ThoughtCast®

ThoughtCast®

An online watering hole for ideas

Episodes

The Restoration of the Neptune Fountain

February 9, 2025 • 1 min
At the Modern Art Foundry in Astoria Queens, workers restore the Neptune Fountain, which was missing its hands, an arm and a foot.
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Tom Perrotta on Flannery O’Connor — a literary affinity

February 2, 2025 • 30 mins
Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Mrs. Fletcher, Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers, speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and inspires him: Flannery O'Connor.
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Blacksmith House Poetry Series: Carl Phillips and Penelope Pelizzon

December 4, 2024 • 54 mins
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s 1839 poem "The Village Blacksmith." Earlier this week, series director Andrea Cohen introduced the poe...
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Kwame Anthony Appiah: the Cosmopolitan Philosopher

November 10, 2024 • 41 mins
Note: Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the New York Times column, "The Ethicist", has just won (in the summer of 2024) the Library of Congress' Kluge Prize. A high honor. This program was broadcast on WCAI, an affiliate of WGBH, Boston. In this interview from 2004, New York University Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism on ThoughtCast! Born in England and raised in Ghana, Appiah is half English ...
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Harvard Critic Helen Vendler on Emily Dickinson

September 4, 2024 • 18 mins
Sadly, Helen Vendler has just died on April 23, 2024, at ninety years of age. I'm so glad I got a chance to meet her. Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, Prairie Public Radio, WABE in Atlanta and on KUT in Austin, Texas. When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson's more famous poems. They've stayed with her over the yea...
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Tales from Donegal, told in Kenny’s Bookshop

August 8, 2024 • 18 mins
Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. In 1861 in Clonmany, on the Inishowen peninsula in the far north of County Donegal Ireland, Charles McGlinchy was born.  His was a windblown, rough world, wracked with beauty and hardship. A weaver by trade, and a bachelor, in his old age he realized he was the last of the McGlinchys, the last of his name. Night after night, he told his tale to an ...
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Behind the Scenes at Law and Order

May 20, 2024 • 3 mins
Behind the Scenes at Law and Order! Watch the shooting of the episode “Blood Libel” from its 6th season.
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Rediscovering James Joyce in Dublin with editor Maurice Earls

October 30, 2023 • 24 mins
Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin,Texas. James Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, and it was from Dublin he fled as a young man, to Trieste, in order to write Ulysses, perhaps the key novel of the early 20th century. But before he left, he began to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, as most of us will remember, is a rite of passage not only for its main character, the...
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Charles Simic’s the choice at San Francisco’s Dog Eared Books!

October 9, 2023 • 11 mins
Sadly, since this interview was recorded, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has died at the age of 84. Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. Kate Rosenberger is one of those rare people who collects independent book stores in San Francisco the way the rest of us collect antique door stops, or unusual African masks. Her most recent acquisition is Alley Cat Books, but she a...
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The history and future of the New England Forest

July 18, 2023 • 9 mins
Note: an audio version of this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and by KPIP in Missouri. The forests of New England are, remarkably, a success story. They've recovered from attack after attack. The early settlers hacked them down, by hand, for houses, fences and firewood. Later on, the insatiable sawmills of a more industrial age ate up the lumber needed for our expansion. Today...
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The End of Our Universe among other timely topics…

April 16, 2023 • 29 mins
The End of Our Universe with astrophysicist Alex Vilenkin. On ThoughtCast!
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International news and the American attention span

January 7, 2023 • 2 mins
International News Coverage in America and the public's attention span
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The Mau Mau rebellion — a revisionist history

July 21, 2022 • 6 mins
NOTE: Caroline Elkins is in the news again, with a new book called Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. In it she continues her searing research into first world abuse and torture of numberless Africans under their colonial control. How does history get rewritten? How do victimizers become victims, and the valiant turn into villains? As Harvard history professor Caroline Elkins has learned, this process can be a ha...
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Zen and the Art of Writing – with Natalie Goldberg

June 21, 2022 • 29 mins
Natalie Goldberg, the well-known author and writing teacher, is also a painter and a practitioner of Zen.
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Dancer, Choreographer Ron Brown

March 8, 2022 • 2 mins
Ron Brown works with his dance company Evidence.
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The North Atlantic Right Whale: Our Urban Leviathan

January 10, 2022 • 19 mins
Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston's NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Photo: courtesy US Marine Mammal Commission The endangered North Atlantic Right Whale is probably our closest cetacean neighbor. There are only about 350 of them in total, and they live precariously near to shore, along the Eastern seaboard, in a horrendously busy commercial shipping corridor that stretches from Nova Sc...
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Women’s Work at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

October 13, 2021 • 3 mins
Division of Labor: Women's Work was an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1995
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Rebecca Goldstein: the atheist with a soul

August 11, 2021 • 28 mins
ThoughtCast spoke to author and academic Rebecca Goldstein about her novel "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction".
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The Dan Flavin Art Institute

May 17, 2021 • 3 mins
The Dan Flavin Art Institute, overseen by Dia Center for the Arts, is filled with the florescent tubes that made Flavin famous.
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The Peabody Sisters – with biographer Megan Marshall

March 3, 2021 • 28 mins
The three Peabody sisters, Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia, were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the 19th century.
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