The Octagon Tower on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan was the city's first municipal insane asylum. Today it's a proud ruin, having survived partial demolition, fire and abandonment. And in a novel approach, the tower has been preserved in its dilapidated state. A reminder of its haunted history.
This time of year, when the relieved earth shrugs off stale dirt and dead leaves, it pauses, recalling. Then, as it lets out a long, low breath, it slowly releases moisture, a glut of color. Everything is growing. But only for a spell, for soon enough the earth will turn, and then the relentless heat will shrivel these green thirsty things, and the ground will grow hard, and withdraw again. Click here: to listen (2:40 minutes).
https://youtu.be/WVlh-Ooi_u4?rel=0 A small house on Staten Island tells the tale of the friendship between Guiseppe Garibaldi, the famed Italian revolutionary, and Antonio Meucci, a candle maker who just might have invented the telephone. Take a tour of the Garibaldi Meucci Museum with WNYC’s Jenny Attiyeh, on ThoughtCast! Click here to listen!
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s 1839 poem “The Village Blacksmith.” On the evening of December 8, 2025, series director Andrea Cohen introduced Henri Cole, whose new book of poetry is called The Other Love, as well as William Logan, whose most recent collection is Rift of Light. This is the last poe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpYg2AE4zcs This archival WNYC TV “Cultural Minute” takes a tour of the Steinway Store in Midtown Manhattan — which, unlike so many traditional city landmarks, is still in business. Watch to see how these famous pianos are actually built!
Note: This interview has been picked up by the public radio stations WGBH, in Boston, its affiliates WCAI and WNAN, and WCVE in Richmond, VA. It was originally broadcast in 2008. In some ways, the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson is the Russell Crowe of the academic world: charismatic, unconventional, and definitely controversial. He’s also a big fan of the British Empire — and wants the United States to follow in its footsteps. That means it’s our job to form colonies in hot climates, for years on end. But are we up for this? While Niall would like that to be the case, he doesn’t really thin
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s 1839 poem “The Village Blacksmith.” On the evening of May 5, 2025, series director Andrea Cohen introduced Fanny Howe, author of Night Philosophy and a reader from the first Blacksmith House reading in 1973, and also Haleh Liza Gafori, whose most recent translation of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21byLfOrwpk?rel=0 At the Modern Art Foundry in Astoria Queens, workers restore the Neptune Fountain, which was missing its hands, an arm and a foot. The statue, which spouted water in Snug Harbor on Staten Island, has been returned to its former home. Watch how these expert craftsmen brought it back to life! Note: This program was broadcast in the mid 1990s on the PBS station, WNYC. Click here to listen!
Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, and also on KUT, in Austin, Texas! Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Mrs. Fletcher, Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers, speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and inspires him: Flannery O’Connor. His relationship with her borders on kinship, and he admires and admonishes her as he would a family member, with whom he shares a bond both genetic and cultural. When asked to choose a specific piece of writing that’s had a significant impact on him, Tom chose O’Connor
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the spreading chestnut tree of Longfellow’s 1839 poem “The Village Blacksmith.” Earlier this week, series director Andrea Cohen introduced the poets — Carl Phillips and Penelope Pelizzon — who read from their new collections. Carl read from Scattered Snows, to the North, and Penelope read from A Gaze Hound That
Note: Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the New York Times column, “The Ethicist”, has just won (in the summer of 2024) the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize. A high honor. This program was broadcast on WCAI, an affiliate of WGBH, Boston. In this interview from 2004, New York University Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism on ThoughtCast! Born in England and raised in Ghana, Appiah is half English and half African. And perhaps because of this, he’s fascinated with the concept of identity, and the power it wields over people. But rather than wage identity politic
Sadly, Helen Vendler has just died on April 23, 2024, at ninety years of age. I’m so glad I got a chance to meet her. Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, Prairie Public Radio, WABE in Atlanta and on KUT in Austin, Texas. When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson’s more famous poems. They’ve stayed with her over the years, and today, she talks with ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh about one poem in particular that’s haunted her all this time. It’s called I cannot live with You- According t
Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. In 1861 in Clonmany, on the Inishowen peninsula in the far north of County Donegal Ireland, Charles McGlinchy was born. His was a windblown, rough world, wracked with beauty and hardship. A weaver by trade, and a bachelor, in his old age he realized he was the last of the McGlinchys, the last of his name. Night after night, he told his tale to an old neighbor, the schoolmaster Patrick Kavanagh, who wrote it all down. Patrick’s son Desmond found these copybooks after his father’s death, and offered them to Bria
https://youtu.be/QhGC2VP0ZHg?rel=0 Watch the shooting of the Law and Order episode “Blood Libel” from its 6th season. The famous show featured Sam Waterston as Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, Jerry Orbach as Senior Detective Lennie Briscoe, Jill Hennessy as Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid, Benjamin Bratt as Junior Detective Rey Curtis, S. Epatha Merkerson as Lieutenant Anita Van Buren and Steven Hill as District Attorney Adam Schiff. This story was originally broadcast on WNYC TV. Click here to listen!
Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin,Texas. James Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, and it was from Dublin that he fled as a young man, to Trieste, in order to write Ulysses, perhaps the key novel of the early 20th century. But before he left, he began to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which, as most of us will remember, is a rite of passage not only for its main character, the sensitive, acute Stephen Dedalus (the alter ego for Joyce himself), but also for the impressed and impressionable reader. When I asked the scholar, bookseller a
Sadly, since this interview was recorded, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has died at the age of 84. Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. Kate Rosenberger is one of those rare people who collects independent book stores in San Francisco the way the rest of us collect antique door stops, or unusual African masks. Her most recent acquisition is Alley Cat Books, but she also owns Phoenix and Red Hill Books, and we met at Dog Eared Books, her fourth store, in the Mission district. When asked to discuss a piece of writing that’s had a pr
Note: an audio version of this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and by KPIP in Missouri. The forests of New England are, remarkably, a success story. They’ve recovered from attack after attack. The early settlers hacked them down, by hand, for houses, fences and firewood. Later on, the insatiable sawmills of a more industrial age ate up the lumber needed for our expansion. Today, the forests contend with acid rain, invasive plants and exotic beetle infestations — evidence of our ever more global economy. And the future of these forests? Goin
Note: this program was broadcast on WGBH‘s sister stations WCAI & WNAN, on Sept. 9, 2007, and picked up by KPVL, a Pacifica station, on July 2, 2013! Want to know how the world is going to end? Just ask Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. If it’s our own universe you’re talking about, well, it’s called the big crunch, and it’s going to be hot hot hot! But if it’s the multiverse, that infinitely expanding, infinitely varied and infinitely populated sea of universes, well, guess what — there is no end. Isn’t that reassuring?? Vilenkin is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmo
I reported this story on the struggle to cover international news in the late 1990s for Freedom Speaks, a TV program on the media run by the Freedom Forum, and I thought with a ground war now raging in Europe and threatening to destabilize the “world order”, it’s worth a revisit. But remember — this is archival. Even so, does it have anything to teach us about the way Americans view the wider world? https://youtu.be/cCziQ1hl4UM?rel=0 Click here: to listen (3 minutes).
NOTE: Caroline Elkins is in the news again, with a new book called Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. In it she continues her searing research into first world abuse and torture of numberless Africans under their colonial control. How does history get rewritten? How do victimizers become victims, and the valiant turn into villains? As Harvard history professor Caroline Elkins has learned, this process can be a hazardous one. The Pulitzer prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya devoted many years to the study of the Mau Mau upri
Note: This program was broadcast on WCAI, KZMU and WFIU. Natalie Goldberg, the well-known painter, writer and writing teacher, who wrote the best-seller on how to write called Writing Down the Bones, is also a Zen practitioner, who applies the lessons of Zen Buddhism to her writing, and her life. This is a complex brew, but in this ThoughtCast interview, which took place in her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Natalie speaks frankly about her often painful but also at times transcendent experiences, and how she has turned these experiences into positive, life-affirming acts of self-expression — a
I had the pleasure of meeting Ron Brown and his dancers when I was covering the arts for WNYC TV in the 1990s. My visit to his studio has stayed in my memory all this time as full of color and vibrancy, and I think you’ll like the story I put together afterwards. In this past Sunday’s New York Times’ Arts and Leisure section, there was his face, dominating the page. He’s recovering from a stroke and taking small steps, the story says, to discover new ways to express his art. I look forward to whatever he comes up with next. https://youtu.be/4enJLYLYGbY?rel=0
Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Photo: courtesy US Marine Mammal Commission The endangered North Atlantic Right Whale is probably our closest cetacean neighbor. There are only about 350 of them in total, and they live precariously near to shore, along the Eastern seaboard, in a horrendously busy commercial shipping corridor that stretches from Nova Scotia to Florida. Scott Kraus, the vice president for research at Boston’s New England Aquarium, and the head of its right whale research project, has studied these wha
“Division of Labor: Women’s Work” was an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1995. I covered it in my role as an arts reporter for WNYC TV. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/yB3BFx2tsRM?rel=0
Note: this interview was broadcast on WGBH, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture! Rebecca Goldstein’s latest work, called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is perhaps best described as a hybrid. It is indeed a novel, with its share of psychology, mathematics and academic politics, but it concludes with an appendix outlining these 36 arguments, as well as their rebuttals, in the language not of fiction, but of philosophy. So, as in many of Goldstein’s earlier novels, this one manages to fold ideas into art. ThoughtCast spoke with Rebecca in her home in the Leather D
