Marginal Revolution to Hold Conversation With Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), Asks Readers What to Ask Her
Key Takeaways
- •Marginal Revolution confirmed an upcoming Conversation with Yiyang Zhuge and asked readers what questions should be posed to her.
- •Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, translator of German and Greek philosophical texts, an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD candidate at Boston College.
- •She has translated several major Hannah Arendt works into Chinese and has written and lectured extensively on Arendt.
- •In 2025, she published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, which became a best-selling philosophy book.
- •She also reaches Chinese audiences through Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, Caixin Weekly, Phoenix TV, Vistopia, and a podcast with more than one million subscribers.
Marginal Revolution has confirmed an upcoming Conversation with Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), also known as Zhong Shu (仲树), and is turning to readers with a direct request: "So what should I ask her?"
Marginal Revolution is the long-running economics blog co-authored by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, economists at George Mason University, and its Conversations series has featured long-form interviews with scholars and public figures. Asking readers what to pose to a guest ahead of a Conversation is a regular part of the format, and suggestions can be left in the comments of the post.
Western audiences know Zhuge best for her interview with Christopher Nolan, the director of Inception and Oppenheimer, but her record extends well beyond that encounter.
Academic and Translation Work
Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University (biography) and a PhD candidate at Boston College.
She is a major translator of Hannah Arendt — the twentieth-century German-American political theorist — into Chinese, having translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, Arendt's collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (books). She has also given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt.
In 2025, Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch's Moralia — the ancient Greek biographer and essayist's sprawling collection of writings — which became a best-selling philosophy book.
Public Engagement
She runs Princeton University Press's Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience.
Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher education monthly for the print magazine Caixin Weekly and serves as a political commenter on Hong Kong's Phoenix TV (appearance one, appearance two).
She hosts great books programs on vistopia, a Chinese knowledge platform, and has contributed essays there on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Arendt.
She also hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast, "Monologues of a Committed Observer" (独树不成林), which has more than one million subscribers (Apple Podcasts).
Taken together, her portfolio runs in both directions: she brings Arendt and Plutarch to Chinese readers while reporting on American higher education and politics back to that same audience, a two-way bridge between the English- and Chinese-language intellectual worlds.
The post closes with the same open question posed to readers: what should be asked of her?
Source: Marginal Revolution
