A veritable plethora of Casual Conversation awaits (yes, plethora is singular) your participation. As of this writing, 199 classmates have joined in a virtual event. One of our newest conversationalists (who attended the discussion of the Dartmouth College Case) stated that he enjoyed listening to the guests so much that he intends to come back. Mayber you can be the 200th!
Three Dartmouth professors will spend time with us, including two chairs of their departments. Professor Jeremy deSilva, Anthropology Chair, will be with us on Monday, March 24 at 5pm Eastern to speak about his work on why, when, and how humans developed their particular form of bipedalism. His book is First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human (Harper paperbacks edition 2022). Although there is no obligation to read the book ahead of time, it enhances the experience. Many classmates have purchased the book afterward; one recently stated that he would be moving the book to the “next position” on his reading table after hearing from Professor Mary Fulbrook.
When we are standing, we can bend our neck a bit and raise our heads to the heavens above, and experience, from much afar, the vastness of the universe. And part of what can see is . . . nothing. Supermassive black holes is the domain of study for Professor Ryan Hickox, Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He will be spending time with us, and part of we will be discussing is Time, as in the formation of galaxies, which pairs with supermassive black holes for discussion with Professor Hickox. A date and time will be set.
Jonathan Eig won the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life (Picador 2023), and he will be with us for a Casual Conversation on Monday, May 26 at 5 pm Eastern Time. We have classmate Bill Coulson for taking the initiative to contact Mr. Eig and obtain his consent to be with us in May. Mr. Eig has written about significant figures in American life with a biography about Muhammed Ali and another about Lou Gehrig. He has also written books Jackie Robinson’s first season in major league baseball, another about the capture of Al Capone’s capture, and, finally, about the birth of The Pill. Mr. Eig will be our second Pulitzer winner to speak with us in a Casual Conversation after Professor David I. Kertzer.
The Civil War era has already been plumbed by several of our guests, including about the Republican Party’s wariness of the Army. Up next is Professor Adam D. Mendelsohn who wrote Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (New York University Press 2022). Professor Mendelsohn’s book was described by the Jewish Review of Books as a “gorgeously illustrated and groundbreaking new study of Jewish soldiers of the Union Army”, in which the author draws on a register of Jewish soldiers “to offer narrative profiles of the Union’s Jewish Medal of Honor recipients and its deserter, triumphant and fallen, faithful and fictional.” Professor Mendelsohn, who teaches in South Africa, will be with us on April 27 at 2 pm Eastern Time to accommodate the guest’s likely location outside the U.S.
Classmate Bruce Alpert, who chairs the Jewish Culture Group, contacted Dartmouth Professor of Jewish Studies Susannah Heschel for recommendations for someone to speak with us who might provide a different view on the current situation in the Middle East. Bernard Avishai has kindly agreed to speak to us on a topic of his choosing. Most recently he has expressed interest in Israel’s culture war. He will be speaking with us from Israel, where he lives, onSunday, May 11 at 10 am Eastern Time.
William C. Wohlforth is Dartmouth’s Daniel Webster Professor of Government and co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion (Oxford University Press 2025). The Wall Street Journal, in a review by Arthur Herman, stated that the authors give a well-researched account of the many ways in which nation-states have conducted information warfare aimed at “subversion”—with lessons for democracies in our current, war-raging moment. Subversion is nothing new, as Herman relates: In different forms, subversion has long been a tool of statecraft and power competition. What you “know” may not be the whole story. That is why we discuss issues in Casual Conversations. A date and time will to be set.
From Hanover and South Africa and Israel to a distinguished orchard in the Garden State, Princeton, whose English Professor Rhodri Lewis will be with us for a Casual Conversation centered on Shakespeare’s tragedies, particularly King Lear. It was but 60 years ago that our Freshman English Seminar required that we read three towering (and toweringly challenging) works in English: Paradise Lost, King Lear, and Moby Dick. We have had a Casual Conversation with a Dartmouth professor who is an expert in John Milton. Now we will take on Shakespeare and his Lear. Lear was almost 80; as are we. Lear faced the loss of power and authority; do we? Assuredly. Lear faced the void; can we? Must we? The Spectator (U.S. Edition) gave Professor Lewis’s book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art (Princeton University Press 2024) a rave review: Shakespeare’s tragedies, argues Lewis, show us we are all deluded, stumbling about in a complex world that we cannot hope to grasp fully. . . . We shouldn’t, though, feel despair at this. . . . Far from being straightforwardly didactic, [Shakespeare’s] desire is, through tragedy, to make us think.” If you want easy answers, this may not be your cup of tea, but if you want to think, feel, and challenge yourself with questions that may not have answers, join us for exploration with Professor Lewis on Monday, August 18 at 3 pm Eastern Time. (P.S. Bruce Alpert is hunting down a suitable Melville scholar for Moby Dick. Bruce and Herman Melville went to the same high school, although not at the same time.)
From subversion practiced from without to destruction from within. Dr. Gregory Makoff, who will be with us for a Casual Conversation on Sunday, July 13 at 3 pm Eastern Time, is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and he wrote Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina’s $100 Billion Debt Restructuring (Georgetown University Press 2024). In a review in Literary Review (UK), Sebastian Edwards wrote: In his magnificent new book, “Default,” Gregory Makoff tells the story of one of the most fascinating (and surreal, I would say) episodes in Argentina’s history. It is the story of the fifteen-year litigation between the Argentine government and a group of bond holders that followed the collapse of the government’s convertibility plan in 2001. Dry? Not al all: if you found the Dartmouth College Case Casual Conversation compelling and interesting, so, too, will you find this one. And it just so happens that I clerked (during his first year on the Bench) for the federal judge who presided over this case in Manhattan, Thomas P. Griesa. Judge Griesa was vilified in Argentina and even was the subject of a mocking float in a parade in Buenos Aires. Economics, international relations, dramatic court proceedings, a nation on the brink: This subject has everything you could ask for. And more!
William Deresiewicz is an independent scholar who will be with us on Sunday, June 29 at 3 pm Eastern Time for a Casual Conversation. I came to an appreciation of what a rare talent he is by reading his essay, by chance, in the Fall 2024 edition of Liberties: “Respect, or the Missing Relation.” He writes: All around us we are witnessing the loss of this thing that I’m calling respect. The problem is bipartisan. The left speaks constantly of “difference” but cannot abide it. . . . But the right is no better these days, having largely extirpated its liberal commitments in the name of an epochal moral crusade. In order to better explore this notion of “respect,” Mr. Deresiewicz turns to Martin Buber. But as he finds much to admire in I and Thou, he also finds much to question. For example: [I]f we need to love the other in order to treat them correctly, then we are all in a great deal of trouble. We had a Casual Conversation with a rabbi who wrote a book about Buber’s teachings, using them to create 52 responses to Torah portions. I find it bracing to have someone who has a decidedly different view.
Mr. Deresiewicz has a book out that collects 42 essays, some previously published and others not: The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society (Henry Holt and Company 2022). If there is a single theme that joins the essays in this book, it is my attempt to defend, and, as well as I can, to enact, a certain conception of the self . . . [,] a self that emerged in the renaissance . . . and appears now to be passing into history. In other words, the individual: developed in solitude, in fearless dialogue, by reading, through education as the nurturing of souls; embodied in original art and independent thought; beset by the online cacophony, by education as the manufacture of producers, by groupthink and the politics of groups. To be an individual, the years have taught me, takes a constant effort. One of his essays is “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” and another is titled “Faux Friendship.”
We are, for the most part, but 77 or 78 and whatever time we still have is worth our struggling with the serious questions raised by our upcoming guests, questions that often don’t have answers, or at least not easy ones. I hope that you will find the Casual Conversations a series of challenges to your brain and your heart.
A P.S.: Independent scholar Harry Freedman was our guest to discuss his book Shylock’s Venice. He promised to return for a Casual Conversation about his book Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius (Bloomsbury Continuum 2021).
And a P.P.S. As with Mr. Freedman, both Mr. Eig and Mr. Deresiewicz are independent scholars, almost as tough a life as being an actor in NYC. Without an institutional base, and a salary that goes along with it, they depend on their writing for a living. I implore all of you to consider buying the books of all our guests, and especially the books from each of the independent scholars who give their time generously to be with us. We proudly have paid no one an honorarium: our guests appear for free, and the list includes some very prominent individuals. The least that those of us who can afford it can do is to buy the book being discussed. Be a Mensch!
See you soon, 200th! And 201st, 202nd, and etc.
Arthur Fergenson