This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street.
Jackson Lears.
The historian Jackson Lears is reintroducing us to the energy, enchantment, courage, spontaneity, and longing that have driven the American story uphill and down, to wherever we are in the 2020s—a big question in itself. He gives us a world that’s thrumming with invisible currents of power: something more than animal magnetism, bigger than electricity.
Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness
Campus Uproar
American Disorder
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
Of Melville and Marriage
Against Despair
The Rebel’s Clinic
Algorithmic Anxiety
The Humbling of Harvard
The Most Secret Memory of Men
The Revolutionary
Israel and Palestine Across History
Time’s Echo
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn
Upended Assumptions
War and Dread
George Eliot’s Marriage Story
Zadie Smith on The Fraud
Henry at Work
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It is Free
Postcards from China
The Art of War
Pride and Prejudice
The Money Machine