We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben. We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.

We’re in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what we wanted? Fintan O’Toole, on the line from Ireland, is our guest and guide. He’s much admired now for his tart reporting on American life in the New York Review of Books. Fintan O’Toole built his reputation as a theatre critic in Dublin and to this day in New York. We’re asking him to review our presidential debate this week as live drama.

There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for the rest of this campaign, come to look and sound presidential, even though no other president has ever looked like her? Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie McMillan Cottom has put it this way: that all Kamala Harris has to prove is that a woman can lead, that a black woman can be qualified, that a South Asian woman can come to feel familiar, that a childless woman can become a nation’s Momala, and that a Gen-X sensibility can resonate with boomers.

Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a variety of states. Cornel West. His will be the first book I want to read on this 2024 campaign, because he will be recounting a moral inquiry into the American condition at least as much as the ups and downs of his own candidacy.

The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. She’s the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what we’re going through. I’ve been re-reading her early fiction, particularly Housekeeping and Gilead from 20 years ago, and remembering her conversations with Barack Obama over the years, with tables turned from the start. It was never the usual writer profiling a president or a candidate. He was the inquiring politician asking her about Iowa and the country, about the image of God in other people, the presumption of goodness in others that underlies cooperation and democracy. Last winter she said that if she and Citizen Obama were still writing letters back and forth, she’d begin by asking him to “Say something to cheer me up . . . Say it again: that the people ultimately are wise . . . are good.” How would that conversation go today?

In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of that gap: politics and global celebrity sports. Joseph O’Neill. He’s famous as an amateur cricket player in New York, of all places, and as a writer about cricket and the many meanings of sports in general. His new novel, Godwin, is deep into soccer/football in a wild intercontinental search for the next superstar, the next Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé.

In a forlorn Fourth of July week, in the pit of an unpresidential, anti-presidential campaign year, 2024, we welcome back John Kaag, who writes history with a philosophical flair, never more colorful than in his new account of American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty that Shaped a Nation. It’s a family saga in three centuries of frontier settlers and folk characters with the same name: Blood. John Kaag. They’ve got two other strong links among them: generation after generation, these Bloods embody in life some of the wilderness, that wild streak in our history, and they grasp it as articulately as the giants of American thinking—notably, Emerson, Thoreau, and William James.

Guests Hussein Ibish, Mishy Harman, and Shaul Magid discuss the evolving interpretations of Zionism, its connections to refuge and settler statehood, challenges of liberal Zionism, generational perspectives on conflicts in Israel, and the need for accommodation between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism for a peaceful future.

We’re on a hometown spree along the famous Fenway in the heart of Boston. Fenway Park is where the Red Sox play, John Updike’s “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” Fenway Court, built around the same time just a few blocks away, is a jewel box, a treasure house of high art, an American palazzo and museum like none other, a matching monument to quirky Boston’s eccentricity and its beauty. Courtyard, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Photo: Sean Dungan. www.gardnermuseum.org.) We owe Natalie Dykstra for her new biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—who designed Fenway Court, inch by inch. She invented this magical space where Proper Old Boston got up close and personal with the Italian Renaissance, and does to this day. Natalie Dykstra. (Photo: Ellen Dykstra.) Mrs. Gardner made social history, art history, women’s history on a grand scale, but there’s something more here, evident in the Titian room of her museum, with masterpieces on the walls by the giants: Velasquez, Titian himself, and Botticelli around the corner. But there’s Mrs. Gardner, too. She had the authority of an empress (and a whole lot of money) in assembling this art, one painting at a time. Somehow the final effect is unpretentious, intimate, humble, democratic. Our banner image is from John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston—www.gardnermuseum.com.

We’re taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Baker—yes, the multifarious writers’ writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the pacifist historian of World War II in his book Human Smoke; he’s also the cherubic pornographer in Vox, about phone sex; and he’s the podcaster and performer of his own protest songs. He is a marvel, and his big new book is a life-changer, titled Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. Listeners will hear him drawing and growing in the making of this book. And here at our site, you can see him drawing Chris (videographer: Mary McGrath). Below: Chris Lydon and Nicholson Baker.