My department’s “Future of the Past” podcast recently invited me to talk about my new book Learning to Be Fair. It was a good opportunity to bounce around some ideas about civic education, government efforts to regulate discussions of “equity,” and the durable paradoxes surrounding “fairness” that arise from various authors in the Greco-Roman tradition.
You can find the episode at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen in the player below:
I’m happy to join a collection of lawyers, historians, and literary theorists in Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice, a new book in the Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature series based out of Cambridge University. My own chapter (“The Common Consent of Words: An Aristotelian Element of Hobbesian Legal Rhetoric”) shows how a 1637 summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric paradoxically draws out some important developments in Hobbes “scientific phase,” during which he reportedly turned away from the rhetorical and humanist texts of his early career and tried to ground his political philosophy in demonstrable proof.
breaking stretch // patricia brennan septet
So glad I discovered this tour-de-force album only a few weeks before the end of the year. The drums on its opening track maintain just enough stability to keep everything from spinning out of control, and that controlled chaos sets the tone for the remaining eight. Not every track is relentless exuberance: “Sueños de Coral Azul” brakes to let Brennan’s swirling vibraphone (a bit like Mary Halvorson) come to the fore. Even though the album features just seven players, the sound is so big it sometimes reminds me of Darcy James Argue’s full jazz orchestra—”555” would fit right alongside the tracks on Argue’s Real Enemies.
diamond jubilee // cindy lee
Maybe it was just the nostalgic excitement of downloading an album as raw .wav files from GeoCities of all places … in 2024? But this unslick album isn’t just some forced exercise in retro, “lo-fi” aesthetics. Some tracks sound like The Jesus and Mary Chain cranked out a rockabilly album, others embrace the wordplay and narrative at the heart of the best country songwriting, others just goof around with guitar pedals within the productive constraints of Americana harmonies. A double album to listen to from start to finish.
slow burn // baby rose (with badbadnotgood)
I had never heard of BadBadNotGood before discovering this album, but they’ve apparently been in the hip-hop-meets-jazz-meets-something producer business for years. And the production on this little EP is solid, but the outstanding, deep vocals of Baby Rose are the real draw: sometimes her singing reminds me of the late Sharon Jones, elsewhere Baby Rose uses her contralto voice—with a lispy authenticity—to serve up the kind narrative development that shines on the best Cindy Lee tracks above. The analog instrumentation—jazz flute!—complements her vocals in just the right way.
orchestras // bill frisell
For decades Bill Frisell’s guitar work has pushed the boundaries of the instrument, especially in small-scale works and even solo reimaginings. And I’ve been lucky to see him play with regular collaborators like drummer Rudy Royston at up-close venues like the Village Vanguard and the Dakota here in Minneapolis—that’s all to say that hearing Frisell play with a 59-member orchestra is a new take. If you’ve come to think (erroneously!) that he has stagnated in staid “boomer soundscapes,” turn up the pulsing dissonance of Electricity and the noir harmonies of Strange Meeting for a Frisell you haven’t heard before.
take 3 // patricia kopatchinskaja
I first heard Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s great interpretations of Beethoven over a decade ago, but she has since championed “pieces from the borders of the current repertoire.” Sometimes she reaches pretty far beyond those borders. On Take 3, she strikes an interesting balance: familiar names like Poulenc, but also tracks that veer into a kind of Bacchic, inspired madness. In her telling, Kopatchinskaja doesn’t want a “perfectly polished and beautiful world,” one that would be “rather one-dimensional, and boringly kitsch.” Here she reminds us that disorder isn’t always destruction and that the outer reaches of creative freedom aren’t to be confused with absurdity.