The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
Donovan Hohn, the acting editor of Lapham's Quarterly, interviews historians, writers, and journalists about books that bring voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. New episodes are released weekly.
Episodes
January 2, 2026 • 46 mins
“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was ver...
Mark as Played
December 19, 2025 • 77 mins
“Handel gets to Dublin and he’s trying to put together musicians, he’s looking for singers and lo and behold, there is Susannah Cibber who has turned up in Dublin to try to restart her career at exactly the time that Handel is there,” says Charles King in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Handel enlists Cibber in the cast, but she doesn’t read music. Anything she sings has to be plunked out on the harpsichord for her. The ...
Mark as Played
December 5, 2025 • 80 mins
“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will...
Mark as Played
November 21, 2025 • 69 mins
“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the ...
Mark as Played
November 7, 2025 • 120 mins
“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.”...
Mark as Played
October 24, 2025 • 74 mins
“Religion gives people certainty and it gives people solace,” says Brenda Wineapple in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And according to
William Jennings Bryan, it gives you a moral center, too, which would make
impossible the cruelties of, say, World War One, which horrified him. But that kind of intolerable meaninglessness is something Clarence Darrow, too, feels so strongly. He said, and I’m paraphrasing: everybody nee...
Mark as Played
October 10, 2025 • 55 mins
“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in,” says Elizabeth Kolbert in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “We are extremely tied up as humans for whatever reason. We have obviously evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place. We are surrounded by species that all have long and rich evolutionary...
Mark as Played
September 26, 2025 • 57 mins
“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab,” says novelist and critic Charles Baxter in this episode of The World in Time. “Like Ahab, he is speaking from a great height. He begins his sermon by issuing orders. He tells all the congregants to sit down. And, you know, they have to listen to him. What other choice do they have? But what is important to me in ‘The Sermon’ is that he—how c...
Mark as Played
September 12, 2025 • 83 mins
“They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yoran Cazac put it, they were ‘eating the same s...
Mark as Played
August 29, 2025 • 59 mins
“In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I...
Mark as Played
August 22, 2025 • 81 mins
“This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compelling, it seems to me, because it does have i...
Mark as Played
August 8, 2025 • 42 mins
“Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the best of times,’ and people would get it bac...
Mark as Played
August 1, 2025 • 64 mins
“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people as long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries to get inside your head, and make you, and ...
Mark as Played
July 25, 2025 • 91 mins
“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale,” writer Wyatt Mason says in this episode of The World in Time. “It’s astonishing as you’re reading through. It’s proof of two kinds of life. It’s proof of the life of the creature itself. But it’s also proof of the life of the mind and the attention that we...
Mark as Played
July 18, 2025 • 91 mins
“In a famous episode, he says his name is Nobody, which in a way is obviously a lie,” says writer, scholar, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn in this episode of The World in Time. “But in another way is sort of true because he has become a nobody, right? And another way to describe the sort of narrative arc of The Odyssey is: he has to go from being a nobody and reclaim his identity and be a somebody again. So, the question of the n...
Mark as Played
July 11, 2025 • 79 mins
“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, and you have people, at least going back to t...
Mark as Played
July 4, 2025 • 99 mins
“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be a...
Mark as Played
June 27, 2025 • 89 mins
“They would take you around, introduce you to all of their contacts, translate for you, and help you put together the story,” says scholar-journalist Kira Brunner Don in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And I often felt like, you pay them, of course, a day rate, but there was this understanding that real news was made by American journalists who flew in and told you what was what. All of us were depending on journalists f...
Mark as Played
June 20, 2025 • 46 mins
“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the city had given it to artists and designers an...
Mark as Played
June 14, 2025 • 61 mins
“Lewis was always engaging with some important piece of literature from the past,” says historian and classicist Emily Allen-Hornblower in this episode of The World in Time, edited from audio recorded at the memorial service held for Lewis H. Lapham in September 2024. “You can be chatting about the insanity of the current political landscape and quickly things would shift to how history repeats itself, how humanity simply does not ...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!