Recall This Book

著者: Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
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  • Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.
    Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
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Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.
Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
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  • 148* Albion Lawrence: Scientists Cooperate while Humanists Ruminate (EF, JP)
    2025/04/17
    Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?” The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography to the influence of place and geographic location in scientific collaboration to mountaineering traditions in the sciences. As a Recallable Book, Elizabeth champions The People of Puerto Rico, an experiment in ethnography of a nation (in this case under colonial rule) from 1956, including a chapter by Robert Manners, founding chair of the Brandeis Department of Anthropology. Albion sings the praises of a collective biography of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, A Message to Our Folks. But John stays true to his Victorianist roots by praising the contrasting images of the withered humanist Casaubon and the dashing young scientist Lydgate in George Eliot’s own take on collective biography, Middlemarch. Discussed in this episode: Richard Rhodes Making of the Atomic Bomb Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite James Gleick, The Information Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation Black Hole photographs win giant prize Adam Jaffe, “Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations“ Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind Julian Steward et al., The People of Puerto Rico Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks Jenny Uglow, Lunar Men George Eliot, Middlemarch Listen to and Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    42 分
  • 147 Ieva Jusionyte on American Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds (EF, JP)
    2025/04/03
    John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions. Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence. Mentioned in this episode: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991) Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004) Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 "Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 2019 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1998) and the "state of exception" Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the "zone" Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023) Recallable Books/Films Ieva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book's structure enacts its argument. Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience. John prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018) Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間
  • 146* Managerial Bishops Rule! Peter Brown on Wealth in Early Christianity (JP)
    2025/03/20
    Peter Brown's fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton UP, 2014) chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. For our 2020 series in the rise of money (we also spoke to Thomas Piketty and Christine Desan) Brown related the emergence, in the 3rd and 4th century AD, of striking new ideas about charity and how to include the poor inside a religious community. Brown explains the importance of civic euergetism in the Greek and Roman worldview–i.e. benefaction and charity strictly confined to the good of the city. In early Christianity, this was replaced by compensatory almsgiving by the rich to benefit the lowly poor, or beggars. That notion of the rich being “less likely to enter heaven than a camel going through the eye of a needle”–that, says Brown, “was Jesus at its wildest.” Augustine even preached about almsgiving as “like a traveller’s check” that let the rich bank up credit in heaven. But most crucial of all to Brown’s argument about changed ideas of wealth is that Christianity initiated the world-transformational notion of corporate identity. Before Oxford, before the East India Company, before IBM, the “managerial Bishop” (Brown’s brilliant coinage) is not wealthy in his own right, but is an agent of “impersonal continuity.”.Brown thinks Foucault got this kind of “pastoralism” in Church leaders partially right. But Foucault–“an old fashioned Catholic in many ways” Brown remarks slyly–underestimated the desire of the Christian community to designate a “consumer-driven” church hierarchy in which they can invest. Pressed on the question of resonance to our own day, Brown (as a “good semi-Durkheimian of the Mary Douglas variety”) stresses that “these are almost incommensurable societies.” And he does note an ominous Roman parallel in present-day “personalization of power”–understanding the odious Putin by reading Seneca. Nonetheless, Brown makes clear his enduring admiration for Late Antiquity–compared to classical Greece and perhaps to our own day–because of its “remarkable tolerance for anomaly.” Brown has that too, more power to him! Mentioned in the Episode Peter Brown, Body and Society (1968) Peter Brown,. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1968) Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (1981) Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul (2015) Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siè (Economic Poverty and Social Poverty) Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 AD and many other works available here ) Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (on priests and the importance of the pastoral or shepherding metaphor) George Lakoff and Michael Johnson, Metaphors We Live By Seneca, Letters from a Stoic Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 分

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