arts
Hosted by Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz · arts · EN
Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.
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Contact path
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Booking probability
36%
Guest openness
Selective
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Signup to Generate a PitchRecall This Book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz. The show has published 189 episodes to date.
Recent episodes include "RTB 181 In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)" (22 October 2026, 13 minutes), "180 Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP)" (1 October 2026, 45 minutes), and "179* What does the Pope have to teach us about AI? (JP, from Public Books)" (17 September 2026, 29 minutes).
Recall This Book publishes roughly every two weeks, with episodes averaging 42 minutes across 189 episodes.
Booking probability for Recall This Book is 36%, and the host is rated Selective on guests. Recall This Book requires a Pod Score of 80 or higher. Recall This Book's contact route on record: verified email.
Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz hosts Recall This Book, an arts podcast with 189 episodes published.
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Episode #188
Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices. This...
Episode #187
It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform , demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about...
When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “ Magnifica Humanitas, ” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread. Turns out I was wrong; always...
Recall This Book
Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the...
Recall This Book
For our pandemic-era Books in Dark Times (our first ever Special Series!) Elizabeth and John discussed books that were keeping us afloat, barely afloat, way back in April 2020. Memory lane, here we come! A...
Recall This Book
After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or...
Recall This Book
In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears...
Recall This Book
Punishment makes nobody safer, imprisonment only impoverishes us as a society. And yet, we lock up our own, more and more for worse and worse reasons. What might finally inspire us to run the equation another way, and...
Episode #173
RTB's sister podcast, Novel Dialogue, spoke recently with Aaron Gwyn. He is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynne’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Children...
Recall This Book
David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his co-authored Social...
Recall This Book
For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her books include...
Recall This Book
Permafrost melts, desert cities boil, inland lakes dry up; but Waltham too in its own way has become one of the dark places of the earth. Adverse manmade climate change is seeping into basements everywhere, and a...
Recall This Book
Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized”...
Recall This Book
John is joined by the brilliant and affable Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt (The Blood of Government) to discuss Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin, 2025) by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard...
Recall This Book
In Recall This Book's second episode (January 2019) John and Elizabeth spoke with their brilliant Brandeis colleague, the MacArthur-winning neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano, about a number of different facets of...
Recall This Book
The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built...
Recall This Book
In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of...
Episode #164
When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and...
Recall This Book
As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama of Celebrity, her tour-de-force account of how stars are born...
Recall This Book
For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust...
Recent guests on Recall This Book. Study who booked and why before you pitch.
assistant professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Trinity College
Michigan state senator, Michigan state senate
chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, The Love Matters Collaboration
author of "What Can I Get Out of This? Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics", Boston College
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