Interviews

James C. Kluge
(Mis)understanding Wittgenstein: James Klagge Says Our Temperament May Be at Fault
In the autumn of 1920, one of the most celebrated minds in European philosophy walked into a one-room schoolhouse in the remote Austrian village of Trattenbach and introduced himself to... Read more...
Maestros of Suspense: Jack Sullivan on Music in Hitchcock’s Films
Maestros of Suspense: Jack Sullivan on Music in Hitchcock’s Films
In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock summoned the composer Bernard Herrmann to a screening room and played him the shower scene from Psycho. Hitchcock had already decided that the scene would have no... Read more...
John Bryant
Whale of a Tale: John Bryant Uncovers the “Darkness Underneath the Surface” of American Writer Herman Melville
In the summer of 1850, Herman Melville climbed a mountain in the Berkshires with a group of writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, and something shifted. He had been working on... Read more...
Jack of All Trades: Rosa Mayorga on the Life and Work of Charles Sanders Peirce
Jack of All Trades: Rosa Mayorga on the Life and Work of Charles Sanders Peirce
In the winter of 1891, Charles Sanders Peirce sat in a farmhouse in Milford, Pennsylvania, and wrote a letter to William James asking for money. It was not the first... Read more...
In Search of Steinbeck: William Souder Takes a “New Look” at the “Complex and Imperfect” Life of Acclaimed Novelist John Steinbeck
In Search of Steinbeck: William Souder Takes a “New Look” at the “Complex and Imperfect” Life of Acclaimed Novelist John Steinbeck
In October 1962, John Steinbeck was sitting in his home in Sag Harbor, New York, when the telephone rang with news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in... Read more...
Analyzing Language: Stephen Neale on Bertrand Russell's Philosophy of Language
Analyzing Language: Stephen Neale on Bertrand Russell's Philosophy of Language
In the summer of 1900, Bertrand Russell attended an international philosophy conference in Paris and came home convinced he had witnessed a revolution. The Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano had presented... Read more...
Looking For Hemingway: Gay Talese Talks of Men and Books
Looking For Hemingway: Gay Talese Talks of Men and Books
In the summer of 1956, a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Gay Talese arrived at the New York Times and began learning how to write sentences that could not be ignored. He... Read more...
Raphael Salkie: How Noam Chomsky’s “calm, provocative, and unflinching voice” helps us handle challenges of the 21st century
Raphael Salkie: How Noam Chomsky’s “calm, provocative, and unflinching voice” helps us handle challenges of the 21st century
In 1953, a young linguist named Noam Chomsky was working on a doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania that his supervisor, Zellig Harris, found interesting but not particularly earth-shaking.... Read more...
A Novelist and a Fabulist: Carl Rollyson Separates Fact from Fiction in William Faulkner's Life
A Novelist and a Fabulist: Carl Rollyson Separates Fact from Fiction in William Faulkner's Life
In the autumn of 1949, a man who had spent the better part of a decade writing Hollywood screenplays to pay his debts, drinking himself into periodic collapse, and watching... Read more...
Quincy Troupe
‘Round Miles: Quincy Troupe on the Life and Music of Miles Davis
In the summer of 1985, Quincy Troupe received a telephone call from Miles Davis. Davis had been thinking about writing his autobiography and had read Troupe's poetry and decided, with... Read more...
Jack Copeland
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jack Copeland on the Life and Work of Alan Turing
On the morning of June 8, 1954, Alan Turing's housekeeper arrived at his home in Wilmslow, England, and found him dead in his bed. He was forty-one years old. On... Read more...
Naming Names: A Deep Dive into Saul Kripke’s Philosophy with Nathan Salmón
Naming Names: A Deep Dive into Saul Kripke’s Philosophy with Nathan Salmón
In the spring of 1970, a little-known philosopher in his early thirties arrived at Princeton University to deliver a series of lectures that would permanently alter analytic philosophy. The setting... Read more...