Relevant Reading:Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms Kimberley Brownlee, Oxford University Press, 2020, $50 What are the ethical implications of the pandemic of loneliness that has been sweeping the modern world well before the COVID pandemic made us all grapple with social isolation? Do we have a human right […]

Maria Golia speaks with guest host Matt Hanson about her new book on jazz great Ornette Coleman.

In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum offers a personal reflection on the splitting of the anti-communist coalition—and asks why so many former friends have embraced illiberal movements across the West.

Is America rapidly secularizing, or is it merely channeling religious impulses in new directions? In her new book Strange Rites, out today from PublicAffairs, Tara Isabella Burton makes the latter case, with examples from SoulCycle to social justice culture.

How did Britain’s intelligence agencies rise to prominence, from World War I to the Cold War and beyond? Simon Ball’s Secret History tells the story through the agencies’ own internal case histories.

As Henry Kissinger turns 97 today, Barry Gewen joins the show to discuss his new intellectual biography of America’s foremost realist.

What does the coronavirus pandemic tell us about the nature of modern China—and does the United States have a coherent strategy to deal with it? Sulmaan Wasif Khan, a China expert at Tufts University, joins the podcast to discuss.

Joseph Horowitz discusses his recent TAI essay on the wartime performances of two musical giants—and explains how great artists can “channel the moment” in a time of crisis.

Kristina Spohr’s new book Post Wall, Post Square offers a vivid account of the decision-making that shaped the world order after 1989—and explains why what happened in Beijing mattered just as much as Berlin.

Why was the Brexit campaign so dominated by analogies to WWII, and what did it reveal about how the British imagine their past and future? David Reynolds probes these questions in Island Stories, his new “unconventional history of Britain.”