Chapter & Verse

The New York Times Magazine's Jenna Wortham -- one of the most stimulating writers on technology, media, race, sexuality, and anything else she puts her mind to -- in conversation with Nadia Ellis, a professor of English at UC Berkeley. Wortham recounts her own development as a journalist; reflects on the challenges — psychological and even physical — of reporting on our often toxic political scene; and sketches some of the blindspots of the high tech industry.

Hua Hsu (The New Yorker) and Jeff Chang (We Gon' Be Alright) take on a set of urgent questions: how is it that, as American culture becomes increasingly 'colorized,', its politics get increasingly polarized in terms of black and white? What are the roots of this divide? Where do Asian-Americans fit in? And how might a Berkeley education (both Hsu and Chang are Cal alums) set up a writer to see the faultlines of this terrain?

Novelist Namwali Serpell reads from, and explores the meaning of, her short story “The Sack,” winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing.

Historian Adam Hochschild discusses Spain in Our Hearts, his mesmerizing chronicle of the Spanish Civil War and the three thousand Americans who — in defiance of their own country — crossed the Atlantic to join the Spanish Republican Army and fight the forces of fascism. Hochschild delves into how he found so many fresh angles on the conflict, and how he understands its lessons.

Mark Bittman -- a key player in 'how we eat today' -- reflects on how he became the unique writer he is: both a writer of popular cookbooks and a forceful advocate for changing our food system. In the first part, he opens up about the people and cultural forces that shaped him in his teens and twenties. In the second, he reads and discusses one of his more personal New York Times columns, "Bagels, Lox & Me," and describes what it was like to be a columnist for the Times.

In this episode, Katrina Dodson reads two Clarice Lispector short stories in their entirety — the fable-like "A Chicken" and the intricate "The Smallest Woman in the World" — and reflects on how she tried to render Lispector's very special Portuguese in the English language.

Here we discuss -- with Robert Alter, the Hebrew Bible's most esteemed translator and commentator -- the Bible at its most unorthodox: the two books that never mention the word God (the Book of Esther, the Song of Songs) and the book of the Bible that most intently focuses its attention beyond the nation of Israel (the Book of Jonah). Chapter & Verse is a books-and-arts podcast about the cultural imagination — what Joan Didion once called the stories we tell ourselves to live. It delves into novels, nonfiction, poems, music, film, and other touchstones of our culture, with an eye to the spells they cast and the questions they raise. More information at chapterversepod.com. This episode is sponsored by UC Berkeley's Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. For more information about the Townsend Center, visit http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu.