The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale,” writer Wyatt Mason says in this episode of The World in Time. “It’s astonishing as you’re reading through. It’s proof of two kinds of life. It’s proof of the life of the creature itself. But it’s also proof of the life of the mind and the attention that we pay—meaning, we readers and we writers pay—through time to this creature, which is very different from the elephant because most of us never see one in our lifetimes. If we’re fortunate, we might, but for the most part, no. So they reside or they live in texts.” With this episode, the second in an intermittent series on the literature, history, and science of the sea, The World in Time launches onto the waters of Moby Dick. The episode begins with excerpts from a pair of conversations Lewis Lapham recorded during his final years as host. First, Lapham speaks with Richard J. King about his 2019 book, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. In the second excerpted interview, recorded in 2022, Lapham talks with Aaron Sachs about Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. The episode concludes with a new conversation. Wyatt Mason and Donovan Hohn talk about the first time they read Moby Dick, about teaching Melville’s novel to incarcerated students enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative, and then, like a pair of sub-sub-librarians, they swim through two curious documents, “Etymologies” and “Extracts,” that precede the famous first sentence of Melville’s tragic Leviathan American novel.

“In a famous episode, he says his name is Nobody, which in a way is obviously a lie,” says writer, scholar, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn in this episode of The World in Time. “But in another way is sort of true because he has become a nobody, right? And another way to describe the sort of narrative arc of The Odyssey is: he has to go from being a nobody and reclaim his identity and be a somebody again. So, the question of the nature of identity—you know, he’s been changed by twenty years of aging, by trauma, by terrible suffering, and yet when he gets home, he has to ‘prove,’ quote-unquote, that he is the same person who left. And that, I think, raises one of the most fascinating questions of the epic—and this speaks to something we know about from our own lives—which is: is there a part of you that remains the same despite the changes that we undergo in life? And that’s the sort of paradox, I think, that’s at the center of the poem. Everybody changes in twenty years, and yet you feel the same in many ways. The Odyssey delves into these very profound questions.” This week’s episode of The World in Time is the first in a series of episodes about The Sea (Summer 2013). Donovan Hohn speaks with Daniel Mendelsohn about his new translation of The Odyssey, traveling back to antiquity in search of the origins of the Homeric epic. Then, in archival audio from 2013, editorial board member Aidan Flax-Clark interviews Lewis H. Lapham about his childhood reading of Moby-Dick, about Lapham’s greenhorn voyages, and about a doomed shipwreck hunt in the early 1960s that Lapham wrote about for The Saturday Evening Post.

“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, and you have people, at least going back to the Paleolithic, consuming these. But you don’t have the system of commodities that makes drugs a particularly modern phenomenon. And what happens as they are commodified—which you could also describe in the same way as saying what happens as they are transformed into drugs, as ayahuasca, for example, is transformed into a drug—is that they’re pulled out of the cultural and ritual context in which they had once made sense, and turned into intoxicants, turned into substances, the purpose of which is to remove you from the burdens of your life.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn revisits the topics of Intoxication (Winter 2012) and Disaster (Spring 2016), speaking first with Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of the forthcoming book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, about the history of drugs and the history of California; about trips, long and strange, good and bad; and about Smith-Ruiu’s experiments—in philosophy and literary nonfiction as well as in psychopharmacology. Later in the episode, Hohn speaks with poet Rachel Richardson about California on fire; about the ways technology gives us a distorted, fishbowl view of disasters, natural and otherwise; about the documentary poetics of C.D. Wright; and about the classical Greek poetic form of the cento, two contemporary examples of which Richardson shares from her new collection, Smother.

“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be able to develop a reputation as a real writer. And that’s something he really wants, too. And arguably, his breakthrough—which I argued that he achieves in the West first—is coming to recognize that those two aren’t mutually exclusive, that that’s a false choice, that he can actually do both, and do both quite well, and that what he thought was a weakness could be a strength.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode all about Mark Twain. First, he speaks with Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, about how Twain’s time in the far West shaped his indelible literary voice and helped give birth to stand-up comedy. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan about why Twain appears to be undergoing a cultural revival, and about how tracking Twain’s travels in newly-digitized archives led to Sullivan’s discovery of a lost Twain eulogy—and its lost writer, Adele Amelia Gleason. Finally, to conclude the episode, Sullivan shares with World in Time listeners yet another long lost passage, this one written by Twain himself, which Sullivan recovered while searching through a database of digitized Indiana newspapers.

Kira Brunner Don, former executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and current editor of Stranger’s Guide, shares her insights on the power of storytelling, especially the importance of local voices in journalism. Nathan Brown, a Concordia University professor and translator of Baudelaire, delves into the complexities of translating poetry and the historical significance of his recently translated poem, "Introspection." Both guests explore the intersection of art and journalism, reflecting on the challenges and nuances of storytelling during conflict.

In this captivating discussion, Francine Prose, author of 22 novels including *1974: A Personal History*, dives into her nostalgic memories of Nixon-era San Francisco. She reflects on vibrant communal living and the pre-tech spirit of the city, contrasting it with the current landscape. Prose shares her idealistic youth, from protesting the Vietnam War to her husband’s audacious climb of the Pentagon. She also explores the eerie parallels between her experiences and themes in Hitchcock's *Vertigo*, weaving a narrative rich in cultural and personal transformation.

In this engaging discussion, guests Ben Metcalf, a former literary editor at Harper’s and author, Emily Allen-Hornblower, a historian from Rutgers, and Sandy Gotham Meehan, a seasoned producer and board member of the American Agora Foundation, pay tribute to the late Lewis H. Lapham. They delve into the vital connection between history and literature, share personal anecdotes about Lapham’s mentorship, and reflect on the absurdities of social etiquette during funerals. The episode also features literary readings that highlight the enduring power of words and art.

“I’m an essayist, not a podcaster,” says Lapham’s Quarterly acting editor Donovan Hohn, “but then the same could be said of Lewis, who took the form and the medium of the podcast and did with it what he’d done all of his adulthood: have conversations with people whose voices he wished to hear. Seasoned listeners to The World in Time may rest assured that similar conversations will resume shortly. This episode, my first behind the microphone, won’t be a conversation, but it will be a duet. I’ll be sharing the microphone some with Lewis Lapham.” This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts two episodes devoted to the life, career, and memory of our founding editor, Lewis H. Lapham. In this first episode, Hohn announces the Quarterly’s plans for Summer 2025, shares excerpts from a keynote address Lapham delivered at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011, pays tribute to Lapham the essayist, and gives an account of the months preceding and following Lewis’ death in July 2024.

Journalist Robert D. Kaplan discusses tragic thinking, Greek perspective, misconceptions about democracy, the complexity of the world, and learning from literature in a thought-provoking conversation with Lewis H. Lapham.

Elizabeth Winkler, a journalist and critic, discusses her book “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” which tackles the contentious Shakespeare authorship question. She delves into the fierce reactions it prompts within literary circles and examines the debate over whether Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, might be the true author. Winkler also highlights the complexities of society's views on playwriting in the 16th century and the intriguing connections between authorship, gender dynamics, and the emotional stakes surrounding Shakespeare's legacy.