Common Ground

Gleaves Whitney is joined by Winston Elliott, Editor-and-Chief and President of the "Imaginative Conservative", and the Free Enterprise Institute, to discuss Homer's "The Odyssey".

#85: Amity Shlaes by The Hauenstein Center at Grand Valley State University

Author Steve Luxenberg discusses with us his new book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation.

Author David Roll comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss his newest book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic.

Danielle Allen, bestselling author of the book Our Declaration comes to our Beyond Aporia podcast to talk about the origins of the Declaration of Independence, and what it means for the country today.

President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, comes to the Beyond Aporia podcast to discuss the current political situation in Washington, as well as the origins of one of our most beloved documents, the Constitution of the United States of America.

Bestselling author Lynne Olson comes to our new Common Ground Podcast, Beyond Aporia, to speak about her books Last Hope Island and Those Angry Days.

This week, we hear from Gerald Russello, editor of The University Bookman, a publication founded in 1960 by the traditionalist conservative Russell Kirk. The University Bookman, like most conservative magazines and journals, is a site where, implicitly or explicitly, there is a debate about what the word “conservative” even means. A couple weeks ago, The Washington Post profiled a number of magazines on the right that have been forced, by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, to stake a claim: is Trump conservative? Is the Republican Party conservative? Who really gets to decide? Gerald Russello provides an interesting perspective on this question because the publication he edits, the University Bookman, is really a review of books and culture. It doesn’t respond directly to the news cycle and rarely takes up specific matters of policy. I asked Gerald whether his and the publication’s bird’s eye view of Trump and the Republican Party helps him see the current debate over conservatism differently. I ask whether he

This week, we hear from Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Coleman is a public historian. As you’ll hear in her lecture, her work is to take the findings, the interpretations, of academic historians and bring them to life for the public—as she says, to make the work relevant to contemporary audiences. She says in her talk that, inevitably, new generations will make new meanings of past events: Baby Boomers will understand the causes and significance of the Civil War differently than will millennials. In her talk, Coleman addresses some of these changes. She starts by considering the ways in which the causes of the civil war have been vastly misunderstood: she helps make sense of that old refrain you used to always hear from self-appointed civil war buffs, that the war was really about states rights after all. Coleman addresses that reading, and then talks about her work at the civil war museum.

This week, we hear from Maggie Doherty, a critic and teacher at Harvard University. Maggie writes often for publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and N Plus One; her criticism often focuses on writers and feminists around the middle of the 20th century—familiar names are Mary McCarthy and Kate Millet. Maggie’s literary criticism blends questions of politics into her writing; she manages to marry the literary and the political in her writing in a careful and very helpful way. In our conversation, I ask Maggie about her recent articles on Mary McCArthy and Kate Millet, as well as a book she’s working on. The book is titled The Equivalents, and it’s about a group of five women writers and artists who met at the Radcliffe Institute in the early 1960s. We talk particularly about one such Radcliffe writer, Tillie Olsen, and the insights she advanced into the ways writing is really work: that is, is labor. We talk about writing as work, and the economic situation—that’s to say economic

This week, we hear from Sophie Pinkham, a writer and academic who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics. Sophie has recently published some review essays, primarily in The Nation, about the Russian Revolution and the legacy of communism in the West. One of her main concerns is the manner in which a given historian’s politics will affect their reading of the history and legacy of communism. Of course, it’s true that a historian’s reading of the past will inevitably be determined, at least to some extent, by their politics: a conservative will understand an event and its significance differently than a progressive. But Sophie Pinkham makes quite clear why the political assumptions behind this or that reading of the rise of Lenin, say, are uniquely important for us to understand and make clear. Sophie and I talk about Anne Applebaum’s recent book Red Famine, for instance; we talk in particular about Applebaum’s effort to insist that communism and Nazism are equally bad, and I ask Sophie what

This episode focuses on the role of the public intellectual, or even the academic, in cultural debate. We hear from Dan Drezner about the difference between public intellectuals and thought leaders, and what happens when we have too many of one over the other. In our conversation, Dan addresses the importance of expertise in cultural debate and discourse; he considers why respect for expertise seems on the decline. But perhaps it’s not on the decline everywhere. In the latter half of this episode, we hear from Jo Livingstone about the ways she brings her academic expertise to bear on her criticism at The New Republic. In 2015, Jo received a PhD at NYU. She is an expert in medieval studies and literature, and she makes use of some of that expertise to the benefit of her readers.

This week, as an installment in our end-of-year retrospective series of episodes, we’re going to hear from Jonny Thakkar as well as from Cate Zaloom, co-founding editor of Public Books. I talked with Jonny and Cate at the beginning of the year. Each of them co-founded publications that exist somewhere between the academy and the world of cultural criticism. Both of their publications are young: Jonny co-founded his in 2008, Cate hers in 2012. Both The Point and Public Books, then, have risen to prominence in what seems like, what feels like, a new renaissance in little magazines. We’re going to hear from Jonny and Cate about what they’ve hoped their publications could contribute to this moment. We’ll also hear about how their publications stand out, what they do that other magazines and publications don’t do. From Jonny, we’ll hear about the importance he and his fellow editors place on bringing a kind of humanistic thinking, a kind of broadly philosophical approach, to cultural criticism. From Cate, we’ll

This week we hear Ian Millhiser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, debate "Citizens United" with Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Hauenstein Center hosted the debate in 2015; the issues the debate addresses are still relevant today. Here’s a quick brush up: In "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission," the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures made by corporations and labor unions in elections. Those in favor of the decision say it’s a victory for political speech in this country; opponents say it gives corporations and the rich unlimited power over the democratic process. On December 7th, just a day ago, Andy Kroll suggested in Mother Jones that Citizens United has a lot to do with this tax bill the GOP has gotten through Congress. Kroll claims that the very political culture which supports and provides foundation for the Citizens United decision also justifies wh

This week we hear from Jo Livingstone, the culture staff writer at The New Republic and a recent PhD in English at New York University. I mention Jo Livingstone’s PhD because that’s a major topic of our conversation. Livingstone’s writing at The New Republic has the kind of agile, supple thinking and prose you’d want from a critic who has her thumb on the pulse of culture, but she blends that style of criticism with the erudition, the specialized knowledge, of a scholar. You can spot this blend in Livingstone’s recent writing on white nationalists, whose attempt to reach back into a kind of imagined and popularized medieval past Livingstone is eager and more than able to critique. Throughout our conversation, Jo and I discuss what it took for her to make the jump from the academy to the world of cultural criticism and magazine writing. We talk a lot about what makes a good academic writer and a good cultural critic. We talk, as well, about the plight of adjunct faculty and the ways in which the distinctio

This week, we hear Dan Varner, President and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit, deliver a Wheelhouse Talk. Varner leads efforts to support 900+ local businesses in Detroit with a reliable workforce, and helps empower trainees with skills for workplace success. Before joining Goodwill, Dan served as the CEO of Excellent Schools Detroit, a partnership of city organizations working to improve Detroit’s public education system.

In this episode, the historian Hank Meijer talks about the work and influence of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican from Michigan who, at the dawn of the Cold War, worked with Democratic administrations to build congressional support for huge foreign policy endeavors, including the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the United Nations.

This week we hear from Andrew Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University. Andrew is currently hard at work on a book about Karl Marx. I asked him to come on the podcast because the name Marx seems to be in the air right now. It’s not just that we’ve come up the centenary of the Russian Revolution. People seem to want to talk about, or at least debate once again, the merit of Marx’s ideas and the form of economic and cultural analysis that he inaugurated. Consider the many books that have recently come out, like China Mieville’s "October," re-assessing the October Revolution and wondering if it inevitably led to Stalinism; consider also the many articles and essays in periodicals not just like Jacobin and the Nation, but also The New York Times, reintroducing Marxist concepts into the national debate as a way to assess and critique what is called neo-liberalism.

In this episode, we hear from Juliet Fleming, Professor of English at New York University and author, most recently, of "Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida," out from the University of Chicago Press. I ask Juliet to defend Derrida against skeptics both inside and outside the academy. She talks about what she says when she is called upon, at cocktail parties and in academe, to "explain" Derrida. We talk about the use and importance of Derrida's thought generally. We talk about his politics, as well as his contemporary followers and interpreters, and also his legacy.

In this episode, we hear from Erik S McDuffie, professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois. Just the other day, the Hauenstein Center posted a call for papers for the fourth "Finding the Lost Region" conference to be held on June 6th, 2018. The problem the conference seeks to address is the lack of institutional support for the study of Midwestern history. Why don't more historians, and more cultural critics generally, acknowledge and discuss the importance of the Midwest to American history, culture, politics? In his talk, Erik S McDuffie argues that the Midwest plays a crucial role not just in African American history but in the history of black diaspora. A major focus of his talk: Garveyism, and the revolutionary role played by women such as Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X.