The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“Fifth-century Athens still lingers even for us, and it’s a mythical golden age,” says Mary Beard on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And we imagine that all we can do is count ourselves lucky to be the inheritors of the Greek Miracle, all of the things that the Greeks invented: democracy, philosophy, and theater, among much else. I struggled with that when I was at university because it was almost cliché to say that the fifth- and sixth-century Athenians invented democracy, which is simply not true. It doesn’t take much to say, ‘Look, democracy isn’t like the iPhone or the steam engine.’ It isn’t invented in that way. Democracy is a process and people have been experimenting with that process all over the world–not just in Western Europe–for thousands of years.”    This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Mary Beard, best-selling historian and professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, about her new book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. “What is the point of the ancient classics?” Beard asks in the book’s introduction. “Why should we bother about what people did two thousand years ago or more: what they made, wrote, and thought? What can it all mean to us now?” In the chapters that follow, and in this episode of The World in Time, she shares her best answers, drawing from her own lifelong, wonder-struck study of the ancient world See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think about what I read, what I write, and what I experience in life. It’s always about these three words. And you cannot separate them in a very clear way.”   This week, in a return of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and essayist Yiyun Li, author most recently of Things in Nature Merely Grow, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, about “The Try-Works,” chapter 96 of Melville’s novel, in which Ishmael teaches readers how to render whale blubber, falls asleep at the Pequod’s jawbone tiller, and, upon awakening, flies like a “Catskill eagle” into and out of the “blackest gorges” of the soul. The chapter’s closing paragraph is, to Li’s mind, possibly “the most gorgeous paragraph written.”   Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” and Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The oarfish is not only extremely long—I think they can be 20 feet long—but they have a very narrow, undulating body. They’re silvery, but they have a red crest all along their back. It really looks exactly like the sea monsters in ancient Greek vase paintings,” says Adrienne Mayor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It looks like an oarfish guarding the Golden Fleece. They live in very deep water, and they have fragile bodies. And if there’s an earthquake under the ocean, they’re damaged and they wash up on shore—that’s the only time most people see an oarfish, and it would look like a stereotypical dragon.”   This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with folklorist, classicist, and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor about her new book, Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore. In 53 alphabetically arranged essays about “legends of the earth,” or “geomyths,” Mayor’s compendium draws upon oral traditions from all over the world and upon “historical and scientific discoveries that shed light on the remarkable phenomena featured in the legendary stories”—phenomena such as tsunamis, meteor impacts, lethal lakes, perpetual fires, fish that rain from the sky, and sand dunes that sing.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.”    This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“The leviathan is both positive and negative,” says Philip Hoare on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The image is almost yin and yang: there is the behemoth, kind of a hippopotamus-elephant-rhinoceros, and the leviathan, which is a sea serpent, but has elements of a sperm whale skeleton that Blake had actually seen. So there is this struggle for good and evil. He acknowledged that you have to have heaven to balance hell and vice versa. But it seems the balance has been interrupted by the sea and he is too close to the power of the ocean.”   In this week’s two-part episode, Donovan Hohn speaks with Philip Hoare, author, most recently, of William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Their conversation, like the book, is a séance that channels many ghosts—the ghosts of writers such as John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde; the ghosts of artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, Derek Jarman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andy Warhol, and Paul Nash; the ghosts of a great many historical and cultural figures. David Bowie and John Waters both make memorable appearances. But the conversation’s presiding spirit is artist, printmaker, poet, and proto-punk prophet of freedom William Blake. Part two of the episode resumes our intermittent and ongoing series on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the history of the sea. While considering Blake’s influence on Melville, Hohn and Hoare linger over chapter 55, “Monstrous Pictures of Whales.”   Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,” Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.