“Fifth-century Athens still lingers even for us, and it’s a mythical golden age,” says Mary Beard on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And we imagine that all we can do is count ourselves lucky to be the inheritors of the Greek Miracle, all of the things that the Greeks invented: democracy, philosophy, and theater, among much else. I struggled with that when I was at university because it was almost cliché to say that the fifth- and sixth-century Athenians invented democracy, which is simply not true. It doesn’t take much to say, ‘Look, democracy isn’t like the iPhone or the steam engine.’ It isn’t invented in that way. Democracy is a process and people have been experimenting with that process all over the world–not just in Western Europe–for thousands of years.” 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Mary Beard, best-selling historian and professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, about her new book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. “What is the point of the ancient classics?” Beard asks in the book’s introduction. “Why should we bother about what people did two thousand years ago or more: what they made, wrote, and thought? What can it all mean to us now?” In the chapters that follow, and in this episode of The World in Time, she shares her best answers, drawing from her own lifelong, wonder-struck study of the ancient world

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“‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think about what I read, what I write, and what I experience in life. It’s always about these three words. And you cannot separate them in a very clear way.”

This week, in a return of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and essayist Yiyun Li, author most recently of Things in Nature Merely Grow, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, about “The Try-Works,” chapter 96 of Melville’s novel, in which Ishmael teaches readers how to render whale blubber, falls asleep at the Pequod’s jawbone tiller, and, upon awakening, flies like a “Catskill eagle” into and out of the “blackest gorges” of the soul. The chapter’s closing paragraph is, to Li’s mind, possibly “the most gorgeous paragraph written.”

Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” and Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”

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“The oarfish is not only extremely long—I think they can be 20 feet long—but they have a very narrow, undulating body. They’re silvery, but they have a red crest all along their back. It really looks exactly like the sea monsters in ancient Greek vase paintings,” says Adrienne Mayor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It looks like an oarfish guarding the Golden Fleece. They live in very deep water, and they have fragile bodies. And if there’s an earthquake under the ocean, they’re damaged and they wash up on shore—that’s the only time most people see an oarfish, and it would look like a stereotypical dragon.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with folklorist, classicist, and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor about her new book, Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore. In 53 alphabetically arranged essays about “legends of the earth,” or “geomyths,” Mayor’s compendium draws upon oral traditions from all over the world and upon “historical and scientific discoveries that shed light on the remarkable phenomena featured in the legendary stories”—phenomena such as tsunamis, meteor impacts, lethal lakes, perpetual fires, fish that rain from the sky, and sand dunes that sing. 

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“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.” 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees.

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“The leviathan is both positive and negative,” says Philip Hoare on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The image is almost yin and yang: there is the behemoth, kind of a hippopotamus-elephant-rhinoceros, and the leviathan, which is a sea serpent, but has elements of a sperm whale skeleton that Blake had actually seen. So there is this struggle for good and evil. He acknowledged that you have to have heaven to balance hell and vice versa. But it seems the balance has been interrupted by the sea and he is too close to the power of the ocean.”

In this week’s two-part episode, Donovan Hohn speaks with Philip Hoare, author, most recently, of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Their conversation, like the book, is a séance that channels many ghosts—the ghosts of writers such as John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde; the ghosts of artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, Derek Jarman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andy Warhol, and Paul Nash; the ghosts of a great many historical and cultural figures. David Bowie and John Waters both make memorable appearances. But the conversation’s presiding spirit is artist, printmaker, poet, and proto-punk prophet of freedom William Blake. Part two of the episode resumes our intermittent and ongoing series on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the history of the sea. While considering Blake’s influence on Melville, Hohn and Hoare linger over chapter 55, “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”

Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin.”

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“An 1833 review of the only book of poetry Hartley Coleridge published in his lifetime praised the verse for embodying ‘no trivial inheritance of his father's genius,’ but also observed, ‘It is an old saying that the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.’ I have long been interested in what makes some oaklings thrive and others wither, because, in a minor way, I’m an oakling myself. My father was a critic and an essayist. My mother was a war correspondent. The upside of this print-smudged parentage was that I was raised in a home with seven thousand books, plenty of literary conversation, and empirical evidence that writing was something you could actually do for a living."

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist Anne Fadiman about the history of the essay since Montaigne and the art of making essays out of history; about teaching essay-writing to college students; and about what Virginia Woolf called “the Common Reader.” The conversation addresses the title essay—about a pet frog named Bunky—of Fadiman’s new collection, Frog and Other Essays, but Hohn and Fadiman spend the most time with two other essays—one that originally appeared in the Family issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, on poet and essayist Hartley Coleridge, who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, Samuel Taylor, and one first published in the Harvard Review, about the South Polar Times, a magazine whose editors, contributors, and original readers were all members of the polar expeditions led by Robert Falcon Scott.

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“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Because you’re going deeper into the painting.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist and critic Morgan Meis, author of a trilogy of books about the history of art, civilization, war, and much else. In The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Meis investigates a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. In The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy (2022), he turns to a masterpiece Franz Marc painted in 1913, three years before his death during the Battle of Verdun. And in The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood (2025), Meis explores Joan Mitchell’s The Grand Valley, a series of twenty-one paintings that Mitchell made between 1983 and 1984. Like the books, the conversation spirals outward into history and inward into the paintings under examination, all the while putting these three artists into conversation with other artists, writers, and philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Degas, Klee, and Monet, among others.

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“The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going every hour,” says Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “But, basically, a free port is an island, a cordoned-off piece of land, where the rules are not the same as outside. In economics and history, we sometimes talk about onshore and offshore. Onshore and offshore don't really refer to shores or land. They just refer to legal regimes. A free port will be offshore, and if you walk ten feet through a gate, you’re back onshore. It’s fiction. It’s a legal construct.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. Their conversation charts and explores the offshore archipelago of freeports, detention facilities, and other extraterritorial zones with which over the past few centuries—on land, on sea, in space, on islands encircled by water and islands encircled by fences, within the borders of nation states and beyond them—we’ve stitched together our global economy.

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“It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all,” says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “There are three or four different factions, each with their own military wing, competing for control of Syracuse. Plato is watching all this from Athens in what must have been a state of horror, because he understands he was partly to blame, or at least that some people were blaming him for what was taking place. And the Seventh Letter—by far the longest, most detailed, the richest source of evidence for my story—is extremely defensive in an effort to extricate Plato from this morass.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with James Romm, historian and classicist, about his new book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece. The conversation follows Plato on three journeys the philosopher made to Syracuse, the Greek city on the island of Sicily. There, during the reign of Dionysius I and then again during the reign of Dionysius II, Plato attempted to put philosophy into practice. Although his efforts to turn tyrants into philosopher kings ultimately failed, although Syracuse fell catastrophically into political terror and civil war, the history of Plato’s involvement in the city’s politics can, Romm argues, complicate and deepen our understanding of The Republic.

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“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “For instance, giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and other human beings, properly understood, that’s human attention. It also involves daydreaming and taking care of a child and burying your dead—those are attentional activities. It’s been hard for us to keep track of that fact about ourselves as we have increasingly asked ourselves to be more and more seamlessly integrated into these continuous, twenty-four seven data flows and communication entertainment networks. We worry about machinic attention—that it is inextricable from the way we feel bad; that there are authentic pandemics of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, despair; and that our politics is weirdly fractious and dysfunctional.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with D. Graham Burnett, historian of science, and Alyssa Loh, writer and filmmaker, about a new book, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, collectively authored by Burnett, Loh, and other members of the Friends of Attention (among them Peter Schmidt, program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention). The Friends of Attention are a coalition of artists, writers, and scholars committed to liberating human attention from the extractive technologies of the “attention economy.” Hohn, Burnett, and Loh discuss the history of, and possible remedies to, the attentional crisis that Attensity! diagnoses and describes.

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“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 very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.”

In this encore episode from 2022, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.

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