On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s principled, he’s prepared, a two-fisted aristocrat networked with farmers and workers; a thinker and writer at risk, without fear, talking ideas and enacting them, getting results; a man with no interest in money, no envy of riches or rank. He’s got a Harvard education, but no profession, no real career. He’s a republican, he’ll tell you, who takes self-government seriously—and the personal virtues that sustain it. The hero in this podcast is Samuel Adams of Boston, revived after two and a half centuries by the magical biographer Stacy Schiff. Stacy Schiff (credit: Elena Seibert). Thomas Jefferson of Virginia saw Sam Adams as the man who lifted a tax protest up to the launch of a new nation—a bigger figure even than his second cousin, John Adams, main author of the U.S. Constitution.

With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples in stop-and-go warfare over a small plot of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. John Judis. What if (as in James Joyce’s most famous line) that hundred years of history is itself the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake? Can we break the nightmare war cycle by relearning the history, by taking it again, by doing it over?

Jeremy Eichler, expert on the role of music in preserving history and memory, discusses the power of music as a memorial. He explores the significance of Badda Yar in Kyiv, the hidden messages in Shostakovich's music, the meaning of 'build dung' in German culture, and the artistic friendship between Benjamin Britain and Shostakovich. Eichler emphasizes the connection between music and memory as a way to understand cultural and social history.

Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas our “chief of intelligence” in the realm of world order and disorder. Chas Freeman calls himself sick at heart at the war crimes abounding in this war, some aided and abetted by the United States, he says. Chas Freeman. We’re at a turning point, he’s telling us—not far, perhaps, from nervous breakdown.

Steven Erlanger, New York Times‘ chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, joins the host in a discussion about the disproven assumptions of the Middle East war. They explore topics such as the political division in Israel, the Biden administration's efforts to promote restraint, the complex relationship between Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu, and the need for new players in resolving the conflict.

We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in a terrorist invasion from Gaza two weeks ago, thousands more Palestinians dead in a first round of punishment from Israel. “Only the beginning” says Prime Minister Netanyahu, while President Biden, in support, warns him against “all-consuming rage.” In all-consuming anxiety, more than a million Palestinians, under Israeli orders, have fled their homes in Gaza, without a clue where safety will be found. David Shulman and Hussein Ibish. What we went to find in conversation was the sound of deep experience in the war zone of the Middle East, and also, in a time of dread, some measure of confidence in restraint.

The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and more. She put a man’s name on her author’s page. She built very nearly a religion on her foundational ideas about marriage, yet she never married the man she loved and for 24 years called her husband. Clare Carlisle. It was an astonishing feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It’s another considerable feat of Clare Carlisle’s to fill out for modern readers the question that she and George Lewes were exploring together.

Zadie Smith, known for her breakthrough novel 'White Teeth' and her new novel 'The Fraud', discusses themes of fraudulence in storytelling, the parallels between the environmental crisis and 19th-century slavery, and reflections on writing and a novel in transition.

John Kaag, an expert on Henry David Thoreau's life and work, discusses Thoreau's critique of modern work, the connection between Bartleby the Scrivener and Thoreau's philosophy of nonconformity, the relationship between work and subjugation, and Henry's reflections on life and writing.

Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots music that Harry Smith collected; Thelonious Monk, who talked him through the bop era; Patti Smith, the songster—no relation; the poet Allen Ginsberg, who looked after the homeless Harry Smith. John Szwed. And now the historian/detective John Szwed has filled in a thousand details in his portrait of the cosmic scholar and catalyst of our culture, Harry Smith. He was a compulsive worker who never took a straight job, a heavy drinker and a druggie, “a social outcast with time on my hands,” he called himself. He was a working artist in film, a mystic and a philosopher who said late in life that he had had the thrill of proving Plato right. Music, he declared, can change the direction of a civilization.