Human Voices Wake Us

• #200: The Last Days of Walter Benjamin, 1940

  An episode from 9/15/25: Tonight, I read a long section on the last days of the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) from the biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (For those who are interested, the BBC’s In Our Time devotes an entire hour to Benjamin’s life and work.) I also read two small passages from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at [email protected].

  --------  

  26:12

  --------

  26:12
• #199: The Protestant Reformation Gets Going, c. 1517

  An episode from 9/9/25: Tonight, I read from three books: A small passage from The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, on how pocket calendars were essential references for popular knowledge. A longer passage, on the Protestant Reformation (and the invention of moveable type that facilitated its spread), from Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. I conclude with small passage on Martin Luther's contemporary, Erasmus of Rotterdam, from my book Notes from the Grid.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at [email protected].

  --------  

  22:24

  --------

  22:24
• #198: Georgia O'Keeffe Finds Herself in the Fall of 1915

  An episode from 9/1/25: Tonight, I read a small passage from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and then a much longer passage from Laurie Lisle’s Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. In it, Lisle describes the weeks and months in late 1915 during which O’Keeffe found herself as an artist after her decision to start from scratch and devote herself to drawing only in charcoal. It was as a result of these drawings that she met her future husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and that her long career as a painter truly began.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at [email protected].

  --------  

  23:17

  --------

  23:17
• #197: A Honeymoon in the House of the Dead in Ancient Mesopotamia, c. 2300 BCE

  An episode from 8/27/25: Tonight, I read from Amanda Podany’s wonderful book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. After a royal wedding took place in the ancient Syrian city of Ebla around 2300 BCE, the new king and queen spent no less than three weeks among the tombs and statues of their royal forbears. I conclude the episode with the response of one listener to the last episode, where he notes that the London docks of 1850 aren’t much different from similar places in contemporary India.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected] with any comments, and they might be used in an upcoming episode.

  --------  

  19:27

  --------

  19:27
• #196: Morning at the London Docks, c. 1850

  An episode from 8/23/25: Returning to the podcast after a long hiatus, I read from Henry Mayhew and John Binny’s London Labour and the London Poor, their exhaustive and essential description of life in London for the working poor in the mid-nineteenth century. Far from being a dry and distant document, it is a work of literature in itself, as this description of the London docks—and those hoping for a day of paid work there—shows. The text can be found here.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at [email protected].

  --------  

  13:11

  --------

  13:11

More Arts podcasts

Trending Arts podcasts

About Human Voices Wake Us