Hot Takes on the Classics

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , the 1879 play whose ending shocked European audiences and helped redefine modern drama. They trace the legal and social pressures behind Nora Helmer’s secret loan, her forged signature, and the blackmail that threatens to expose her, while paying close attention to Ibsen’s use of dial...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” a story about beauty, sacrifice, holiness, and the demanding vocation of the artist. In a quiet Norwegian religious community shaped by austerity, Babette arrives as a refugee and spends twelve years serving two aging sisters before using her entire lottery fortune to prepare one m...

In this special spouses episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda are joined by Gaelyn Hurd and Mark Maeda to ask two deceptively simple questions: What is classical education, and what convinced each of them that it was worth pursuing? Their answers range across the great conversation, the classical canon, grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, Latin, history, virtue, wonder, and...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” a story about two brothers trying to understand one another across the distance created by responsibility, suffering, addiction, and art. They discuss Baldwin’s lyrical prose, his Harlem upbringing and life in Paris, the tension between the older brother’s dutiful path and Sonny’s v...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story in which the most important subject is never named. At a Spanish train station, an American man and a young woman called Jig wait for a train to Madrid while circling around a “simple operation” that will determine the future of their relationship. Tim and Em...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a story of young adulthood, race, pride, dependence, and painful moral awakening. Set largely on a city bus, the story brings Julian, a self-consciously progressive college graduate, into collision with his cheerful but deeply prejudiced mother as the chang...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that captures the uncertainty and self-consciousness of adolescence and early adulthood. They consider Prufrock’s anxious journey through the modern city, his inability to act or speak decisively, and Eliot’s use of jarring images, near rhymes, and the dra...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Jon Fosse’s Trilogy , the work of a Norwegian novelist and playwright whose spare, musical prose gives voice to experiences that resist ordinary explanation. Focusing primarily on “Wakefulness,” they follow the young lovers Asle and Alida as they wander through cold and rain searching for shelter before the birth o...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda enter the teen years with Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?,” a terrifying story in which almost nothing violent happens on the page. They follow fifteen-year-old Connie from a restless family life and flirtation at a drive-in to a long, increasingly threatening conversation with Arnold Friend a...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda close their exploration of childhood with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince . Part children’s story, part fairy tale, and part philosophical meditation, the book asks readers to recover a childlike capacity for wonder without confusing innocence with naïveté. From the Little Prince’s encounters with kings, busine...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh begin their exploration of adolescence with James Joyce’s “Araby”, a story of youthful longing set against the drab, paralyzed world of Dublin. Tim and Emily discuss the unnamed boy’s intense attraction to Mangan’s sister, the religious and chivalric language through which he understands his desire, and the painful disillus...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, a psychologically complex ghost story that challenges idealized visions of childhood innocence. They discuss James’s elaborate prose, the governess’s uncertain perceptions, the sinister influence surrounding Miles and Flora, and the story’s unresolved tension between supernatura...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore Hans Christian Andersen’s life and two of his best-known stories: “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling.” They consider how fairy tales preserve patterns of reality, form the moral imagination, and speak as powerfully to adults as to children.  Episode Outline Hans Christian Andersen’s impoverished chi...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh discuss William Faulkner's celebrated short story "Barn Burning." Along the way they explore Faulkner's life, the emergence of stream of consciousness narration, and why “Barn Burning” remains one of the greatest American short stories ever written. The hosts examine the heartbreaking moral dilemma facing young...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh begin their season on the stages of life with William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." They explore the Romantic movement's response to the Enlightenment, Wordsworth's vision of childhood as a uniquely perceptive stage of life, and the poem's claim that child...

Description In this opening episode of Season 3, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh unveil a last-minute change of plans, shifting from a season on politics to an exploration of literature centered on the stages of human life. Together they build a reading list spanning childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, debating classic short stories, novellas, poems, and plays that illuminate each season...

Description In this special year-end episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda share their five favorite reads of 2025. Moving from plays and poetry to memoir, philosophy, theology, neuroscience, and historical fiction, they reflect on the books that most shaped their thinking this year. Along the way, they discuss stage design and historical drama, political memoir, levi...

Description In this penultimate episode of Hot Takes on the Classics ’ season on love, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh step back to reflect on what a sustained engagement with classic texts has revealed about love itself. Drawing on philosophy, novels, poetry, and plays explored throughout the season, they consider why love is harder to portray than war, why modern culture lacks an adequate vocabular...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh close their season on love by turning to Simone Weil’s Waiting for God . Through a wide-ranging conversation, they explore Weil’s life as an “activist mystic,” her radical commitment to solidarity with the afflicted, and her understanding of attention as the heart of prayer, learning, and love of neighbor. The...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, the first known book written in English by a woman. They discuss Julian’s life as a fourteenth-century anchoress, her extraordinary visions during a near-fatal illness, and her enduring theological vision of divine love as all-encompassing, sustaining, an...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore The Temple by George Herbert, one of the most profound devotional poetry collections in the English language. Through close readings of Herbert’s poems and reflections on his life, suffering, and vocation, the hosts examine how Herbert uses poetic form, architectural structure, and startling imagery to...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore how Western art and music have depicted the many faces of love—from divine ecstasy to tragic longing to the gentle affections of pastoral life. They move through Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony , Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas , Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa , and Bruegel’s The Wedding Dance , examining how...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh take a deep dive into Jonathan Edwards’s A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections , one of the most important theological works ever published in America. They explore Edwards’s historical moment in the midst of the First Great Awakening, the cultural divide between “old lights” and “new lights,” and Edwards’...

Description In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore one of the most influential works in Western thought—St. Augustine’s Confessions . Through Augustine’s prayerful reflections, they trace the restless search of a soul divided between desire and grace, and how divine love— caritas —gathers a disintegrated self into unity. Emily and Tim discuss Augustine’...

Description  In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics , Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh turn to the fourth and final love in C.S. Lewis’s taxonomy— agape , or divine charity—through the Gospel of St. John. They explore how John’s vision of love transforms an ordinary Greek term into the heartbeat of Christian revelation. Emily and Tim trace the word’s evolution from the Greek poets through the Se...