Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 10/12/26: Tonight, I read a letter than Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother in the spring of 1883, when Van Gogh was in his early thirties. It can stand in for many of his letters in how it documents what he saw that day, the joy that it gave him, and his plans to transform the people and landscapes he observed into numerous studies and then a final, larger work. After thinking a...

An episode from 1/31/24: Tonight, as a companion to last episode of poems on being a child, I read a handful of poems about being a parent: ⁠“Morning Song,”⁠ by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) ⁠“Child Crying Out,”⁠ by Louise Glück (1943-2023) ⁠“First Snow”⁠ read by Louise Glück ( ⁠audio from here⁠ ) ⁠“This Be the Verse,”⁠ by Philip Larkin (1922-1985) ⁠“Lucinda Matlock,”⁠ by Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)...

An episode from 9/22/26: Tonight, I read three new poems that were just published over at The Brazen Head: “London, 1943,” “Shtetl, 1803,” and “Cleveland, 1988.” You can read the poems here . Since I’ve spent so much time writing longer narrative poems, earlier this year I suddenly wanted to see what it would be like writing smaller narratives—anything from fifty to a few hundred lines. These thre...

An episode from 9/14/26: Tonight, I read my favorite passages from the Diaries of Franz Kafka . (The edition of his diaries that I read has since been replaced by this one ). When you approach these passages, as I do here, with almost no comment or connecting links to his life or his work, let alone to the library of Kafka scholarship that has developed in the last century, he suddenly appears ver...

An episode from 9/7/26: Tonight, I talk about a recent trip to Amsterdam. At the great art museums there I suddenly found myself wondering if the overcrowding in them didn’t suggest what I’ve been saying for a long time on this podcast: that great meaning and intensity is usually found in private experiences. In this case, in the memory of having seen so many great works in person, or actually jus...

An episode from 8/17/26: Tonight, we look at the years of intense simplicity that the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) spent in New Mexico. Attached to the area from her first visit to Taos in 1929, over the next fifteen years she continued to travel and paint there. In 1949 she moved to New Mexico permanently and achieved the kind of bare-bones life, seclusion from the wider world...

An episode from 8/10/26: Tonight, I read about the childhood and adolescence of the actor Al Pacino (born in 1940), as told in his wonderful memoir Sonny Boy . (I also recommend the audio version, read by Pacino himself). We also hear about Pacino now, and what looking back at his upbringing in the South Bronx means to him. After a brief detour on Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre (and...

An episode from 8/3/26: Tonight, we return to the life of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and look into two very different aspects of his creative life. The first is to ask the question how, and under what circumstances, did he write his great music? As it turns out, for the last almost-thirty years of his life, he wrote his music in a 125-square foot room, amid the inescapable the...

An episode from 7/27/26: Tonight, we visit London at two different times in history. First, I read passages from Craig Taylor’s 2011 book Londoners: The days and nights of London now—as told by those who love it, hate it, live it, left it, and long for it . Then we go back a few centuries in Liza Picard’s Restoration London: Everyday Life in London 1660-1670 , and focus especially on the lives of...

An episode from 7/20/26: I’ve realized that, even though I’ve become more social than ever before since becoming a father, the deepest meaning and intensity still come from more private experiences. By “private” I mean those experiences shared with one or two people, or our families and friends, just as much as those moments experienced in complete isolation. I spend this episode giving examples o...

An episode from 7/6/26: For the past year or so, I’ve been putting out another podcast with the artist and educator Tom Hart over at his Substack, Men, an Explanation . You can find all the episodes we’ve done at Apple or Spotify where we talk about all kinds of things, but mostly creativity and how to be decent in the weird world of 2026. Today, I wanted to share one of those episodes with you, w...

An episode from 6/22/26: Tonight, we hear about the British poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) , and the poem he said he spent the most time on, “The Gulkana.” The poem is named after a river in Alaska, and in this episode, I preface a reading of the poem with excerpts from his letters and biography about Hughes’ love for the outdoors and for fishing. In particular, in the last two decades of his life, H...

An episode from 6/1/26: Tonight, we delve into the significance of the moon in mythology, religion, and folklore. I read from the Taschen Book of Symbols , the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols , and Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion . Finally, and most personally, I read about the history of Rosh Chodesh, the monthly Jewish holiday recognizing the New Moon. For this, I read a passage f...

An episode from 5/18/26: Tonight I read about the bear in folklore and mythology from two books everybody should have on their shelves: the Taschen Book of Symbols and the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols . Browsing through either puts you in contact with our best stories and, with the Taschen book, some of our best artwork. Next, I read Lord Byron’s (1788-1824) apocalyptic poem Darkness from 1816. Y...

An episode from 5/11/26: Tonight, I read passages on what the discoveries of agriculture and metallurgy meant for human beings, as reflected in the mythologies and rituals and stories that grew up around them. These passages are taken from sections 12 and 15 of Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries . After Eliade’s rich catalogue of st...

An episode from 5/4/26: Tonight, I read the story of the French journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann and his capture and three year captivity at the hands of Hezbollah. While held prisoner, he was given many books to read to pass the time, and what I share comes from the spy novelist John le Carré’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life . Next, I read from Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime a...

An episode from 4/27/26: Tonight, I read about the destruction of two great houses of worship. The first is the cathedral of Old St. Paul’s, destroyed in 1666 in the Great Fire of London. My reading comes from Neil Hanson’s The Dreadful Judgement: The True Story of the Great Fire of London , and as mentioned, I link to the unabridged UK edition of the book, which is about a hundred pages longer th...

An episode from 4/20/26: Tonight, we delve into the world of cities. First, in a passage from Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic , the town of Portsmouth, Ohio, is lovingly described in the decades before the epidemic. Next, a passage from Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Great Invention describes the author’s travels to research the boo...

An episode from 4/13/26: Tonight, I read about the invention of the wheel and what it meant for the earliest communities of Europe and the Eurasian steppes, from David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language . After this, a few passages from Norman Longmate’s How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War tells the story of gasoline rationing in England during the w...

An episode from 12/9/24: Tonight's episode gathers together all of the readings I've done on this podcast from the poet ⁠William Blake⁠ (1757-1827). All of these poems can be found online at ⁠The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake⁠ : Blake & His Animals: One passage from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and two from Milton. I hope that plucking these three excerpts from hi...

An episode from 1/10/23: Tonight we take a peek into the creative life of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens , we see how he was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels for simultaneous serial publication. Then, thanks to a letter written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who visited Dickens in London in 1862, we also hear...

An episode from 8/25/23: Tonight, I read ten essential poems from one of the great and most public poets of the last seventy years, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). It isn’t hard to come by details of Heaney’s life, but ⁠Stepping Stones⁠ (where Heaney is interviewed at length in what amounts to an autobiography), is a good place to start. His poems are collected in ⁠100 Poems⁠ , and in the ⁠individual c...

An episode from 3/16/26: Tonight, I read about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the year 535 CE, and the outbreak of plague in Constantinople (and elsewhere) only a few years later. It all comes from Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade , and I give a handful of reasons why her histories for adults and children are def...

An episode from 3/9/26: Tonight, I read from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America . After that, I talk about the recent TV show The Killing , as a way in to talking about our obsession and desire for criticism, objectivity, and certainty. Isn’t privacy and the subjective more fruitful? Both parts of this episode are related to essays in my book Notes from...

An episode from 3/2/26: Tonight, I read a single paragraph from two books that each had a profound effect on my understanding of religion, creativity, and a great deal else. The first comes from page one of Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas , and the second from John Eliot Gardiner’s Johann Sebastian Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven . What is your equivalent of these passages? Email me...