Best Adam Colman Podcasts (2024)

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5.5 Otherworldly Bedtime Stories 25:31

1M ago25:31

25:31

The word “story” often comes after the word “bedtime,” and for good reason. Stories can frighten us, disturb and shock us, prompt us to change our thinking, but compared to most experiences, reading a story is tranquil. Podcasts, similarly conveying mediated encounters with other lives, are also used as sleep aids (there’s a “sleep” category in App…

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5.4 NYC+MFA+ATL 37:25

1M ago37:25

37:25

“If my college-age self, reading White Noise, had thought I would one day be discussing word placement with Don DeLillo, I would have had a heart attack,” Deborah Treisman says in this episode. Since those days, in her role as fiction editor at The New Yorker, she has indeed discussed word placement with Don DeLillo, whose stories include “Midnight…

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5.3 It's Weird 20:53

2M ago20:53

20:53

American short stories started out weird. Consider Nathaniel Hawthorne, as we just did in episode two this season—or, consider Edgar Allan Poe. Existential strangeness and cosmic peril pervade these nineteenth-century stories, and those moods have stayed with American short stories into the twenty-first century. Brevity can be crucial for such stor…

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5.2 Wake Up with Wakefield 37:35

2M ago37:35

37:35

It’s time for a story. In this episode of our season on short stories in the United States, you'll hear Nathaniel Hawthorne’s mysterious short story “Wakefield,” read by the actor Max Gordon Moore. It’s a story from the 1830s, reflecting from the first sentence the early American interest in strange information found repeatedly in periodicals, and …

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5.1 Introduction 29:39

2M ago29:39

29:39

The Cosmic Library has always followed notions, tangents, and moods prompted by books that can never be neatly summarized or simply decoded. This new season is no exception. Still, there's a difference: we're prompted now by more than one major work. In season five, we're talking about short stories in the United States. You’ll hear from New Yorker…

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Season 5 Trailer: The Short Story in the United States 3:10

3M ago3:10

3:10

The trailer is here for the new season of The Cosmic Library! This five-episode season concerns a subject both smaller and vaster than any massive book, and that subject is: short stories in the United States. You’ll hear how short stories exceed their own brevity and meld with a reader’s mind; you’ll hear about the history of the short story acros…

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4.5 Immortality 27:29

12M ago27:29

27:29

Here, in the conclusion of our five-episode season on The Hall of the Monkey King, you’ll hear about Journey to the West’s capacity for reinvention across centuries—about, in other words, its openness to different circumstances, something like the Monkey King's own openness, his playfulness. Julia Lovell says, “Running through Monkey's actions and …

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4.4 Cinematic Transcendence 20:56

1y ago20:56

20:56

You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it’s a sixteenth-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the sixteenth century and into the movies. We’re talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the …

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4.3 The Flawed Mind Monkey 28:41

1y ago28:41

28:41

You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all t…

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4.2 Lawful Chaos 28:37

1y ago28:37

28:37

Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you’ve got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China's first heavy metal band and host of the Sin…

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4.1 Introduction 21:40

1y ago21:40

21:40

The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It’s the story of a monk’s journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests inc…

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Season 4 Trailer: The Hall of the Monkey King 2:59

1y ago2:59

2:59

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the …

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3.5 You Take It from Here 23:00

2y ago23:00

23:00

It's not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral provocation. See, for instance, Ecclesiastes, which in the King James translation begins: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labo…

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3.4 Struggling with Disaster 22:49

2y ago22:49

22:49

From the book of Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible presents a struggle with language: a struggle to establish meaning, to figure out the right uses of words, to understand one's place in the world. The famous early scene of struggle in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob's wrestling match with the divine, goes as follows in the King James translation: Jacob was lef…

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3.3 Dream Interpretation 32:41

2y ago32:41

32:41

Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it’s yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob's dream of angels, Joseph's dream of sheaves of wheat. So this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic” explores…

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3.2 Laws of Emotion 41:50

2y ago41:50

41:50

“We regulate each other’s nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the caretakers of each other’s nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn’t quite work, in this sen…

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3.1 Introduction 35:14

2y ago35:14

35:14

This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents. It's the Hebrew Bible, home to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Ark, David and Goliath, and prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Here, in a season we're calling "Mosaic Mosaic," it especially pr…

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Season 3 Trailer: Introducing Mosaic Mosaic 3:38

2y ago3:38

3:38

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titl…

1
2.5 Inconclusion 31:07

2+ y ago31:07

31:07

The 1,001 Nights are not typically about conclusions, but about the suggestion of more stories, more information passed from person to person, language to language. In this, the last episode of this season, Mazen Naous—a scholar whose specialties include the Nights—points out the implication of the phrase “thousand and one nights”: “There’s always …

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2.4 Survival 33:54

2+ y ago33:54

33:54

1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories, then, relies on a drive to live, manifesting the basic connection between our intuitive selves and imagination. When stories really survive, there’s more to them than repetitive cliffhangers or exce…

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2.3 Formulaic Surprises 34:40

2+ y ago34:40

34:40

The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, says in this episode, “Formula is essential to the work. It draws it force from accumulation. It draws its meaning from pattern.” But formulaic narrative doesn’t neces…

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2.2 Magnet Mountain 30:42

2+ y ago30:42

30:42

The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of science that coincided with the collection of early versions of the 1,001 Nights. In this episode, we hear about the science of the Nights, the science of the Abbasid age, and the history, more broadly, o…

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2.1 Introduction 28:34

2+ y ago28:34

28:34

You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nights. At least, you've felt the influence of those stories. On TV, in books, in comics—you’ve experienced things informed by the episodic narratives of Shahrazad. And in this season of The Cosmic Librar…

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The Worlds of Scheherazade Trailer 3:23

2+ y ago3:23

3:23

The Cosmic Library follows tangents out of literary classics concerned with infinity. Building on Lit Hub’s five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, this series explores the most unfathomable books in conversation with an eclectic cast of guests. The upcoming season, The Worlds of Scheherazade, plunges into and out of the 1,001 Nights with guests Ka…

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1.5 Musical Conclusions 20:48

3y ago20:48

20:48

Some of Finnegans Wake’s canniest readers, like guest Olwen Fouéré, don’t read the whole thing. That makes sense, too, considering that the book is itself incomplete: the last line doesn’t end, has no period. You’re left with a book that cannot conclude itself, that avoids coherence. So what are all these words doing, if not communicating? In part,…

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1.4 Familiar Language 23:12

3y ago23:12

23:12

Think of your most obscure, private, family chatter—some combination of baby-talk and nicknames and reiterations of the same concerns or jokes. It wouldn’t make sense to outsiders, but it makes a special kind of sense to you. It’s language that communicates in a highly local way, and not at all in other ways. And yet: everyone sort of knows how thi…

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1.3 Water 31:42

3y ago31:42

31:42

The “wake” in Finnegans Wake means both a joyous funereal gathering (here Joyce invented the word “funferal”) and a rising from sleep. But it also suggests the wake that follows movement through water. The book’s language, while dreamy and ceremonial, is also material, and often watery. This is appropriate, because like dreams, water brings us into…

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1.2 Dreams 36:44

3y ago36:44

36:44

Finnegans Wake—a book of rebirth and reawakening—finds its engine for rejuvenation in dreaminess. This matches what neuroscientists tell us: sleeping and dreaming are regenerative, intellectually and physiologically. Dr. Jade Wu, a sleep specialist at Duke University, tells us in this episode, “Sleeping is actually a very very active state of the b…

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1.1 Introduction 34:37

3y ago34:37

34:37

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake doesn’t work like other novels. It has lines like: “What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!” In some ways, this makes the book almost impossible to read. H.G. Wells told Joyce, “You have turned your back on common men — on their elementary needs … What is the result? Vast riddles.” The Wake d…

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Finnegan and Friends Trailer 3:58

3+ y ago3:58

3:58

Prepare for our five-part series about the most mystifying book ever written: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With a range of guests—including a novelist, an actor, a sleep specialist, a philosopher, and several Joyce scholars—Finnegan and Friends follows tangents inspired by Joyce’s novel of dreamy strangeness. We discover, along the way, that the W…

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An Interview with Serin Houston

9y ago

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Professor Serin Houston of Mount Holyoke College discusses her work in the field of geography. Music Credit: Laundromatted by Lawrence Grey.By Adam Colman and Darren Lone Fight

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An Interview with Donald Pease

11+ y ago

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Professor Donald Pease of Dartmouth College discusses state fantasies and American culture with Darren Lone Fight and Adam Colman.By Adam Colman and Darren Lone Fight

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Adam Colman Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

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The Cosmic Library

Adam Colman

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Conversations on American Studies

Adam Colman and Darren Lone Fight

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5.5 Otherworldly Bedtime Stories 25:31

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5.4 NYC+MFA+ATL 37:25

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5.3 It's Weird 20:53

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5.2 Wake Up with Wakefield 37:35

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5.1 Introduction 29:39

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Season 5 Trailer: The Short Story in the United States 3:10

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4.5 Immortality 27:29

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4.4 Cinematic Transcendence 20:56

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4.3 The Flawed Mind Monkey 28:41

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4.2 Lawful Chaos 28:37

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4.1 Introduction 21:40

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Season 4 Trailer: The Hall of the Monkey King 2:59

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3.5 You Take It from Here 23:00

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3.4 Struggling with Disaster 22:49

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3.3 Dream Interpretation 32:41

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3.2 Laws of Emotion 41:50

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3.1 Introduction 35:14

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Season 3 Trailer: Introducing Mosaic Mosaic 3:38

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2.5 Inconclusion 31:07

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2.4 Survival 33:54

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2.3 Formulaic Surprises 34:40

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2.2 Magnet Mountain 30:42

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2.1 Introduction 28:34

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The Worlds of Scheherazade Trailer 3:23

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1.5 Musical Conclusions 20:48

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1.4 Familiar Language 23:12

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1.3 Water 31:42

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1.2 Dreams 36:44

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1.1 Introduction 34:37

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Finnegan and Friends Trailer 3:58

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An Interview with Serin Houston

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An Interview with Donald Pease

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