It gives me great pleasure to share with you, dear loyal readers, this brief promotional teaser for my new podcast, Think Back.
As a free subscriber to this Substack, you’ll receive every episode in your inbox. If you prefer to listen in your favored podcast app (Apple, Spotify, etc.), it will live there as well. I’d be grateful if you might follow, like, all the rest.
You’ll hear at the beginning and end of this teaser, as in the proper episodes I’ll begin posting next week, my enormously talented friend and neighbor, Akiko Sasaki, playing the opening of “The Union,” an 1862 piece by the composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Akiko has done a phenomenal job capturing the vibrancy of Gottschalk’s Civil War-era composition, with its period-appropriate combination of patriotic grandeur and a certain mournful melancholy. The idea to use this once-popular tune—which incorporates three “national airs”: the Star-Spangled Banner, Hail Columbia, and Yankee Doodle—came to me shortly after having the idea for the show. I’ve thought for years of writing an essay titled “Why Gottschalk Matters.” Maybe I’ll just make it a Think Back episode. Anyway, my immense thanks to Akiko.
I also want to thank my friend Lily Piyathaisere for helping to create the logo and other design elements. The background is a painting by John Frederick Kensett, a somewhat lesser light of the Hudson River School. It hangs in the American Wing at the Met, one of my favorite indoor places on earth, and depicts one of my favorite outdoor places: what the Dutch called the Wey-Gat—the Wind Gate—the dramatic northern entrance to the Hudson Highlands, a few miles from my home. Every time I drive through that gap, or spy it from the summit of some neighboring ridge, I think about how lucky I am to live in this beautiful, storied place (and with such wonderful, talented people as Akiko and Lily); I think about the past and the present. I often remind my kids that history isn’t back then—history is now. Both the painting and the place it depicts represent for me that powerful sense of connectedness. It’s the perfect logo for this podcast, and Lily has executed it beautifully.
Finally, I just want to say that my aim here is to offer up a heaping intellectual repast at least every two weeks, if not oftener. My first guest is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose next book will change how you think about, well, America. Those that follow are no less exciting. If you’ve been a free subscriber to this point, you can click the button below to become a sustaining contributor to this project for just $6/month. That’s a T-Bone at McRib prices. (Annual and “Founder” subscriptions are also available.) I’ve now activated payments, so it should be fairly straightforward. Everything will remain free and fully accessible for a good while as I seek to build an audience, but I can’t tell you how much your support and encouragement means to me.
Even more important: please share the show with friends, family, colleagues, anyone else you know who might be interested. I’m not on social media, but for a vestigial Facebook, thus can use all the promotion help I can get. Many thanks.
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