Literature and History.com.

Hello and welcome to Literature and History.

Episode 110.

Questions.

This is a special program in our long series in which you, the listeners, have sent me your host interview questions.

Over the next two hours or so, I will answer the questions that you've sent, which range from academic questions about how the show is made to personal questions about me as a human.

Let me say ahead of time that if you are just here for the usual literature, philosophy, theology,

and so on, I will ask you to skip this one as I don't intend to offer any content on cultural history today,

not much anyway. If you listen to literature and history, you know that I prefer

a professional scholarly approach to the material with no fluff about what I had for breakfast.

And with today's episode, I'm making a special installment before returning to the usual,

long-form, content-only, ad-free episodes we usually do next month. So again, if you're just here

for the educational content and don't want to see behind the proverbial curtain, please don't

grouse at me for releasing this free extra program in the feed. Skip over this one and jump back

in at episode 11 pre-Islamic Arabia. Otherwise, let's get started. I'm making this program for a

couple of reasons. First, a number of listeners requested it. Second, over the years, I've had a lot

of the same questions asked again and again, and I thought that others who had listened to my voice

for hundreds of hours might be curious about the same sorts of things. Third, I am trying this year to spread the word about literature and history more than I have thus far,

so I figured I'd start by just talking about the podcast a bit with you guys.

Finally, I'm a human and not a wraith who eats dictionaries and burps footnotes,

so I'm happy to get a little bit more personal for one show.

To begin, I got far more questions than I had time to answer, and some people sent six or a

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