Amanda Holmes reads Sylvia Plath’s “A Birthday Present.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The world is a gas station, and we’re fighting in its parking lot. This week, Will and Felix offer the definitive analysis of America’s suicidal flailing on the world stage. We also talk about JD trying to straddle the “anti-war” fence, Robert J. O’Neill as the ultimate 21st century American, and more US jets crashing.
The Instagram is BACK: https://www.instagram.com/chapotraphousereal/
Milton Friedman and others tried to explain interest rates using liquidity, economic activity, and inflation expectations. These things, however, only describe interest but do not explain it. Only the Austrian theory of time preference correctly explains interest.
As war drums beat again, this time against Iran, we ask ourselves if recklessness from Donald Trump and European and Israeli leaders is pushing us to catastrophe.
Scholar of science and technology studies and Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Anita Say Chan, is back to break down the fight between the Pentagon and Claude A.I., & explain big tech's increasingly obvious and ominous gestures to a techno feudalist future where intelligence is paywalled, human bodies exist to be rented by AI agents, and big tech runs the American military machine.
Today we dive into the declining relevance of movies and movie theaters in the modern era, as well as the meager highlights from last night's Oscars ceremony: The snubs, the politics, and the tributes. Plus, more updates on the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz.
If you were in the business of making a bunch of money in 2026, you probably wouldn’t pick journalism. From social media to AI, the attention economy has upended the economic calculus for delivering news. But some entrepreneurs are looking to buck the trend.
Today on the show, we examine what the success of two startups could mean for the future of journalism.
Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent became a runaway hit for its exploration of a life told through letters. When readers meet Sybil Van Antwerp she’s in her 70s, and she takes readers on a journey through her various correspondences — which include names as revered as Joan Didion and Ann Patchett. But Sybil isn’t telling us everything, and her clever prose might hide as much as it reveals. In today’s episode, author Virginia Evans joins Here and Now’s Robin Young to discuss the value of correspondence, and how the book’s success has changed the letter-writing industry itself.
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