“What in God’s name are the humanities,” Lewis Lapham asked in a commencement address he delivered at St. John’s College in 2003, “and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?” His answer—the humanities are not luxuries akin to “the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach” but liberating necessities—harmonizes with the answers proposed by the three guests on this special, two-part episode of The World in Time, which commemorates the anniversary of the Quarterly’s revival. Today’s three guests are all scholars—“card-carrying, old-school metaphysical humanists”—who have dared to do what Lewis Lapham did nearly two decades ago: launch a nonprofit that brings the humanities and the arts into the American agora, the public square.
Zena Hitz, tutor at St. John’s College, is the founder of the Catherine Project, a nonprofit that, through online seminars and reading groups, makes the study of “the great books” available for free to all. She is joined by two returning guests: Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, editor of the Substack magazine The Hinternet, and founder of the Hinternet Foundation, which seeks to “steward humanism into a machine-driven future”; and D. Graham Burnett, Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. A member of the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board, Burnett is also the co-founder and director of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which offers to the general public courses and workshops that “deepen our shared understanding of attention’s relation to human flourishing.”
In part two of today’s two-part episode, available for free and in full on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, Hohn and Hitz add a new conversation to our intermittent and ongoing series of conversations about Moby Dick and the history of the sea, discussing the “The Doubloon,” chapter 99 of Melville’s novel. Earlier conversations in our series about Moby Dick: Lewis Lapham’s Sea Stories, Wyatt Mason on “Extracts,” Francine Prose on “Loomings,” James Marcus on “The Mast-Head,” Charles Baxter on “The Sermon,” Elizabeth Kolbert on the History of Cetology, Alexander Chee on “The Counterpane,”Aaron Sachs on “The Monkey-Rope,” Caleb Crain on “Queequeg in his Coffin,” Philip Hoare on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” and Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works.”
WORKS CITED
(In order of mention.)
Part One
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by John D. Sinclair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Donovan Hohn, host. “Episode 21: The Friends of Attention.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, January 16, 2026.
The Friends of Attention. Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. Edited by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt. New York: Crown, 2026.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Zena Hitz. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Justin Smith-Ruiu. “A Third Way for the Humanities: A Declaration,” The Hinternet, March, 8, 2026.
D. Graham Burnett. “A Conversation with Henry Moses,” November Magazine, September 25, 2025.
D. Graham Burnett. “Say No to Mammon!” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2025.
Peter Weir, director. Dead Poets Society. Touchstone Pictures, 1989.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly, July 1, 2004.
Marilynne Robinson. “Save Our Public Universities: In Defense of America’s Best Idea,” Harper’s Magazine, March, 2016.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin Classics, 2012.
The Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by Andrew George. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Linda Kinstler. “A University System Went All in on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart,” The New York Times, June 1, 2026.
Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal. “From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education,” Dissent Magazine, Fall, 2012.
Adrian Johns. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.
Plato. Theaetetus. Translated by John McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Scott Spillman. “The Book That Explained the University to Itself,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2025.
Laurence R. Veysey. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Laurence R. Veysey. The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Christopher Newfield. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Christopher Newfield. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Bill Chappell. “Thousands of Cabdrivers Clog France’s Roads To Protest Uber,” NPR, June 25, 2015.
Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
David J. Chalmers. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Walter Ong. Orality and Literacy: 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Herman Melville. “Chapter 99: The Doubloon.” In Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
William Shakespeare. Hamlet: The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
James Baldwin. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.
Josiah Royce. The Letters of Josiah Royce. Edited by John Clendenning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Donovan Hohn, host. “Episode 6: Justin Smith-Ruiu and Rachel Richardson.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, January 10, 2025.
Part Two
Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Anthony Verity. Introduced by Barbara Graziosi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace: The definitive translation newly revised. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Revised, edited, and introduced by Amy Mandelker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
George Eliot. Middlemarch. Edited by Rosemary Ashton. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by David McDuff. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
William Shakespeare. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.
E.M. Forster. Aspects of the Novel. Boston: Mariner Books, 1956.
D.H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Edited by Michael Squires. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Demons. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
John Y. Beaty. The Baby Whale Sharp Ears. Illustrated by Helene Carter. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company. 1938.
Richard C. Paddock. “Hundreds Cheer Whale: Wrong-Way Humphrey Finally Returns to Ocean,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1985.
Herman Melville. “Chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck.” In Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Donovan Hohn, host. “Yiyun Li on ‘The Try-Works.” The World in Time fromLapham’s Quarterly, Friday, May 8, 2026.
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.
John Milton. Paradise Lost. Edited by John Leonard. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Francis Allyn Olmsted. Incidents of a Whaling Voyage. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1841.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast. Edited by Thomas Philbrick. London: Penguin Classics, 1981.
Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. London: Penguin Classics, 2002.
William Shakespeare. Macbeth. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
The Hebrew Bible. Translated by Isaac Leeser. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1853.
Lindley Murray. English Grammar. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1859.
William Shakespeare. King Lear. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
