An episode from 9/15/25: Tonight, I read a long section on the last days of the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) from the biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (For those who are interested, the BBC’s In Our Time devotes an entire hour to Benjamin’s life and work.) I also read two small passages from Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, due out next year, is now available for preorder. Other books include Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.Email me at [email protected].

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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