An episode from 7/6/26: For the past year or so, I’ve been putting out another podcast with the artist and educator Tom Hart over at his Substack, Men, an Explanation. You can find all the episodes we’ve done at Apple or Spotify where we talk about all kinds of things, but mostly creativity and how to be decent in the weird world of 2026. Today, I wanted to share one of those episodes with you, where Tom and I talk about baseball.

It begins with Tom dealing with a bout of insomnia by listening to a podcast of fake AM baseball broadcasts, Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio; it ends up with the two of us talking about what baseball has meant to us and its connections to creativity and even religion, mysticism, and history.

I end the episode by reading from Mac Davis’s Baseball’s Unforgettables, a book published in 1966 that first belonged to my dad and much later became hugely important in my childhood. I also mention the HBO documentary When it Was a Game, which everybody should check out. If anyone is wondering how I ended up obsessed with history, religion, and meaning, Davis's book and the documentary are good places to start. Both showed me, at a young age, how history so easily becomes folklore and myth and how, in the best ways, individual and shared memory can become layered in the best kind of sentimentality.

Thanks to Tom for letting me repost the entire episode here. I hope listeners to Human Voices Wake Us will go check out the other episodes Tom and I have done.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 6/22/26: Tonight, we hear about the British poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998), and the poem he said he spent the most time on, “The Gulkana.” The poem is named after a river in Alaska, and in this episode, I preface a reading of the poem with excerpts from his letters and biography about Hughes’ love for the outdoors and for fishing. In particular, in the last two decades of his life, Hughes found great solace and intensity visiting his son, Nicholas, a marine biologist, who was then living in Alaska. Only after this introduction do I read “The Gulkana” in full, as well as the poem “That Morning.”

Both poems come from his 1983 collection, River; the letters come from those he wrote to the critic and friend Keith Sagar, as well as The Letters of Ted Hughes; the biography I read from is by Jonathan Bate. The other episodes I’ve done on Hughes’ life and poetry can be found here.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 6/1/26: Tonight, we delve into the significance of the moon in mythology, religion, and folklore. I read from the Taschen Book of Symbols, the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, and Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion.

Finally, and most personally, I read about the history of Rosh Chodesh, the monthly Jewish holiday recognizing the New Moon. For this, I read a passage from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s A Guide to Jewish Prayer.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 5/11/26: Tonight, I read passages on what the discoveries of agriculture and metallurgy meant for human beings, as reflected in the mythologies and rituals and stories that grew up around them. These passages are taken from sections 12 and 15 of Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries.

After Eliade’s rich catalogue of stories and beliefs that came out metallurgy, I read a few passages from the Hebrew Bible—Isaiah, Ezekiel, Malachi, Proverbs, and finally Job—where metallurgy is discussed literally and as metaphor. Here, metallurgy becomes a symbol of transformation imposed by God on backsliding humanity, as well as enduring symbol of wisdom and understanding.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 5/4/26: Tonight, I read the story of the French journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann and his capture and three year captivity at the hands of Hezbollah. While held prisoner, he was given many books to read to pass the time, and what I share comes from the spy novelist John le Carré’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life.

Next, I read from Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers. As I say, ever since listening to the audiobook I’ve come to think that there are true crime books, and then there is Fraser’s book: for those who can stomach this kind of material, it is essential. I read the pages describing Ted Bundy’s kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund on the same day—July 14, 1974—from Lake Sammamish State Park in Washington.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 4/27/26: Tonight, I read about the destruction of two great houses of worship. The first is the cathedral of Old St. Paul’s, destroyed in 1666 in the Great Fire of London. My reading comes from Neil Hanson’s The Dreadful Judgement: The True Story of the Great Fire of London, and as mentioned, I link to the unabridged UK edition of the book, which is about a hundred pages longer than the American version. Next is the Second Jerusalem Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 60 CE. This reading is from Martin Goodman’s introduction to his Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

An episode from 4/20/26: Tonight, we delve into the world of cities. First, in a passage from Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, the town of Portsmouth, Ohio, is lovingly described in the decades before the epidemic.

Next, a passage from Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Great Invention describes the author’s travels to research the book, and his conclusion that the messiness of urban life is key to its vitality and innovation.

Finally, I read letters from twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to New York City. Originally published in the Jewish Daily Forward and later collected in The Bintel Brief, the letters describe the difficulties faced by newly arrived immigrants who had rarely (if ever) experienced life outside of the insular world of shtetl.

The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.

Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.