Madison's Notes

Philippe Villeneuve has been chief architect of Notre Dame Cathedral since 2013. On the night of the shocking 2019 fire, he learned by phone that the building he had loved since boyhood, and modeled in miniature at just 16, was burning. In this conversation with host Ryan Shinkel, he traces how a career spent restoring fire-damaged monuments prepared him for the five-year effort to bring the cathedral back, and explains why he describes the result not as a restoration but as a restitution. Along the way he makes the case for Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as the father of his discipline, defends the judgment of the craftsman against the certainties of computer modeling, and recounts the three “miracles” he found in the ruins. Underneath it all runs a striking humility: the conviction that he is a single point in a long story, preparing the cathedral for generations he will never meet. 

What is magic, and why does it keep returning in new disguises? For a special Halloween episode, host Ryan Shinkel is joined by essayist and novelist Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature, Here in Avalon, Strange Rites, and Self-Made, to trace the Western esoteric tradition from the Renaissance to the present. Burton describes learned magic as the search for hidden correspondences between things, a humanist project that promised not union with God but the chance to become godlike through secret knowledge.The conversation follows that promise through Ficino’s Hermetic translations at the Medici court, the 19th-century occult revival and its turn from proto-science toward art, reaction, and the unstable self, and the American arrival of New Thought, which gave us manifesting. Along the way: why the technocratic class keeps finding itself at the center of the magical worldview, what the tradition’s two-tier esotericism has in common with the noble lie, and how occult imagery shaped modern propaganda. Burton also discusses how her own search for beauty led her to Anglo-Catholicism, whether demons can possess a chatbot, the nature of charisma, and what a human writer can offer that a large language model cannot.

What keeps political power aimed at the good of those it governs? Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton, joins host Ryan Shinkel to discuss her book Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton UP, 2026). She distinguishes rule, any hierarchical relationship of direction, from office, which is bound by term limits, eligibility requirements, limited powers, and accountability.Lane argues that the Republic, far from Karl Popper’s vision of unconstrained power, is a book about constitutional design: its very title, Politeia, meant a city’s offices and laws, and Plato surrounds his rulers with legal safeguards rather than trusting virtue alone. The conversation also takes up the noble lie, the written law code of the Laws and its dawn-meeting council, and the Statesman’s account of weaving a city divided between hawks and doves — a problem we’d now call polarization. Lane closes on why no AI can do the work of reading Plato for you and an invitation for listeners to live with these texts themselves.

On this episode of Madison’s Notes, host Ryan Schinkel interviews journalist Charles C. Mann about his New Atlantis essay series “How the System Works,” which examines the four hidden systems that sustain modern life: food, water, electricity, and public health.Mann argues that progress, though heavily criticized over recent decades, deserves defending. Global malnutrition fell from roughly 40% in the 1970s to about 8% today, even as population nearly tripled, thanks to the Green Revolution’s three pillars: synthetic fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process, expanded irrigation, and high-yield crop varieties bred by Norman Borlaug and others. Similar transformations brought electricity to some 6.5 billion people and, through unheralded figures like the Manchester sewage researchers Fowler, Arden, and Lockett, made dense cities livable.But each system faces mounting strain: freshwater scarcity and wasteful flood irrigation, an aging grid dependent on volatile fossil fuels, and a public health establishment facing populist backlash over bureaucratization. Mann warns of a competency crisis, too few trained people to maintain what we inherited, and of institutional sclerosis that invites destructive overcorrection.

The old story in the academy was that as science and technology progressed, western society would grow more secular while the supernatural would disappear permanently from the public square. But nowadays re-enchantment is the new byword, from renewed public interest in traditional forms of religion to weirder phenomenon like ufology and psychedelics entering mainstream culture. However, the academy has been slow to catch up with this wider sea change.So various scholars of religion have been putting forward new arguments for the legitimate study of the supernatural. One of these is Dale Allison, who is my guest today as we continue Season 6 to discuss modern religious experiences. Dale Allison is the Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the author of books such as The Resurrection of Jesus (2021) and Encountering Mystery (2022).We look at numinous events of bliss and terror, responses to prayers, out-of-body & near-death experiences, angelic encounters, and visions of dead loved ones. Along the way, we also discuss William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, current research into psychedelics, George Harrison’s mysticism, David Hume’s borrowing from anti-Catholic arguments, Jesus Christ’s post-mortem appearances, and the emerging scholarship on supernatural phenomenon.Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?So argues the political theorist James Poulos, who is my guest in Episode 7 of Season 6 on Madison’s Notes. Having earned his PhD in government at Georgetown University, he was a founding editor of The American Mind, Return, and Frontier, where he is currently editorial director. The author of The Art of Being Free (2017), Human, Forever (2021), I Know This Sounds Crazy (2024), and an upcoming book called, Golden Age Problems, he recently wrote a Palladium Magazine essay called, “The Dostoevskian Moment,” which we use along with Human, Forever to discuss the digital technology crisis.Along the way we discuss media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Beaudrillard, the American political tradition, post-Cold-War civilizational states, cryptocurrency and AI, digital sovereignty, the modern camps fighting over technology among effective altruists, vitalists, gnostics and post-humanists, conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pink Police State, why Mars colonies are safer for humanity than Lunar ones, and the genius of David Lynch.Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

What is freedom? Benjamin Constant and Isaiah Berlin divided the answers to that question into two categories: the positive conception of the ancients (freedom to participate in political life) and the negative conception of the moderns (freedom from external constraints). But what if this dichotomy is a false one?My guest on Madison’s Notes thinks so. So in Episode 6 of Season 6, I interview the political philosopher, Philip Pettit. The L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton, the Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Professor Pettit is the author of many books, including Republicanism (1997) and The State (2023).Today, drawing upon Republicanism and The State, the nature of freedom as “non-domination,” the neo-republican tradition that began in the Italian Renaissance with Machiavelli, and how this account worked through the Enlightenment and into the American Founding. Also along the way, we talk about Henrik Ibsen, what Constant and Berlin got wrong, the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, the relationship between technology and freedom, and how political freedom relates to spiritual freedom.Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

Debates about AI typically deal with its immediate material consequences, from cybersecurity and infrastructure to plagiarism and copyright. Yet most people deal with AI as a generative consumer product that raises longer-term questions about its cultural effects on American society, human art, and ultimately, our souls. What is the role of the artist, for example, when a bot can crank out the same thing more quickly and efficiently?To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest the playwright, novelist, and essayist Matthew Gasda. The author of the novels The Sleepers (2025) and Stranger Beauty (2026), he has written, produced, and directed over thirty plays, including Dimes Square, Zoomers, and Doomers, with his former production company, The Center for Theatre Research.Today, drawing on his upcoming book, Futurepast (Encounter Books 2026), alongside Stranger Beauty, his many essays on culture and technology, as well as his Ted Talk about training an LLM on his own works, we discuss the future of the creative arts in the AI age.We also touch upon the paradoxes of Jorge-Luis Borges, Harold Bloom’s literary criticism, what is different about large language models, why Kafka felt older than his predecessors, the mysteries of poetic inspiration and of the soul, what hosting live theater was like during the pandemic, the possibility of secular monasteries, how to use AI as a competitor to root out artistic complacency, and the unpredictable prospects for cultural renewal.Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

While many know that Mark Twain created some of the most famous characters in literature—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Puddn’head Wilson—too few have understood that the Missouri author wasn’t only America’s greatest humorist, but also one of its most subtle political thinkers. But what was the political philosophy of the elusive and ironic Mark Twain for his new democratic America? To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest Ivan Kenneally. A contributor to The New Atlantis and First Things, among other publications, he wrote an essay for The Hedgehog Review on modern reactions to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), titled: “Mark Twain’s Absurd, Noble America,” which we will be discussing today. We also talk about the travels of the two runaways Huck and Jim, along with their many disguises and rouses, how Americans like Tom Sawyer read European literature too dogmatically, the conmen Twain depicts in the Duke and Dauphin, technical versus tacit knowledge in his memoir Life on the Mississippi, contemporary interest in Twain from Ron Chernow and Percival Everett, the nature of irony as well as the poverty of modern comedy, and what philosophers and comedians alike can learn from the Missouri author and philosopher. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

Whether recovering a lost history or charting a new land, scholars and explorers alike often hit at frontiers not only of place, but also knowledge. When the evidence only goes so far, what is the right way to advance? The answer is to make a conjecture: an educated guess that discourses on what is likely the case. Historical examples range from Italian humanists stealing manuscripts from monasteries and reconstructing classical languages, to Jesuit missionaries speculating about land bridges to the Americas, and even Renaissance magicians pioneering in alchemy and astrology. This collective practice is called “conjectural history,” and its roots go far back. But how far back? To answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest, Professor Anthony Grafton. A former president of the American Historical Association, and the Emeritus Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, Grafton is a scholar of early modern Europe and written history, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and the author of many books such as The Footnote (1997) and Magus (2023). Today, we will discuss his current project on “conjectural history.” We discuss the use of conjectural versus counterfactual history, its founders in Herodotus and Thucydides, and proponents like the explorer Jose de Acosta, S.J. and the scholar Lorenzo Valla. Also discussed are Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the birth of modern science from renaissance magic, C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image, recent scholarship on premodern eyewitness testimony to the supernatural, the magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and the best lost spots of Princeton University. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Chapter Headings: 00:00 | Introduction & What is Conjectural History 4:30 | The Scottish Enlightenment vs. the Renaissance Tradition 11:42 | Conjectural History & a Case Study: Jose de Acosta 19:30 | Theology, Science & The Renaissance 26:19 | Lorenzo Valla and the Donation of Constantine 38:19 | Conjecture, Divination, and Magic Closing | Reflections: History, Belief, and Closing Thoughts