74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, ...

At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to matter -- to ourselves as well as to others? The need to matter can be motivation t ...  Show more

It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to think about consciousness. Modern LLMs can mimic human conversation with extraordina ...  Show more

Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Rosenberg is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journa ...  Show more

Ryan speaks with Philipp Meyer about his novels American Rust and The Son, processing the morally qu ...

The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe considered his monumental book known in English as The Theory of Colours to be his greatest achievement. The book is a record of hundreds of Goethe's observations about the way colour affects our mood, as well as a long and heated po ...  Show more

In this conversation, we talked to Naomi Shihab Nye about her career in prose and poetry writing. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, ...