One of my side projects in 2026 has been to record brief audio essays about the rich histories of English words, particularly as they emerge from their Greek and Roman ancestors, for a new podcast called Original Public Meaning. I was inspired to create these recordings, at least in part, by how much I enjoyed producing a similar audio essay on the Latin verb proficio for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in 2025. And cultural-criticism-via-word-history has been a favorite beat of mine for many years.
I’ve been recording two episodes of this show per week. A few of my favorites are listed below.
“nostalgia” defined as a longing for one’s home, one’s past, and one’s own psychological space:
“convention” considered both as a meeting place and as a prevailing social practice:
“incandescent” viewed through the lenses of technological and moral development:
I’m also realizing how effective audio recordings can be for teaching: producing brief segments to reflect on a section of the Iliad that didn’t quite make it into lectures, for instance. Making these kinds of recordings for students is more knack than science, so the podcast is a good opportunity for practicing all kinds of skills: microphone technique, argumentative clarity, and refining prose for the ear rather than the eye.
You can find all the episodes at the show’s website. (And no, the podcast has nothing to do with originalism as a legal theory; Original Public Meaning is just a good title for a show about the complex histories of words.)
In the album notes for First Dance, the Freedom Art Quartet says their “purpose is to explore … the limitless dimensions of the art form.” Sign me up, folks. Right out of the gate, “Counterbalance” explodes into energetic interplay, hurtling toward chaotic culmination and eventual dust-settling. “Song for the Old Ones,” a twelve-minute almost-ballad, never drones and never spins out, in large part thanks to masterful drumming. Even with its formalist devotion, First Dance isn’t some exercise in tired, mid-century nostalgia: “Nature of the Past” foregrounds sonic and instrumental expansiveness that you might well find on some new post-rock album.
This release is one of many produced by a constellation of jazz musicians in Los Angeles this year. Nicole McCabe, a young saxophonist, combines her own instrumental talent with bold, even lush production. Sometimes it feels like you’re listening to Homogenic but with a saxophonist taking the place of Björk’s improvisational vocals. Elsewhere, tracks like “San Benito” present McCabe through the lens of a kind of baroque pop. Her co-producer Pete Min released his own album this year (alongside Joey Waronker) with some great stuff, on which Tortoise’s Jeff Parker occasionally plays. (Tortoise had their own worthwhile release this year.) Parker has been around for years, but these other associated musicians are also worth watching.
There’s more Kurt Weill out there than just The Threepenny Opera. This recording opens with the gripping, dissonant chords of Weill’s 1921 Berliner Sinfonie, a work that never rests even in its Andante religioso. Another collaboration between Weill and Bertolt Brecht—a scored ballet on the seven deadly sins (Die sieben Todsünden)—occupies the album’s middle section. I have found it interesting not just to look for translations of its sharply satirical libretto (“He who does no wrong will atone for it on earth,” for instance) but also to read accounts of the work, whose listeners “start by laughing and then discover in their laughter a certain pain.” (Other superb classical releases this year include the music of Bohuslav Martinů and Tarquinio Merula.)
Hailing from Rwanda and recording the first release for a new label out of MASS MoCA, the Kasambwe Brothers sing over instruments of their own making: sometimes developing a melody over repeated strumming, sometimes ceding the floor to their guitars and percussion. Listening to this album reminds me of sitting in the back seat while the worn cassette of Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints plays for the fourth time in a row. Amid so many global crises, this joyous release—its ecstatic hollers, its rhythmic heartbeat—reminds listeners that there is still a world of brotherhood out there.
I’m hardly the only person to praise this bundle of poetic, winding alt-country (or “punked-up country gunk“). Ryan Davis’s new album sounds like some hybrid of Wilco and Lucinda Williams, combining genre-bending production with the hyper-local backdrop of pawn shops and small-town bars. One track can’t “tell the cattle roads from the chemtrails of our past lives”; another track documents how “Dionysus hits the urinal.” It’s an album that falls just on the right side of the boundary between allusiveness and inscrutability—like modernist literature recited on a Great Plains radio station. Its dense, almost-enigmatic lyricism is part of the reward of repeated listening. Davis asks, “Are we getting any closer to me knowing what the point of this is?”—well, not really, thank goodness.
In a brief essay for the latest issue of Commonweal, I consider the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk and make the case that “robust discourse” in academic settings can never be entrusted to political pundits. Instead, colleges and universities need to defend “substantive principles like toleration, moral freedom, and openness to doubt,” and doing so will require institutional recommitment to teaching advanced literacy and the “slow-paced rituals of humanistic learning”:
In my view, colleges and universities already have monuments to “open, robust discourse.” They’re called libraries. In their quiet stacks, one can find John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice not far from Robert Nozick’slibertarian response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Library patrons can read Frantz Fanon’s defense of political violence in The Wretched of the Earth, but they can also pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, her rejection of bloodshed in the pursuit of political power. Spirited disagreement can be found on every American campus. We simply need to pull it off the shelf.
I realize how naïve this may seem amid the chorus of articles reporting that college students can’t read selections from demanding books, let alone entire volumes. Even so, colleges must promote their own literate vision of “robust discourse” and hold firm to their identity and mission against opportunistic political actors. They make a grave, self-destructive error if they accept that intellectual life is best represented by a tent emblazoned with the insincere taunt “Prove Me Wrong.”
This essay picks up on some ideas that I considered years ago in a review of Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought—that review remains one of my favorite contributions to Commonweal. On a related note, I was happy to be consulted alongside Hitz and others for a report in The Guardian on the state of humanities education at US universities.
