The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

Episode 22: James Romm on Plato and Tyranny

“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.

Episode 21: The Friends of Attention

“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.

Encore Episode: Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams

“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.

Episode 20: Charles King on Handel's “Messiah”

“Handel gets to Dublin and he’s trying to put together musicians, he’s looking for singers and lo and behold, there is Susannah Cibber who has turned up in Dublin to try to restart her career at exactly the time that Handel is there,” says Charles King in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Handel enlists Cibber in the cast, but she doesn’t read music. Anything she sings has to be plunked out on the harpsichord for her. The place of the premiere is at a charitable event; it’s going to support the indigent and folks in the hospital, the jail—it is not in a cathedral. The premier of Messiah is not even in a church but in a music hall and this new music hall is also trying to develop its own reputation. There were some well-established, very famous theaters in Dublin. This is not it. This is an up-and-comer but they’ve booked Handel for this new piece of music that he’s going to premiere.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Charles King about his new book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. King recounts the history—both sacred and profane, but mostly profane—of the composer’s most famous oratorio, tracing its humble origins and eventual fame to series of unlikely collaborations. Among Handel’s collaborator’s: King George I, King George II, the actor Susannah Cibber, choristers from the church run by Jonathan Swift, and Charles Jennens, the depressive heir to an iron fortune who conceived of the Messiah and compiled the devotional libretto that Handel set to music influenced by Italian opera.

Episode 19: Jeremy Eichler on “Time’s Echo”

“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation.