Recall This Book

On a blustery fall morning, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands of other steel workers, lost his job when the mills in Southeastern Chicago closed. The book is part of a multimodal project, including the documentary … Continue reading "16 de/industrialization with Christine Walley (EF and JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zadie Smith touched down at Brandeis because Swing Time was this year’s New Student Book Forum selection. It made for a busy day: on top of the podcast, she spoke to faculty and undergraduates at two different events. So, lots of material to discuss. We do our best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, … Continue reading "15x Afterthoughts on Zadie Smith (John and Elizabeth)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. Zadie’s horror at the idea of rereading her own novels opens the show; she can more easily imagine rewriting one (as John’s beloved Willa Cather once did) than having to go through them all again. From there the conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, … Continue reading "15 In Focus: Zadie Smith (JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In May, John and Pu interviewed SF superstar Cixin Liu (you will want to listen to that episode before this one). In August they entered the studio again to work on the final edits for that interview in both its Chinese and English versions. While they were there, they took some time to reflect on … Continue reading "14x Afterthoughts about the Cixin Liu interview (Pu Wang and John)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, John and Brandeis professor Pu Wang talk with the bestselling science fiction author Cixin Liu. Mr. Liu is the author of The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s End, and other works. When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record … Continue reading "14 In Focus: Cixin Liu (in English, with Pu Wang, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

[This is the original Chinese interview with Cixin Liu; to hear the English translation, go to Episode 14] 今年5月18日，前来Brandeis大学接受荣誉博士学位的科幻小说家刘慈欣接受了John Plotz和王璞两位教授的专访。这次独具深度、异常精彩的访谈，已经整理为中英双语两个版本，想听刘慈欣中文原声的科幻迷们，请点这里！也请有兴趣的朋友们多多关注Recall This Book。 收听音频，请戳—— Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth talk cultural renewal with Christina Thompson, author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, a book that both tells a part of the history of Polynesia, and tells how histories of Polynesia are constructed. The discussion also ranges to consider different moments of cultural contact between Polynesian and European thinkers and doers. Those … Continue reading "13 Polynesia, Sea of Islands: with Christina Thompson" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this warm summer episode, Elizabeth and John present a marvelous podcast, The Electro-Library, and they speak with one of its hosts and founders, Jared Green. Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences … Continue reading "12 RTB Presents “The Electro–Library” (with Jared Green)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? What do a badly characterized, racist novel and an imaginatively metaphoric biology article from the 1970s have to do with that? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth find out all of that and more in this discussion with Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley … Continue reading "11 Xenophobia and Ethno-Nationalism, 1973 to today (Quinn Slobodian)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonus! Available only on our website, Episode 10X includes a brief RTB discussion about Exit Zero, a stunning “auto-ethnography” that raises fascinating questions about what it means when people retell stories or anecdotes about their own lives as a form of evidence that helps explain their overall worldview. Update: For more on autofiction, check out this essay on … Continue reading "10 Life, Writing, and Life Writing with Helena DeBres" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices