The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“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.
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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 Reading
Paul Ford. “What Is Code?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 11, 2015.
Paul Ford. “My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes,” Wired Magazine, June 15, 2023.
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“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.
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“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.
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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.
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