Best Will Sonnet Podcasts (2026)

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Emily Dickinson (Archive Episode) 50:14

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22m ago50:14

50:14

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Comedian Frank Skinner has picked the episode on the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage sho…

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765 Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne (with Mike Palindrome) 1:09:38

3d ago1:09:38

1:09:38

In Puritan New England, a young man leaves Faith, his wife, to go into the forest to meet the Devil. It's a story "as deep as Dante," said Herman Melville. In this episode, Jacke reads "Young Goodman Brown," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, then Jacke and Mike discuss the story that Stephen King has called "one of the ten best stories written by an American…

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Groq, Hotel Delivery Robots, and Mark Launches a Company 1:01:33

2h ago1:01:33

1:01:33

It’s been a travel-heavy hiatus—Mark’s been living in Spain and Shashank’s been bouncing across Asia (including a month in China)—but they’re back to unpack a packed week of AI news. They start with the headline hardware story: the Groq (GROQ) deal/partnership dynamics and why ultra-fast inference is becoming the next battleground, plus how this co…

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Sonnet 18 through the Metasonnet Lens 25:08

1d ago25:08

25:08

Send us a text Sonnet 18 is one of the most analyzed poems ever. However, through the prism of the Metasonnets, it takes on new meaning. How is this possible? Well, if "thou" represents the masculine Fair Youth and "thee" represents the feminine Dark Lady, then this is a conversation about creating a poem that will ensure the sonnet format lives fo…

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764 Two Thousand Years of Roman History (with Edward J. Watts) | My Last Book with Nathan Hensley 1:19:13

6d ago1:19:13

1:19:13

What do we talk about when we talk about ancient Romans? For many of us, it's typically a fairly narrow slice of history: the toga-clad figures of Cicero and Caesar, perhaps, as their republic shades into empire before collapsing at the hands of barbarians a few hundred years later. In this episode, Jacke talks to Edward J. Watts, whose book The Ro…

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Shakespeare's Sonnets (Archive Episode) 53:21

5d ago53:21

53:21

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Historian and broadcaster Simon Schama has selected the episode on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly a…

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763 Emily's Desk Drawer 56:18

10d ago56:18

56:18

After the publication of her debut novel Wuthering Heights in December of 1847, Emily Brontë - still writing under her pen name Ellis Bell - joined Currer and Acton Bell (her sisters Charlotte and Anne) as promising and intriguing young writers. Sadly, Emily would die barely a year later. How did the public view her and her writing during this brie…

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762 The History of the Sonnet 55:36

13d ago55:36

55:36

“A sonnet,” said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “is a moment’s monument.” But who invented the sonnet? Who brought it to prominence? How has it changed over the years? And why does this form continue to be so compelling? In this episode of the History of Literature, we take a brief look at one of literature's most enduring forms, from its inventi…

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A Beginner's Guide to the Metasonnets 29:49

8d ago29:49

29:49

Send us a text This episode is designed to help you enjoy the most basic aspects of the 11x14 framework. www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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Margery Kempe and English Mysticism (Archive Episode) 47:11

12d ago47:11

47:11

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Author and columnist Caitlin Moran has picked the episode on the English medieval mystic Margery Kempe and recorded an introduction to it. Margery Kempe (1373-1438) produced an account of her extraordinary life in…

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761 The Story of the Nativity (with Stephen Mitchell) | The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (#4 Greatest Book of All Time) 1:17:45

18d ago1:17:45

1:17:45

Stephen Mitchell has translated or adapted some of the world's most beautiful and spiritually rich texts, including The Gospel According to Jesus, The Book of Job, Gilgamesh, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and The Way of Forgiveness. In his la…

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760 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and Ebeneezer Scrooge 1:13:57

20d ago1:13:57

1:13:57

In this holiday-themed episode, a sentimental Jacke takes a look at Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), and the creation of Ebeneezer Scrooge. A version of this episode first aired in December 2020. That episode has not been available in our archives for several years. Join Jacke on a trip through literary England! Join Jacke and fellow lite…

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Shakespeare is a Foreign Language - Part 2 26:45

19d ago26:45

26:45

Send us a text Am I a language expert? Maybe...maybe not, but my personal and private life is completely built around languages. That gives me a sufficient amount of credibility, right? www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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DeepMind Gemini 3 Lead: What Comes After "Infinite Data" 54:56

19d ago54:56

54:56

Gemini 3 was a landmark frontier model launch in AI this year — but the story behind its performance isn’t just about adding more compute. In this episode, I sit down with Sebastian Bourgeaud, a pre-training lead for Gemini 3 at Google DeepMind and co-author of the seminal RETRO paper. In his first-ever podcast interview, Sebastian takes us inside …

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Eclipses (Archive Episode) 49:48

19d ago49:48

49:48

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Guy Garvey, lyricist and lead singer of the band Elbow, has selected the episode on eclipses, first broadcast in December 2020. Solar eclipses are some of life’s most extraordinary moments, when day becomes night …

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759 The Godfather (with Karen Spence) | My Last Book with Elyse Graham 1:04:39

24d ago1:04:39

1:04:39

Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece The Godfather routinely tops lists of the greatest films ever made - and when it doesn't, it's often because its sequel, The Godfather II, has replaced it. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Karen Spence about her new book, The Companion Guide to the Godfather Trilogy: Betrayal, Loyalty, and Family. PLUS Elyse…

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Shakespeare is a Foreign Language - Part 1 22:38

22d ago22:38

22:38

Send us a text Is this about Shakespeare or about how we view ourselves? www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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758 Jane Austen in 41 Objects (with Kathryn Sutherland) | 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (#5 Greatest Book of All Time) 57:21

27d ago57:21

57:21

How well can we know someone through the objects they encountered? In this episode, Jacke talks to Kathryn Sutherland, Senior Research fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford, about her new book Jane Austen in 41 Objects, which examines the objects Jane Austen encountered during her life alongside newer memorabilia inspired by the life she lived. PLUS…

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757 George Orwell's 1984 (#6 Greatest Book of All Time) 1:07:22

1M ago1:07:22

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In 1949, American critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the New Yorker, was quick to recognize the achievement of George Orwell's new novel. "[P]rofound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating," he said. 1984 "confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life." And while the Cold War and the book's primary satirical tar…

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Shakespeare Reddit Broke My Heart 24:11

1M ago24:11

24:11

Send us a text Shakespeare Reddit owes me nothing, but that doesn't mean I wish it would take me more seriously. www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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756 Newly Discovered Stories by Virginia Woolf (with Urmila Seshagiri) | My Last Book with Jake Poller 58:07

1M ago58:07

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Did you think we already knew everything there was to know about Virginia Woolf? Think again! In this episode, Jacke talks to scholar and editor Urmila Seshagiri about The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, which presents three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet, which Woolf wrote in 1907, eight yea…

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755 The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (with Nan Z. Da) | My Last Book with Iris Jamahl Dunkle 42:51

1M ago42:51

42:51

At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but he portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, a professor of English literature who emigrated from China to the United States as a child in the 1990s, this startling opening scene sparked a re…

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754 Christopher Marlowe (with Stephen Greenblatt) | My Last Book with Eric White 55:43

1M ago55:43

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Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was born into relative obscurity and died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 29. And yet, somehow this ambitious cobbler's son brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. In this episode, Jacke talks to Stephen Greenblatt about his book Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Ti…

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Most people don't read the full Sonnets 27:56

1M ago27:56

27:56

Send us a text When we say "The Sonnets," what are we referring to? Well, for many, it's just a slice because approximately 2/3 of readers have read less than 20% of the work. www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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What’s Next for AI? OpenAI’s Łukasz Kaiser (Transformer Co-Author) 1:05:25

1M ago1:05:25

1:05:25

We’re told that AI progress is slowing down, that pre-training has hit a wall, that scaling laws are running out of road. Yet we’re releasing this episode in the middle of a wild couple of weeks that saw GPT-5.1, GPT-5.1 Codex Max, fresh reasoning modes and long-running agents ship from OpenAI — on top of a flood of new frontier models elsewhere. T…

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753 Tenth-Anniversary Special (with Mike Palindrome and Laurie Frankel) | Giving Thanks | My Last Book with Eve Dunbar 1:17:22

2M ago1:17:22

1:17:22

When Jacke started the podcast in 2015, he decided to privilege books that were at least fifty years old. (Longtime listeners will know he's made a few exceptions, but for the most part, that's been the policy.) Last month, the History of Literature Podcast celebrated its tenth anniversary - which means there are ten years' worth of books that are …

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How did I discover the Metasonnet Theory? - Part 2 18:18

2M ago18:18

18:18

Send us a text In this episode, I will explain how I, of all people, stumbled across this amazing idea. www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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752 The Brontes' Sibling Rivalry (with Catherine Rayner) | My Last Book with Keith Cooper 1:01:28

2M ago1:01:28

1:01:28

Charlotte Brontë wasn't born the eldest child, but she was thrust into a leadership role at the age of ten, as the Brontë children dealt with the tragic deaths of their mother and two eldest sisters. How did this affect their family dynamic? And when the younger two sisters, Emily and Anne, had their novels accepted while Charlotte's alone was reje…

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Gemini 3, GPT-5.1, Anti-Gravity & Yann LeCun’s Exit: Are We Near AGI or Just in a Bubble? 1:00:59

2M ago1:00:59

1:00:59

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GenerativeAIMeetup Mark's Travel Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/@kumajourney11 Mark's Personal Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@markkuczmarski896 Attend a live event: https://genaimeetup.com/ Shashank Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashu10/ In this episode of the Generative AI Meetup Podcas…

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Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking" 1:28:10

2M ago1:28:10

1:28:10

In this special release episode, Matt sits down with Nathan Lambert and Luca Soldaini from Ai2 (the Allen Institute for AI) to break down one of the biggest open-source AI drops of the year: OLMo 3. At a moment when most labs are offering “open weights” and calling it a day, AI2 is doing the opposite — publishing the models, the data, the recipes, …

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751 Covering Iran's Women-Led Uprising (with Nilo Tabrizy) | My Last Book with Sharmila Sen 1:02:37

2M ago1:02:37

1:02:37

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. In thi…

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How did I discover the Metasonnet Theory? - Part 1 22:57

2M ago22:57

22:57

Send us a text In this episode, I will explain how I, of all people, stumbled across this amazing idea. www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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750 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (with Mark Cirino) | Joyce Carol Oates vs the Trillionaire | My Last Book with Ken Krimstein 1:28:09

2M ago1:28:09

1:28:09

It's the 750th episode of the History of Literature, and what better way to celebrate than to talk some Hemingway with repeat guest Mark Cirino? In this episode, Jacke talks to Mark about Hemingway's classic love-and-war novel A Farewell to Arms, including the recent Norton Library edition of the book, which Mark edited. PLUS Jacke takes a look at …

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749 Willing and Will-Making in the English Renaissance (with Douglas Clark) | #7 Greatest Book of All Time 1:06:00

2M ago1:06:00

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When Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy, pondered the "dread of something after death, / the undiscovered country," he noted that such thoughts "puzzles the will." (Earlier editions of the play had this as a "hope of something after death" that "puzzles the brain." What's the significance for an Elizabethan writer (and audience) of the change from hop…

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748 Katherine Mansfield (with Gerri Kimber) | The Poet and the Sex Worker Who Burgled Him | My Last Book with Emerson Expert Kenneth Sacks 55:47

2M ago55:47

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Katherine Mansfield's writing, said Virginia Woolf, "was the only writing I was ever jealous of." In this episode, Jacke talks to author Gerri Kimber about Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, which explores the life and work of one of literary modernism's most significant writers. PLUS Jacke takes a look at the unusual friendship between poet W.H. …

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What is the purpose of this podcast? 28:51

2M ago28:51

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Send us a text Why am I doing this? Well, I'll tell you. www.sonnetspodcast.com [email protected] Reagan Peterson

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Intelligence Isn’t Enough: Why Energy & Compute Decide the AGI Race – Eiso Kant 1:06:28

2M ago1:06:28

1:06:28

Frontier AI is colliding with real-world infrastructure. Eiso Kant (Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Poolside) joins the MAD Podcast to unpack Project Horizon— a multi-gigawatt West Texas build—and why frontier labs must own energy, compute, and intelligence to compete. We map token economics, cloud-style margins, and the staged 250 MW rollout using 2.5 MW mod…

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747 Graphomaniac - The Story of a Horrible Russian Poet (with Ilya Vinitsky and James H. McGavran III | My Last Book with Stephanie Sandler | #8 Greatest Book of All Time 1:11:57

2M ago1:11:57

1:11:57

Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov (1757-1835) might be the worst poet who ever lived. Pathologically prolific and delusional dedicated to a craft for which he had no talent, he continued to write and publish his poetry despite the pleadings of friends, loved ones, critics, and the public. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Ilya Vinitsky and translator …

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Taming AI Context Chaos: How Epic Scale AI Ships Faster with MCP 48:43

2M ago48:43

48:43

00:00 Cold open: “Humans of Earth” intro 00:38 Meet the guest: Colin Masters (Epic Scale AI) 02:40 Colin’s origin story (military → construction → NYSE → dev) 04:00 The EPIC method: Explore–Plan–Implement–Check 05:40 Context isn’t a dump: vector DB + forced session search 06:20 Plans = branches (GitHub issues integration) 07:10 Memory bank: standar…

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746 Wild Jane Austen (with Devoney Looser) | #9 Greatest Book of All Time 1:04:37

2M ago1:04:37

1:04:37

Author Devoney Looser may be a mild-mannered English professor to most people, but roller derby fans know her as Stone Cold Jane Austen, her smashmouth alter ego. In this episode, Devoney tells Jacke about her new book Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, which suggests we also rethink the commonly held view of "spinster Jan…

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Neo Arrives: Tele-Ops Today, AGI Tomorrow? 1:01:22

2M ago1:01:22

1:01:22

From a tiny island in Seychelles to the heartland of Ohio, we unpack a wild week in AI. First up: 1X’s “Neo” humanoid—$20k to buy or $500/month to rent—promising laundry, dishes, and errands soon…with a lot of teleoperation today. We debate whether tele-ops is a feature (not a bug), who it employs, and how quickly autonomy could follow. Then we zoo…

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State of AI 2025 with Nathan Benaich: Power Deals, Reasoning Breakthroughs, Real Revenue 1:03:15

2M ago1:03:15

1:03:15

Power is the new bottleneck, reasoning got real, and the business finally caught up. In this wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, to discuss the newly published 2025 State of AI report—what’s actually working, what’s hype, and where the next edge will come from. We start at th…

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745 Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (Halloween Fun-Size Edition) 2:14:14

2M ago2:14:14

2:14:14

In the spring of 2022, Jacke dropped everything to plummet into one of the strangest poems he had ever read, "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). The result was a two-part episode that never quite found its home. In this special Halloween episode, we've combined the best parts of both of those episodes to bring you the full story of a…

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744 Love, Sex, and Frankenstein (with Caroline Lea) | #10 Greatest Book of All Time | My Last Book with Geoffrey Turnovsky | A Letter from a Middle School Teacher and Mom 1:26:42

3M ago1:26:42

1:26:42

The year is 1816, and 18-year-old Mary Shelley has fled London with her lover, Percy Shelley, and her sister, Claire. They're on their way to visit Lord Byron's villa in Lake Geneva, Switzerland - and to change the course of literary history. In this episode, Jacke talks to Caroline Lea about her novel Love, Sex, and Frankenstein, which tells the h…

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Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic) 1:09:56

3M ago1:09:56

1:09:56

Are we failing to understand the exponential, again? My guest is Julian Schrittwieser (top AI researcher at Anthropic; previously Google DeepMind on AlphaGo Zero & MuZero). We unpack his viral post (“Failing to Understand the Exponential, again”) and what it looks like when task length doubles every 3–4 months—pointing to AI agents that can work a …

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743 Fairy Tales (with Jack Zipes) [RECLAIMED] | Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (#11 GBOAT) | Chaucer News 1:02:07

3M ago1:02:07

1:02:07

An early encounter with one of the most famous people in the world initiated Jack Zipes into the world of fairy tales - and he never looked back. In this episode, Jacke talks to the fairy tale expert about his book Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales, which profiles modern writers and artists who tapped the political potential of f…

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742 Edgar Allan Poe (with Richard Kopley) | Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (#12 GBOAT) | My Last Book with Christopher Herbert 1:17:41

3M ago1:17:41

1:17:41

It's October, the perfect month to celebrate the master of mystery and the macabre. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Richard Kopley about his book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a comprehensive critical biography that combines a narrative of Poe's enduring challenges (including his difficult foster father, poverty, alcoholism, depression, and his n…

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How GPT-5 Thinks — OpenAI VP of Research Jerry Tworek 1:16:04

3M ago1:16:04

1:16:04

What does it really mean when GPT-5 “thinks”? In this conversation, OpenAI’s VP of Research Jerry Tworek explains how modern reasoning models work in practice—why pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF) are both essential, what that on-screen “thinking” actually does, and when extra test-time compute helps (or doesn’t). We trace the evolut…

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741 Gabriela Mistral 1:04:27

3M ago1:04:27

1:04:27

In 1945, the Nobel Committee awarded its prize for literature to Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world." Born in a rural Andean valley and abandoned by her free-spirited father at the age of three, Mistral s…

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Sonnet 4.5 Sucks (says Rollins) 44:33

3M ago44:33

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Debating AI Models and Efficient Workflow Management with Michael Rollins and ThanosIn this episode, Michael Rollins and his co-host Thanos discuss their experiences and frustrations with various AI models, specifically critiquing Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5. They delve into the technical details of setting up PR environments using AWS Fargate and Terrafo…