After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope.
Hope against Hope is a ... Show More
Apr 27
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the ... Show More
23m 23s
Apr 20
London Revisited: Plague, Rebellion and Guilds
If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward decided from the start of his reign in 1272 to put pressure on the city to justify its liberties. The result was a profusio ... Show More
27m 44s
May 2023
J. Daniel Elam, "World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics" (Fordham UP, 2020)
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers en ... Show More
55m 16s
Apr 2023
501 The Naked World (with Irina Mashinski)
Irina Mashinski is a bilingual Russophone American writer, poet, essayist, teacher, and translator, whose works include Giornata and eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is also the co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. In this episode, Irina talks with Ja ... Show More
54m 41s
Oct 2025
Ahmad Ibsais: Law & the Power of Words | Sumud Podcast
🎙️ This week on the Sumud Podcast, we’re joined by Ahmad Ibsais, a law student, writer, and poet whose work captures life, loss, and defiance under siege. Through his acclaimed newsletter State of Siege, Ahmad documents a generation’s struggle for justice, blending legal insight ... Show More
36m 23s
Jul 2023
17: Fanon the Clinician feat. Nica Siegel
<p>Abby and Patrick welcome political theorist Nica Siegel, author of a forthcoming manuscript on the politics of exhaustion, including a recently published chapter, “Fanon's Clinic: Revolutionary Therapeutics and the Politics of Exhaustion,” and a brand-new essay in <em>Par ... Show More
1h 31m
Dec 2024
Red Bricks, Revolution, and Renewal
In our final episode of 2024, the 16:1 hosts share reflections and takeaways from the 2024 NCTE National Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts. The event was inspiring and energizing, featuring notable figures such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, comedienne Kat ... Show More
40m 4s
Sep 2025
TM Smoke Signals: We Refuse to Be Victims by Njuki Githethwa
<p>In this Smoke Signal, Njuki Githethwa reads from the newly published collection ‘We Refuse to Be Victims' by Ugandan activist and poet Sam Mugumya. His words remind us that courage, dignity, and resistance are possible even under the harshest conditions.</p>
<p>Sam visited Nai ... Show More
4m 18s
Mar 2023
Mortal Pretensions in John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (Holy Sonnet 10)
A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects were mo ... Show More
57m 49s
Jul 2025
Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us
This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translat ... Show More
50m 57s
May 2019
Episode 6: The .01 Percent
In this episode, Israeli poet Tahel Frosh talks to us about her debut poetry collection Betsa (Avarice, 2014), financial crisis, and the value of culture. We revisit the summer of 2011, when a series of protests spread across Israel sparked by rising housing costs, the increased ... Show More
27m 46s