Listen to this episode from Think About It on Spotify. Hannah Arendt's 1967 essay on "Truth and Politics" centers on the uneasy relation between truth-telling and politics. Lying has always been part of politics, Arendt says, but something shifts with the wholesale attack on our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and make-believe.

Listen to this episode from Think About It on Spotify. "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the order of angels?" This angsty cry opens poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies -- one of the greatest poetic masterpieces of all time that grounds us, modern beings, in a disenchanted, mechanized, and godless world.

Kate Chopin's absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who questions her life choices, and seeks something else. What does she want?

The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels ever written and a masterpiece of American fiction. Midwesterner Nick Carraway spends a summer on Long Island where he is lured into the ultra-glamorous parties and social circle of his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby.

Who was the first Chinese American writer to publish in America? Sui Sin Far, or Edith Maude Eaton, was born to a British father and Chinese mother who immigrated from England first to the U.S. and then to Montreal in 1873.

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, the first known Indian poet, and the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language.

Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams, James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, relates the emotionally gripping tale of a mixed-race piano prodigy who can pass for white in turn-of-the-century America.

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary," is the line many remember from middle or high school, or a Simpsons episode. It's the opening of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" which flutters not only though America's collective unconscious but is celebrated in Europe, Latin America and Asia as one of the great achievements of American culture.

Something different today: I was lucky to speak with writer Doon Arbus about her debut novel, The Caretaker, published September 2020 by New Directions books. It's a spell-binding, intricate and haunting tale of a world-renowned philosopher's house museum filled with his collection of objects, and the mysterious man who becomes the museum's caretaker.

Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the great love stories of all time, but it's also the story of a woman who speaks her truth even when this means risking everything she wants.

Marx has never left us. In our era of populism, political polarization, and the pandemic, concerns central to Marx such as economic inequality, the consolidation of power in the hands of the few, and the fate of workers - whether officially designated as essential yet treated, exactly, how? - are urgently discussed.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was the novel that scandalized, challenged, and inspired Victorian England with its tale of a beautiful young man who trades his soul, captured in a portrait, for eternal youth.

"The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all." This is Brenda Wineapple on the friendship of Emily Dickinson, in my view America's greatest poet, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor, writer, abolitionist, activist, and soldier. During this time of a global lockdown, let's listen to Dickinson again.

Why is everyone talking about Michel Foucault these days? How can Foucault's work have so many resonances in our contemporary world? What were his insights and discoveries that have influenced disciplines as diverse as cultural studies, gender and queer studies, or post-colonial studies?

"It is impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West. -- Yes, everyone knew that, except the dead." Albert Camus's world-famous 1947 novel The Plague is about the human response to extreme circumstances.

Why read books in dark times? Daniel Defoe, known to most as the author of Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, about the plague that decimated London's population in 1665. The gripping account is presented as a survivor's story who confronts his world being ravaged by an invisible and extremely contagious disease.

Immanuel Kant's short 1784 essay, "What is Enlightenment?" clearly lays out what the Age of Reason means: that we are encouraged to think for ourselves to claim our freedom. What, precisely, does it mean to think for oneself? Should that not be just natural and intuitive, rather than something we need to learn?

In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture that Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of our modern Supreme Court, called America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence. What does it mean for America, and us as Americans, to start thinking for ourselves?

Being arrested without ever being told why, or waking up to discover one has been transformed into a giant insect: these are the powerful images we have of Franz Kafka, a writer of existential despair who embarked on a futile quest for meaning in the 20th century.

Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane is one of America's literary masterpieces: a book that captures the dynamism and rhythm of American English through characters that could not exist anywhere else in the world. The short novel is comprised of stories, tales, poetry and even songs, and in breaking with conventional genre it also broke with assumptions of who and what a book of modernist writing can feature.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we live under conditions of inequality, violence, dependency and general unhappiness (just look on twitter!)

Led by Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, a generation of young people are ready for swift and commensurate action on climate change. Are their parents and grandparents morally obligated to listen? Philosopher Dale Jamison explains the morality of fighting for our lives when we are not directly impacted.

The British romantic poet William Wordsworth is best known for his moving evocations of nature, his celebration of childhood, and his quest to find a shared humanity in his poetry. He's also widely considered the first modern poet because he turns his experiences, memories, and the workings of his mind (earlier "spots of time") into the main subject of his accessible poetry.

Nobody should feel excited about the renewed relevance of Hannah Arendt's work today. Her foresight about the fragility of democratic life is relevant for the worst possible reasons: populism, white supremacy, mass deception, the rise of fascism around the world, the coordinated assault on serious journalism, academia and any kind of responsible thought.

The human urge for self-expression is so powerful that it often challenges conventions that seem set in stone. The poetry of Phillis Wheatley is among the writers whose tremendous capacity to speak out in her own words upends a tradition and inaugurates something truly new.