The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“There’s a lot I love about Arendt,” says Gal Beckerman on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She says: Why do we need to orient ourselves around this question of death and having a meaningful life? Think about the other thing that is common to human existence, which is birth. We all come into this world new and can make and remake ourselves throughout an existence. It’s just like a slight shift of perspective, but it felt so wonderfully—I’m not going to say optimistic, because I kind of take a stand against optimism in the book, but positive. Let’s put it that way. Positive in the sense that it opens the door to transformation.” Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. This series of conversations, A Broken World, attempts to make sense of both Arendt’s broken world and our own, and it addresses the controversies around her work by doing what every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly does—pluralize the voices. This fourth episode in the series opens with a meditation on the example of Gandhi that Uday Singh Mehta, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York, delivered at the 2026 Hannah Arendt Forum. There follow some selections from one of the conversations that took place at this year’s Arendt Forum, between journalist-essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams and sociologist Eva Illouz. In the episode’s second act, Donovan Hohn speaks with author, essayist, and journalist Gal Beckerman about his book How to Be a Dissident, which searches for wisdom in the biographies and voices of a great many dissidents, Hannah Arendt among them. The unabridged edition of the episode available on the Lapham's Quarterly Substack includes an epilogue in which Hohn and Beckerman discuss the Israeli documentary NAZA and the review of it that Beckerman wrote for The Atlantic. Earlier episodes in this series: (1) Annie Dillard and Lewis H. Lapham; (2) Roger Berkowitz and Jennifer Szalai; (3) Benjamin Moser and Benjamin A. Saltzman. WORKS CITED(In order of mention.)  Leonard Cohen. “Anthem,” Live in London. Sony Music Entertainment Canada: 2009. “The Arendt Forum 2026: Solidarity: What Are We Fighting For?,” live at Olin Hall at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, October 15–17, 2026. Donovan Hohn. “Democracy’s Fierce Defender,” New York Times, March 9, 2018. Marilynne Robinson. What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. New York: Picador, 2019. “Is This the End of Democracy?,” Switchyard, Vol. 3, Issue 1, Summer 2025.  Jennifer Frey. “This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education,” New York Times, July 17, 2025. Gal Beckerman. “The Missed Opportunity of NAZA,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2026. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors. NAZA. The Guardian, 2026. Uday Singh Mehta. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Uday Singh Mehta. A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality. Forthcoming. Sam Dalrymple. Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2026.Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. My Experiments with Truth. Hoboken: Start Publishing, 2014. Eva Illouz and Thomas Chatterton Williams. “Fraternity Without Illusions: What Binds Us in a Broken World?”, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, 2026. Eva Illouz. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Eva Illouz. Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012. Eva Illouz. The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021. Eva Illouz. Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026. Hagai Levi, director. Scenes from a Marriage. HBO, 2021. Hannah Arendt. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Introduced by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. Foreword by Adam Hochschild and introduced by Lionel Trilling. Boston: Mariner Books Classics, 2015. Daron Acemoglu. What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. New York: Dutton, 2026. John Keats. Selected Letters. Edited and introduced by John Barnard. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015.(Continued on our website.)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Hannah Arendt has been sanitized in a certain way now, as a kind of wise Jewish figure,” says Benjamin Moser on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In Germany, she’s probably the most read Jewish philosopher. Germany, with all its censorship of anti-Zionist viewpoints, has kind of adopted her. There’s a Hannah Arendt Strasse in every town in Germany. There will be, you know, a little statue of her as this nice Jewish lady. But this happens, unfortunately, to a lot of really explosive artists and writers. They get sanitized.” Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. This series of conversations, A Broken World, attempts to make sense of both Arendt’s broken world and our own, and it addresses the controversies around her work by doing what every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly does—pluralize the voices. In this third episode in the series, Donovan Hohn speaks with Benjamin A. Saltzman, professor of English at the University of Chicago, about his essay “The Silence of Agamemnon,” adapted from his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. In the second part of the episode, Hohn speaks with Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Susan Sontag, about his new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a portrait gallery of Jewish opponents and critics of Zionism, among them Hannah Arendt. The unabridged, paywalled version of the podcast, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes a segment on Ahmad Sadiq Saad and the Jews of Egypt.  Works CitedIn order of mention. I.F. Stone. “Holy War,” The New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967. Benjamin A. Saltzman. “The Silence of Agamemnon,” Roundtable from Lapham’s Quarterly, Monday, October 19, 2026. Benjamin A. Saltzman. Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026. Benjamin Moser. “Appellation Texas contrôlée: The Bloody History of the Lone Star State,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2004. Benjamin Moser. “New Books,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2009. Sholem Aleichem. Wandering Stars. Translated by Aliza Shevrin. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Grigoris Balakian. Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918. Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. Mahmood Mamdani. Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. New York: Doubleday, 2009. C.P. Cavafy. Complete Poems. Translated and introduced by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Benjamin Moser. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Benjamin Moser. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: Ecco, 2020. Benjamin Moser. The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters. New York: Liveright, 2023. Benjamin Moser. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History. New York: Doubleday, 2026. Benjamin A. Saltzman. Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages. Edited by R.D. Perry and Benjamin A. Saltzman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Hannah Arendt. On Revolution. Introduced by Jonathan Schell. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Hannah Arendt. “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, Winter 1959. Fred Moten. “Refuge, Refuse, Refrain.” In The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Robert Penn Warren. Who Speaks for the Negro?. Introduced by David W. Blight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Ralph Ellison. “The World and the Jug.” In Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. “Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts,” live at Olin Auditorium at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, October 28–29, 2011. John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays. Edited by Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Lewis H. Lapham. “Revised Text,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2004. Lewis H. Lapham. “The Road to Shaaraim,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1988. Hannah Arendt. Men in Dark Times. Boston, MA: Mariner Books Classics, 1970. Omer Bartov. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. (Continued on our website.)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’” Hannah Arendt was controversial in her own times. She remains controversial in ours. In her own times, the controversies sometimes tested Arendt’s friendships. Or shattered them. This series of conversations, A Broken World, attempts to make sense of both Arendt’s broken world and our own, and it addresses the controversies around her work by doing what every issue of Lapham’s Quarterly does—pluralize the voices.  In this second episode in the series, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jennifer Szalai, essayist and nonfiction book critic for The New York Times, about her article “Hannah Arendt is Not Your Icon,” and with Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, about his new book, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, which examines the nature of friendship through the lens of Arendt’s biography and her thinking on the subject. On the unabridged, paywalled edition of the podcast available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Berkowitz and Hohn turn to the present-day implications of Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Truth and Politics,” first published in The New Yorker in 1967.WORKS CITED(In order of mention.) Jennifer Szalai. “Hannah Arendt Is Not Your Icon,” New York Times, December 5, 2025. Donovan Hohn. “Episode 39: A Broken World: Annie Dillard and Lewis H. Lapham.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 25, 2026. Roger Berkowitz. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2026. “Voices: On Hannah Arendt,” Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, October 6, 2026. Curtis White, “Song of a Lost World,” Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, October 2, 2026. Hannah Arendt. “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 18, 1967. Hannah Arendt. “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent, Winter 1959. Hannah Arendt. “Zionism Reconsidered,” The Menorah Journal, Autumn 1945.  Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Introduced by Amos Elon. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Roger Berkowitz. “Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’,” New York Times, July 7, 2013. Jennifer Szalai. “Buying Tomorrow,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2011: The Future. “Remembering Lewis H. Lapham,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2024. Raoul Peck, director. I Am Not Your Negro. Velvet Film, 2017. Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Thomas Wild. New York: Library of America, 2025. James Baldwin. “Autobiographical Notes.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. Thomas Paine. Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. Edited by Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Jennifer Szalai. “How Empathy Became a Threat,” New York Times, July 18, 2025. Donovan Hohn. “Episode 38: Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, September 11, 2026. Adolf Eichmann. Memoirs: Part One. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2000. “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” LIFE, November 28, 1960. “Eichmann’s Own Story: Part II,” LIFE, December 5, 1960. Bettina Stangneth. Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. Translated by Ruth Martin. New York: Vintage Books, 2015. Isaac Chotiner. “Is Zionism’s Moral Crisis About Roads Not Taken—Or Original Sin?,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2026. Hannah Arendt. “Eichmann in Jerusalem—I,” The New Yorker, February 9, 1963. Hannah Arendt. “Eichmann in Jerusalem—II,” The New Yorker, February 16, 1963. Deborah E. Lipstadt. The Eichmann Trial. New York: Schocken Books, 2011. David Cesarani. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer.” Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006. Margarethe von Trotta, director. Hannah Arendt. Heimatfilm, 2013. Roger Berkowitz. The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Edited by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Donovan Hohn. “Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, Friday, August 1, 2025. Hannah Arendt. Responsibility and Judgement. Edited and introduced by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2021: Friendship.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn commemorates the life and work of Annie Dillard, member of the Quarterly’s editorial board, frequent contributor to its pages, and friend for half a century of Lewis H. Lapham, who first began editing Dillard’s essays in the early 1970s. Hohn shares passages from Dillard’s work along with audio of remarks, delivered in the year 2000 on the 150th anniversary of Harper’s Magazine, in which Dillard explained how she came to write for Lapham and why she kept writing for him. Hohn also shares a pair of letters that Dillard and Lapham exchanged in August 1974, following her return from the Galápagos.The episode doubles as the prologue to a new series of conversations that we are calling A Broken World, the title for which comes from a new book by Roger Berkowitz, A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. As introduction to the series, this episode concludes with the unabridged audio of the keynote address that Lewis Lapham delivered at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011.Further Reading“Dear Lewis, Dear Annie,” Lapham’s Quarterly website, September 17, 2026.“Voices: Annie Dillard, In Memoriam,” Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, September 23, 2026.Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here.Photo credit: Bowels of the Earth – Water, by Naoko Fukumaru, 2020. Earthenware, urushi lacquer, resin, and 23.5K gold. Kintsugi transformation. 12 cm. © Naoko Fukumaru. Courtesy of the artist.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and literary critic Namwali Serpell about her new book, On Morrison, in which Serpell takes readers on a guided, chronological tour of Toni Morrison’s fiction and criticism. The conversation touches on Morrison’s literary modernism; her surprising affinities with Vladimir Nabokov; her water imagery; her enchanting way with metaphor; her transformation of historical materials; her religious faith; her study of Greek tragedy and African literature; her participation in “the canon wars”; her ardent commitment to the freedoms conferred by the First Amendment, and her equally ardent opposition to what—in her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, published in the Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly—Morrison called “dead language”: language that “thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential,” and “cannot form or tolerate new ideas.” The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with an epilogue about Morrison’s Paradise, the final novel in the trilogy—Morrison’s Divine Comedy—that begins with Beloved.  Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To subscribe to our new digital archive, visit the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack. To make a gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Then writer and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Harper's Magazine digital archive and co-founder of Aboard, a software consultancy, joins Hohn for a conversation about the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, whether technologists can move fast without breaking things, the gold rush origins of Silicon Valley, what Lewis Lapham would have made of our new Gilded Age, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and much else.Further ReadingPaul Ford. “What Is Code?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 11, 2015.Paul Ford. “My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes,” Wired Magazine, June 15, 2023.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Before he was twenty, George Washington had bought and sold and parlayed himself into nearly three thousand acres of prime land,” William Hogeland writes in Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion That Opened the West. “If he could amass enough land this way, he might build plantations, grow tobacco, marry well, become a burgess, join the Ohio Company, maybe even buy an officer’s commission in the British army. … Prospects were lengthening, and the view lay westward.” This third installment of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, brings together a pair of conversations about the westward and eastward beginnings of American empire. The episode begins with a conversation between Lewis Lapham and William Hogeland about the conquest of the Ohio River Valley. Then, Lapham sails the Atlantic with Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.  The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a reading of “The Battle at Fort Necessity: The Battle at Fort Necessity: How a Young George Washington, Fortune-Seeking in the Ohio Country, Helped Start the Seven Years’ War,” an excerpt from Hogeland’s Autumn of the Black Snake, performed by the author. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “As they travel across the South Pacific and stop at all these different islands, he records the islanders’ languages, he observes their customs, he describes their appearances, their jewelry, their tools, their houses, and brings back such detailed accounts that they, to this day, are regarded as the best accounts of Polynesian culture before and around first European contact. He doesn’t demonize, but he also doesn’t romanticize. He very clearly says: Good and evil is in all societies. We find all these different shades of human life and human experiences in all societies.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with returning guest Andrea Wulf, about The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, a narrative and intellectual biography of the German polymath George Forster—a botanist whose investigations of the breadfruit disclosed the history of Polynesian migrations; a prose stylist whose account of Cook’s second voyage helped invent the genre of travel writing; an intellectual pugilist who quarreled with Rousseau and Kant and influenced Coleridge and Von Humboldt; a revolutionary whom Friedrich Engels called “the German Thomas Paine.”  The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes an epilogue about Forster’s Parisian exile during the tumult of the French Revolution. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two years ago today, Lewis Lapham’s voice joined all those other departed voices of the past. This summer we’ve been welcoming his voice back to the microphone of the present, and today, in commemoration of the anniversary of his death, we are sharing this bonus episode. In the first years of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called The American Ruling Class, released in 2005. On August 1, 2026, The American Ruling Class is coming to the Criterion Channel. Lewis wrote much of it, narrated much of it, and starred in much of it, playing himself, or a version of himself—a wise, mirthful, sardonic mentor in pinstripes guiding a pair of greenhorn youths who set out to uncover the secrets of the American ruling class. This episode collects audio excerpts from the film. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.