Jay Nordlinger is a journalist who writes about a range of subjects, including politics, foreign affairs, and the arts. He is the music critic of The New Criterion. He is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative, and a contributor to its publication, The Next Move. His guests are from the worlds of politics and culture, talking about the most important issues of the day, and some pleasant trivialities as well. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.jaynordlinger.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.jaynordlinger.com</a>
Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger
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Jay Nordlinger is a journalist who writes about a range of subjects, including politics, foreign affairs, and the arts. He is the music critic of The New Criterion. He is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative, and a contributor to its publication, The Next Move. His guests are from the worlds of politics and culture, talking about the most important issues of the day, and some pleasant trivialities as well. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.jaynordlinger.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.jaynordlinger.com</a>
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3/12/2015
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Recent Episodes
June 29, 2026
Love, Language, Literature
<p>As regular readers know, one of my favorite writers, and favorite people, is Mark Helprin. His new novel is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Elegy-Blue-Novel-Mark-Helprin/dp/1419786083/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OEP4XHKN8STW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.yN75WgwSGZ7d_GIWqvN2RZ-zhlL79Wbzk6alY3C3YIGkhIJfnFU1gerzpHGnhvnMgCu2L_vTOz0PUsTN0rSIK3RSNefw6n93tzH-cyeF7S4.mUdQ6wFrIhksaMU5Ysd6XP74aX_fGY4EVJXRclZi9pg&dib_tag=se&keywords=elegy+in+blue&qid=1782714860&sprefix=elegy+in+blu%2Caps%2C257&sr=8-1">Elegy in Blue</a>. (Marvelous title, and utterly suited to the book.) (It wouldn’t be so marvelous if it weren’t so suited, true.) The book includes some familiar Helprinian themes: love, New York, the sea, courage. In our new Q&A, we discuss those, and more.</p><p>Mark ends our discussion by emphasizing the beauty and protean wonder of the English language. He is both a guardian of our language and a pride of it.</p><p>This fellow is important to me and many others.</p><p><p>Q&A is the podcast of this site, Onward and Upward. The site is supported by readers and listeners. To receive new articles and episodes—and to support the work of the writer and podcaster—become a free or paid subscriber. Many thanks to you.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Onward and Upward at <a href="https://www.jaynordlinger.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.jaynordlinger.com/subscribe</a>
June 25, 2026
Anthropologist and Writer
<p>One of my favorite writers—one of my favorite commenters on social affairs—is Conrad Kottak. He writes at <a target="_blank" href="https://conradkottak.substack.com/">The Anthropocene Anthropologist: Reflections on Bizarroland</a>. Maybe I could quote from the introduction of this new Q&A:</p><p>… our guest today is Conrad Kottak, one of the leading anthropologists in the world. He is a cultural anthropologist—rather than an archeologist, say, or a primatologist—but he has his fingers in many pies.</p><p>He is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1968. I myself had the privilege of taking one of his classes. He has done extensive fieldwork in Madagascar and Brazil. He is the author of several textbooks in wide use.</p><p>In this Q&A, he tells me something interesting—well, many things that are interesting, but I am now thinking of this: He has been writing all his life, since he was a little boy. He always wanted to be a writer, and the writing came before the anthropology. For all these years, he has been writing as an anthropologist.</p><p>He went to Columbia University, home of anthropology. Is that what introduced him to the field? Got him hooked on it?</p><p>“Well,” he says, “I had a fourth-grade teacher who did a unit on South American Indians that I thought was pretty interesting. It fascinated me. But that lay in abeyance for quite a while until I got to college.”</p><p>One of his teachers at Columbia was Margaret Mead, whose name for a long time was virtually synonymous with anthropology. In addition to being an anthropologist, she was a generalist, writing on a variety of subjects for a variety of publications.</p><p>Conrad Kottak, too, is an anthropologist and generalist.</p><p>Mead was controversial—is controversial—and I ask Professor Kottak to get into it a little, which he does, illuminatingly.</p><p>The two countries of his fieldwork, Madagascar and Brazil—they seem to me remote, exotic, romantic. (Those are all forbidden words in anthropology, I’m sure. I almost specialize in forbidden words.) Professor Kottak has seen many sides of life. Indeed, he has examined them up close.</p><p>I ask whether he was amused when a hit movie called “Madagascar” came out (2005). The people in Madagascar were not amused, he says. The world seemed more interested in saving wildlife than in addressing human problems.</p><p>A blunt question, and a natural one: Did anthropology get flaky? Did a field that once attracted brilliant minds go all soft and political and granola?</p><p>In the course of his answer, Professor Kottak says something central: Respect for fact must be paramount. Without a respect for fact, you don’t have science, social or otherwise.</p><p>Here is another question: Are differences between peoples more interesting than similarities, or vice versa? Well, any anthropologist worth his salt studies and accounts for both.</p><p>One thing Professor Kottak is known for is his inclusion of television. What I mean is, he writes about the impact of television on societies. Here in the United States, we used to be bonded by TV shows. Those bonds are … loosening, as we all look at select material on our phones.</p><p>Oh, there are so many things you can discuss with an anthropologist, and with Conrad Kottak in particular. You will enjoy getting to know him.</p><p><p>Q&A is the podcast of this site, Onward and Upward. The site is supported by readers and listeners. To receive new articles and episodes—and to support the work of the writer and podcaster—become a free or paid subscriber. Many thanks to you.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Onward and Upward at <a href="https://www.jaynordlinger.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.jaynordlinger.com/subscribe</a>
June 10, 2026
Your Land, My Land, Our Land
<p><a target="_blank" href="https://history.yale.edu/people/beverly-gage">Beverly Gage</a> is a professor at Yale and has a new book, timed for our 250th anniversary: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Land-Your-Through-History/dp/1668033100/ref=sr_1_1?crid=33GVBDWRFOSC0&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YkcCYtZkCMkRNquEV5hzuCKEmTGqyj5w470ngfFb7_IbTcNj2W0VI63qbm3zJ7GqkSUV20aMGnYlJhAGEWeBNL6N6O3tEL2GupBUunFnM9JceeinFn2qnsacGpwEpx117GsToG4aRxXORaCnthfqWxYCTUgQgRFn1pvqUgB2J0D7-dwzolHHvvu0aszIOTzMaHN1ufAoajTrn6SMY26SWB5HT1CNQdq6CdpTeseKAgk.-TqkuPH7Xq-qyiarnFJGbtYDn_EsWUeg0kMVpooVv2g&dib_tag=se&keywords=this+land+is+your+land+book&qid=1781093470&sprefix=this+land+%2Caps%2C184&sr=8-1">This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History</a>. In a Q&A, we talk about this book and plenty more.</p><p>“Q&A,” by the way, is the name of my podcast. For an interview show, it is not an especially imaginative name, but it serves.</p><p>Professor Gage grew up outside Philadelphia. “When you were a girl,” I ask her, “did you read history like a fiend or did that come later?” She read “pretty widely,” she says. This reading included the trilogy by John Jakes about the Civil War—North and South. They were huge sellers, those books.</p><p>Beverly was a musician: violinist, pianist, conductor. In college, however, she gravitated to other interests. She went to Yale and then, for graduate school, to Columbia.</p><p>Can she name us a few of her favorite historians? Historians of the U.S., that is? She gives me two names: W. E. B. Du Bois (who, in addition to everything else he did, wrote a history of Reconstruction) and Richard Hofstadter. One thing those two had in common is: they could write like angels.</p><p>That counts, when it comes to engaging a reader …</p><p>In 2022, Professor Gage published a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/G-Man-Pulitzer-Prize-Winner-American/dp/0593511468/ref=sr_1_1?crid=U5JJ9EXPEEZQ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H6QbFtyCmAJqbNjguV3tqfse-ScByFHl8ixjp-glxNTHuSEwI8w8dIrjgZTrUdwoDpYhsSJbRniqXN2vCX24neL_8FIZ8W7G52DNVhST1gw.lGbd32t9aMJ_EoHXhzQ25Q0enCeuijiz4HVmOmEDh84&dib_tag=se&keywords=beverly+gage+g-man&qid=1781053846&sprefix=beverly+gage%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-1">G-Man</a>. It won the Bancroft Prize, the top award in U.S. history. And the Pulitzer Prize and yet others.</p><p>I ask her a few questions about Hoover—including, “Was there anything good about him?” Well, he was “a believer in nonpartisan professional government service.” He was an “institutionalist.” He would not have liked the current FBI director.</p><p>Was Hoover guilty in the matter of Martin Luther King? Did he and the FBI treat the civil rights leader unfairly? Very much so, answers Professor Gage.</p><p>One more question, which is interesting in light of the FBI’s hounding of gays: Was Hoover himself gay? By all appearances, yes.</p><p>Professor Gage’s new book, This Land Is Your Land, takes its title from a famous song: Woody Guthrie’s number from 1940. The song was, in part, a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Guthrie was a leftist, a supporter of Stalin’s Soviet Union.</p><p>His song is an interesting story, but suffice it to say, here and now: it is part of the American treasury. You know the words:</p><p>This land is your land, this land is my land,From California to the New York Island,From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream Waters.This land was made for you and me.</p><p>The subtitle, remember, of Professor Gage’s book is “A Road Trip through U.S. History.” That is an American rite, and right, you could say: a road trip. I’ve always wanted to do the Maine-to-California thing. Never have. Beverly Gage has, two or three times.</p><p>In this new book, she starts in Revolutionary Philadelphia and winds up at Disneyland, in SoCal.</p><p>I tell her, “I think your book belongs in the category of civic education, which has been one of my causes in recent years.”</p><p>“Very much so,” she says. “I mean, it’s not civic education in the sense of saying, ‘There are three branches of government, and here’s how they work,’ but it’s civic education in that it prods people to go out and get to know their country.” (I have paraphrased.)</p><p>Last year, Yale formed a <a target="_blank" href="https://president.yale.edu/committees-programs/presidents-committees/committee-on-trust-in-higher-education">Committee on Trust in Higher Education</a>. It delved into a number of issues: grade inflation, tuition prices, admission policies, political bias, etc. Professor Gage was a co-chairman of the committee. It issued its <a target="_blank" href="https://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-04/Report-of-the-Committee-on-Trust-in-Higher-Education.pdf">report</a> in April.</p><p>We talk about this a bit. And I ask her, “If you were czar—if you could wave a wand—what would you do, to improve higher ed?” She would get costs down. And she would get laptops and the like out of the classroom (except where strictly necessary).</p><p>Maybe I have typed enough and should let you get on with hearing or watching our podcast. Beverly Gage is an excellent conversationalist and teacher.</p><p><p>Q&A is the podcast of this site, Onward and Upward. The site is supported by readers and listeners. To receive new articles and episodes—and to support the work of the writer and podcaster—become a free or paid subscriber. Many thanks to you.</p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Onward and Upward at <a href="https://www.jaynordlinger.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.jaynordlinger.com/subscribe</a>
534 total episodes available
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