The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time . “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish...

“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book,  For the Time Being.  “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The hol...

As a companion to last week’s episode of  The World in Time,  we are sharing with listeners the first episode of  Passages: On Morrison , a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of  The Bluest Eye , Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all...

“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morris...

This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel . Then wri...

“Before he was twenty, George Washington had bought and sold and parlayed himself into nearly three thousand acres of prime land,” William Hogeland writes in Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion That Opened the West . “If he could amass enough land this way, he might build plantations, grow tobacco, marry well, become a burgess, join the Ohio Company, m...

“He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time . “As they travel across the South Pacific and stop at all these different islands, he records the islanders’ languages, he observes their customs, he describes their appearances, their jewelry, their tools, their houses, and brings back such detailed accou...

Two years ago today, Lewis Lapham’s voice joined all those other departed voices of the past. This summer we’ve been welcoming his voice back to the microphone of the present, and today, in commemoration of the anniversary of his death, we are sharing this bonus episode. In the first years of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called The American Ruling...

“America’s founding is not just your conventional heroic struggle for noble ideas and ideals,” says historian Holger Hoock on today’s episode of The World in Time . “It is also a profoundly violent civil war—America’s first civil war—and a civil war in the British Empire.”   This second, war-torn episode of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time , collects histo...

“What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse America had become. We’ve got Frenchmen, we’ve got Spaniards, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Irish, we’ve got all these different Scots, how are we going to hold together? We’re not a nation. Lincoln says, Well, we have an answ...

A series from The World in Time, beginning Friday, July 3, 2026. Voices heard here: Lewis H. Lapham, Jill Lepore, Gordon S. Wood. Illustration: The 1795 flag that flew from Fort McHenry and inspired Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

“We have language. That’s the best tool we have for understanding the consciousness of another,” says Michael Pollan on this week’s episode of The World in Time . “You can go pretty far with it, as Proust himself showed, but that is, in the end, the function of art: to translate one consciousness into another. That’s the only way we know how to do it right now, and it’s pretty powerful, but there’...

“What in God’s name are the humanities,” Lewis Lapham asked in a commencement address he delivered at St. John’s College in 2003 , “and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?” His answer—the humanities are not luxuries akin to “the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach” but liberating necessities—harmonizes with the ans...

“Everyone expected this comet to hit and obliterate England in 1857,” says Francine Prose in this episode of The World in Time. “So a lot of the novel is about the pressure from this belief or non-belief that the comet is going to hit. And of course, Dickens, who’s sort of scientifically minded, dismisses it immediately. And Andersen, who is romantic—paranoid, fearful, the whole list of things whi...

“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...

“‘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...

“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...

“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 me...

“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 ha...

“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 fa...

“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’...

“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. O...

“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 peop...

“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 hu...

“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...