stalin's Shadow: Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials" (Resistance Books, 2025)
Most people on the contemporary left see Stalin as an unfortunate stain on the history of the global left, a part of the historical process that we’d be better avoiding in our attempts to build towards socialism. He does still have some scattered defenders though, putting out boo ... Show More
1h 3m
Feb 2013
Willem J. M. Levelt, “A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era” (Oxford UP, 2012)
The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the sto ... Show More
58m 27s
Apr 2021
Junaid Quadri, "Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In his much anticipated and equally brilliant book Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (Oxford UP, 2021), Junaid Quadri explores the productive tensions, fissures, and creative interpretive projects enabled by the drive to defend Muslim traditionalism ... Show More
1h 16m
Apr 2023
A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern, "Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence (Columbia UP, 2022) recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring ... Show More
46m 36s
Oct 2023
#68 — Reality and the Imagination
Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about meditation, the need for stories, the power of technology to erase the boundary between fact and fiction, wealth inequality, the problem of finding meaning in a world without work, religion as a virtual reality game, the difference b ... Show More
1h 12m
Sep 2023
#68 — Reality and the Imagination
Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about meditation, the need for stories, the power of technology to erase the boundary between fact and fiction, wealth inequality, the problem of finding meaning in a world without work, religion as a virtual reality game, the difference b ... Show More
38m 47s
Feb 2018
Alexander Knysh, “Sufism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Sufism, like many terms in the study of Islam, can be difficult to define and even more difficult to handle, but Alexander Knysh, in Sufism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2017), has produced a primer that will both challenge and reinforce many of the assumptions we’v ... Show More
56m 2s
Jul 2019
Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)
Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancien ... Show More
1h 5m
Jul 2021
The Last Archive: Scopes Monkey Trial
July 10, 1925. A group of Tennessee jurors is selected to judge the case of John T. Scopes, a high school science teacher. His offense? Teaching his students about evolution. Across the country, Americans are tuning in to hear science face off against religion in the eyes of the ... Show More
51m 28s
Jan 2024
David M. Henkin, "The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us who We are" (Yale UP, 2021)
The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us who We are (Yale UP, 2021) is an investigation into the evolution of the seven-day week and how our attachment to its rhythms influences how we live.
We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or ... Show More
58m 13s
Mar 2020
Michael O’Sullivan, "Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award winning new book examines how longing for the divine paradoxically drove secularism. ... Show More
1h 17m
Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engage ... Show More
