Think About It

Think About It

episodes

A podcast featuring interviews with authors and thought leaders conduced by Uli Baer.

Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"

December 9, 2023

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken’s "Notes on Democracy"

Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Hosted by Uli Baer

A century ago, journalist H. L. Mencken provocatively stated in Notes On Democracy (new edition by Warbler Press, 2023) that anti-democratic behavior…

Cleo McNelly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"

May 20, 2023

Cleo McNelly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"

Cleo McNelly Kearns
Hosted by Uli Baer

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American l…

Campus Misinformation with Bradford Vivian

May 2, 2023

Campus Misinformation with Bradford Vivian

Bradford Vivian
Hosted by Uli Baer

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: u…

Reading the Classics with Louis Petrich

May 1, 2023

Reading the Classics with Louis Petrich

Louis Petrich
Hosted by Uli Baer

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian …

Book Talk 58: Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman

March 17, 2023

Vivian Gornick on Emma Goldman

Vivian Gornick
Hosted by Uli Baer

What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this ques…

Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)

January 30, 2023

Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)

Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar
Hosted by Uli Baer

Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at h…

What is a "Great Book?": A Discussion with Roosevelt Montás

January 6, 2023

What is a "Great Book?": A Discussion with Roosevelt Montás

Roosevelt Montás
Hosted by Uli Baer

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and cultur…

Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"

September 12, 2022

Courtney B. Hodrick and Amir Eshel on Hannah Arendt's "Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman"

Courtney Blair Hodrick and Amir Eshel
Hosted by Uli Baer

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 18…

Anne Fernald on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"

August 2, 2022

Anne Fernald on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"

Anne Fernald
Hosted by Uli Baer

Halfway through Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith mutters to himself: "Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication.” It’s easy to wr…

Paul Edwards on Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark"

June 30, 2022

Paul Edwards on Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark"

Paul Edwards
Hosted by Uli Baer

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and in the for…

Book Talk 52: Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

May 16, 2022

Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

Linda Patterson Miller
Hosted by Uli Baer

When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of ex…

Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde

April 18, 2022

Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde

Ardythe Ashley
Hosted by Uli Baer

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his hea…

John Waters on James Joyce's "Dubliners"

January 11, 2022

John Waters on James Joyce's "Dubliners"

John Waters
Hosted by Uli Baer

James Joyce’s 1914 collection of fifteen short stories, Dubliners, is righty considered one of the greatest literary achievements of Western modernity…

Book Talk 49: “The Good Life” with Dora Zhang

December 6, 2021

“The Good Life” with Dora Zhang

Dora Zhang
Hosted by Uli Baer

“The good life” and “the American Dream “remain powerful animating principles in popular culture, politics, and also our individual psyches. I spoke w…

Charlie Louth on Rainer Maria Rilke

November 19, 2021

Charlie Louth on Rainer Maria Rilke

Charlie Louth
Hosted by Uli Baer

Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such p…

Wendy Lee on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

September 1, 2021

Wendy Lee on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

Wendy Lee
Hosted by Uli Baer

Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice delights, charms and entrances reader since its anonymous publication in 1813. The Bennett sisters need to mar…

Marlene Daut on the Haitian Revolution in Literature

May 27, 2021

Marlene Daut on the Haitian Revolution in Literature

Marlene Daut
Hosted by Uli Baer

To learn more about the Haitian Revolution in fiction, I spoke with Professor Marlene Daut specialized in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American…

Paul Mendes-Flohr on Martin Buber's "I and Thou"

May 3, 2021

Paul Mendes-Flohr on Martin Buber's "I and Thou"

Paul Mendes-Flohr
Hosted by Uli Baer

Today we talk a lot about a need for genuine dialogue, and for conversations across partisan divides and differences. What is a true, authentic, and m…

Samantha Hill on Hannah Arendt

March 18, 2021

Samantha Hill on Hannah Arendt

Samantha Hill
Hosted by Uli Baer

Hannah Arendt's 1967 essay on "Truth and Politics" centers on the uneasy relation between truth-telling and politics. Lying has always been part of po…

Mark Wunderlich on Rainer Maria Rilke

February 19, 2021

Mark Wunderlich on Rainer Maria Rilke

Mark Wunderlich
Hosted by Uli Baer

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the order of angels?" This angsty cry opens poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies -- one of the greatest p…