Despite various proclamations about the 'death of the author', the historian, critic and public intellectual Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) rather looks like a thinker whose time has come. Mumford is chiefly remembered for his literary and architectural criticism and his historical writings on cities. He won the National Book Award in 1962 for The City in History and was awarded the Presidential Award of Freedom in 1964 (which was swiftly followed by Mumford's strongly worded attack on the President's Vietnam policy in 1965). ¹ But Mumford's reflections on technological modernity, nuclear weapons and global ecology also deserve a wide audience in the twenty-first century – an age that has reached its own cul-de-sac in dealing with issues of technology and global security. We staged a meeting with Mumford in an effort to recover his ideas for contemporary IR theory. What follows is the edited transcript of how the interview took place in our heads.