Hot Takes on the Classics

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” a story about beauty, sacrifice, holiness, and the demanding vocation of the artist. In a quiet Norwegian religious community shaped by austerity, Babette arrives as a refugee and spends twelve years serving two aging sisters before using her entire lottery fortune to prepare one magnificent French feast. Tim and Emily consider how the meal restores memory, fellowship, delight, and spiritual vision to the community, and how Babette brings material beauty and spiritual devotion together rather than setting them against...

In this special spouses episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda are joined by Gaelyn Hurd and Mark Maeda to ask two deceptively simple questions: What is classical education, and what convinced each of them that it was worth pursuing? Their answers range across the great conversation, the classical canon, grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, Latin, history, virtue, wonder, and the relationship between curriculum and method. Along the way, they reflect on their own schooling, homeschooling and hybrid school experiences, memorable encounters with poetry and great books, and the importance of helping students see knowledge as...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” a story about two brothers trying to understand one another across the distance created by responsibility, suffering, addiction, and art. They discuss Baldwin’s lyrical prose, his Harlem upbringing and life in Paris, the tension between the older brother’s dutiful path and Sonny’s vocation as a jazz musician, and the way music gives form to experiences that ordinary speech cannot contain. The episode culminates in the jazz-club scene, where listening becomes an act of recognition and the narrator f...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story in which the most important subject is never named. At a Spanish train station, an American man and a young woman called Jig wait for a train to Madrid while circling around a “simple operation” that will determine the future of their relationship. Tim and Emily discuss Hemingway’s iceberg theory, the story’s compressed setting and dialogue, the unequal pressure between the couple, and the way Jig sees possibility where the man sees a threat to free...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a story of young adulthood, race, pride, dependence, and painful moral awakening. Set largely on a city bus, the story brings Julian, a self-consciously progressive college graduate, into collision with his cheerful but deeply prejudiced mother as the changing South forces people who would rather remain separate into uncomfortable proximity. Along the way, Tim and Emily consider O’Connor’s grotesque humor, her idea of dark grace, the story’s title from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and t...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that captures the uncertainty and self-consciousness of adolescence and early adulthood. They consider Prufrock’s anxious journey through the modern city, his inability to act or speak decisively, and Eliot’s use of jarring images, near rhymes, and the dramatic monologue to make interior experience visible. Along the way, Tim and Emily discuss why modernist writers broke with inherited forms, how Eliot remained deeply engaged with the tradition he challenged, and why Prufro...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Jon Fosse’s Trilogy, the work of a Norwegian novelist and playwright whose spare, musical prose gives voice to experiences that resist ordinary explanation. Focusing primarily on “Wakefulness,” they follow the young lovers Asle and Alida as they wander through cold and rain searching for shelter before the birth of their child, while memories of music, love, rejection, and the past flow through the present. Along the way, Tim and Emily consider Fosse’s use of repetition and stream of consciousness, the story’s echoes of...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda enter the teen years with Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?,” a terrifying story in which almost nothing violent happens on the page. They follow fifteen-year-old Connie from a restless family life and flirtation at a drive-in to a long, increasingly threatening conversation with Arnold Friend at her screen door. Along the way, they discuss Bob Dylan’s influence on the story, Oates’s use of ordinary suburban details to create dread, the dynamics of grooming and seduction, and the ways C...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda close their exploration of childhood with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Part children’s story, part fairy tale, and part philosophical meditation, the book asks readers to recover a childlike capacity for wonder without confusing innocence with naïveté. From the Little Prince’s encounters with kings, businessmen, lamplighters, and geographers to his friendship with the fox and devotion to his rose, Tim and Emily explore how relationships, rituals, responsibility, and attention reveal what matters most.

Episode Outline

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh begin their exploration of adolescence with James Joyce’s “Araby”, a story of youthful longing set against the drab, paralyzed world of Dublin. Tim and Emily discuss the unnamed boy’s intense attraction to Mangan’s sister, the religious and chivalric language through which he understands his desire, and the painful disillusionment that awaits him at the bazaar. The conversation also considers Joyce’s development from the realism of Dubliners to the experimental modernism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, his fascination with ordinary experience, and the lasting...

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, a psychologically complex ghost story that challenges idealized visions of childhood innocence. They discuss James’s elaborate prose, the governess’s uncertain perceptions, the sinister influence surrounding Miles and Flora, and the story’s unresolved tension between supernatural evil and psychological instability. The conversation also considers how impressionable children can be shaped by the adults and forces around them.

Episode Outline

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore Hans Christian Andersen’s life and two of his best-known stories: “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling.” They consider how fairy tales preserve patterns of reality, form the moral imagination, and speak as powerfully to adults as to children. 

Episode Outline

Description

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh discuss William Faulkner's celebrated short story "Barn Burning." Along the way they explore Faulkner's life, the emergence of stream of consciousness narration, and why “Barn Burning” remains one of the greatest American short stories ever written. The hosts examine the heartbreaking moral dilemma facing young Colonel Sartoris Snopes as he struggles to reconcile loyalty to his father with loyalty to truth, while reflecting on Faulkner's enduring influence on American literature. 

Episode Outline

Description

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh begin their season on the stages of life with William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." They explore the Romantic movement's response to the Enlightenment, Wordsworth's vision of childhood as a uniquely perceptive stage of life, and the poem's claim that children possess an awareness of transcendent realities adults gradually lose. Along the way, they discuss poetic form, the influence of Neoplatonism, and whether nature can restore our vision of the eternal.

Episode...