Princeton University Podcasts

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as commander of the U.S. Central Command, was presented with the James Madison Medal, the University's top honor for graduate alumni. Petraeus, who earned his master's in public affairs and a Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1985 and 1987, respectively, is renowned both as a military leader and public intellectual. He emphasized the qualities needed for successful strategic leadership -- developing big ideas, effectively communicating and implementing those ideas, and learning from best and worst practices. While he applied those examples to his experience with the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Petraeus underscored that such qualities were keys to success in any endeavor.

On the topic of homosexuality, Andrew Sullivan has stated “There are as many politics of homosexuality as there are words for it, and not all of them contain reason. And it is harder perhaps in this passionate area than in any other to separate a wish from an argument, a desire from a denial. This fracturing of discourse is more than a cultural problem; it is a political problem. Without at least some common ground, no effective compromise to the homosexual question will be possible. Matters may be resolved, as they have been in the case of abortion, by a stand-off in the forces of cultural war. But unless we begin to discuss this subject with a degree of restraint and reason, visceral unpleasantness will dog the question of homosexuality for a long time to come, intensifying the anxieties that politics is supposed to relieve.” Andrew Sullivan is a blogger (The Atlantic Online’s Daily Dish), a senior editor at The New Republic, and author of The Conservative Soul (HarperCollins, 2006). His 1993 TNR essay, “The Politics of Homosexuality,” was credited by the Nation magazine as the most influential article of the decade regarding gay rights. Sullivan is a graduate of Oxford University and has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Cosponsored by the Princeton University Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center.

On the topic of homosexuality, Andrew Sullivan has stated “There are as many politics of homosexuality as there are words for it, and not all of them contain reason. And it is harder perhaps in this passionate area than in any other to separate a wish from an argument, a desire from a denial. This fracturing of discourse is more than a cultural problem; it is a political problem. Without at least some common ground, no effective compromise to the homosexual question will be possible. Matters may be resolved, as they have been in the case of abortion, by a stand-off in the forces of cultural war. But unless we begin to discuss this subject with a degree of restraint and reason, visceral unpleasantness will dog the question of homosexuality for a long time to come, intensifying the anxieties that politics is supposed to relieve.” Andrew Sullivan is a blogger (The Atlantic Online’s Daily Dish), a senior editor at The New Republic, and author of The Conservative Soul (HarperCollins, 2006). His 1993 TNR essay, “The Politics of Homosexuality,” was credited by the Nation magazine as the most influential article of the decade regarding gay rights. Sullivan is a graduate of Oxford University and has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Cosponsored by the Princeton University Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center.

Seldom can it be said that any one person ever managed to change the outside world’s perception of an entire nation, an entire people. But, beginning in 1954, Joseph Needham (1900–1995), a Cambridge biochemist, a figure dauntingly eccentric and brilliantly polymathic in equal measure, did just that. This account, drawn from his diaries and letters and the immense and extraordinary book he spent half a lifetime writing, is his remarkable story. A graduate of Oxford University, Simon Winchester began his career as a journalist in 1967 and has covered numerous stories for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, including the Ulster crisis, the creation of Bangladesh, the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos, the Watergate affair, the Jonestown massacre, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the Falklands War. He has worked as a free-lance writer for more than 20 years, contributing to Harper’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and publishing several best-selling books. He has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; the bestselling The Professor and the Madman; The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans, which tells the story of his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 war in Kosovo; and The Map That Changed the World, about 19th-century geologist William Smith. In addition he is the author of the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 and A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. His latest book is The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (May 2008).

Seldom can it be said that any one person ever managed to change the outside world’s perception of an entire nation, an entire people. But, beginning in 1954, Joseph Needham (1900–1995), a Cambridge biochemist, a figure dauntingly eccentric and brilliantly polymathic in equal measure, did just that. This account, drawn from his diaries and letters and the immense and extraordinary book he spent half a lifetime writing, is his remarkable story. A graduate of Oxford University, Simon Winchester began his career as a journalist in 1967 and has covered numerous stories for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, including the Ulster crisis, the creation of Bangladesh, the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos, the Watergate affair, the Jonestown massacre, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the Falklands War. He has worked as a free-lance writer for more than 20 years, contributing to Harper’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and publishing several best-selling books. He has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; the bestselling The Professor and the Madman; The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans, which tells the story of his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 war in Kosovo; and The Map That Changed the World, about 19th-century geologist William Smith. In addition he is the author of the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 and A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. His latest book is The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (May 2008). A Spencer Trask lecture

Martin Chalfie, chair and professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). GFP has become a fundamental tool in cell biology, developmental biology, genetics, neurobiology and the medical sciences. It has permitted scientists to study damaged cells in Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and genetic disorders. It also has many applications in industry. Chalfie has a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University. A Louis Clark Vanuxem Lecture

Martin Chalfie, chair and professor of biological sciences at Columbia University, shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). GFP has become a fundamental tool in cell biology, developmental biology, genetics, neurobiology and the medical sciences. It has permitted scientists to study damaged cells in Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and genetic disorders. It also has many applications in industry. Chalfie has a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University. A Louis Clark Vanuxem Lecture

In addition to being the former ambassador to Afghanistan, Robert Finn is a Lecturer in Near Eastern Studies and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School

The President’s Lecture Series was established by President Shirley M. Tilghman in the fall of 2001 to give Princeton’s faculty an opportunity to learn about the work of their colleagues in other disciplines and to share their research with the University community. First proposed by Alan B. Krueger, the Lynn Bendheim Thoman, Class of 1976, and Robert Bendheim, Class of 1937, Professor in Economics and Public Policy, the lectures are presented three times a year and are open to the public.

Plutarch and Heraclitus believed that a certain passage in the 20th book of The Odyssey (“Theoclymenus’s prophecy”) was a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total over the Ionian Islands and was the only suitable eclipse in more than a century to agree with classical estimates of the decade-earlier sack of Troy around 1192–1184 B.C.E. However, much skepticism remains about whether the verses refer to this, or any, eclipse. Marcelo Magnasco and his colleague Constantino Baikouzis of the Observatorio Astronomico in La Plata, Argentina analyzed other astronomical references in the epic, without assuming the existence of an eclipse, and searched for dates matching the astronomical phenomena they probably describe. Using three astronomical references in the epic—Boötes and the Pleiades, Venus, and the New Moon—and supplementing them with a conjectural identification of Hermes’s trip to Ogygia with the motion of planet Mercury, they searched all possible dates in the span 1250–1115 B.C., trying to match these phenomena in the order and manner that the text describes. In that period, a single date closely matches the phenomena: 16 April 1178 B.C.E. They speculate that the astronomical references in the epic, plus the disputed eclipse reference, may refer to that specific eclipse.