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News headline roundup. The politics of tyranny. Find us on YouTube. In this episode of The Bulletin, Mike and Clarissa discuss cruelty, the talks between the US and Russia, the bombing of a fertility clinic in California, former president Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis, and the anniversary of George Floyd's death. Then, Mike talks with Roger Berkowitz about the politics of tyranny. GO DEEPER WITH THE BULLETIN: Join the conversation at our Substack Find us on YouTube. Rate and review the show in your podcast app of choice. ABOUT THE GUEST: Roger Berkowitz is founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. Berkowitz is the author of The Gift of Science, the introduction to On Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt, and The Perils of Invention. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review online, and Democracy. ABOUT THE BULLETIN: The Bulletin is a twice-weekly politics and current events show from Christianity Today moderated by Clarissa Moll, with senior commentary from Russell Moore (Christianity Today's editor in chief) and Mike Cosper (director, CT Media). Each week, the show explores current events and breaking news and shares a Christian perspective on issues that are shaping our world. We also offer special one-on-one conversations with writers, artists, and thought leaders whose impact on the world brings important significance to a Christian worldview, like Bono, Sharon McMahon, Harrison Scott Key, Frank Bruni, and more. The Bulletin listeners get 25% off CT. Go to https://orderct.com/THEBULLETIN to learn more. “The Bulletin” is a production of Christianity Today Producer: Clarissa Moll Associate Producer: Alexa Burke Editing and Mix: Kevin Morris Music: Dan Phelps Executive Producers: Erik Petrik and Mike Cosper Senior Producer: Matt Stevens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
April 23, 2025 - With the ever-growing need to understand ourselves and humanity as a whole, it is necessary to examine the concepts of morality, ethics and universal values as guiding principles of the human condition. With generous support from Y.T. Hwang Family Foundation, The Korea Society presents a Series on Ethics and Common Values. This series promotes the understanding of central themes of our human existence - morality, ethics, personal responsibility, compassion and civility - through a series of lectures by distinguished speakers and conversation with extraordinary individuals who exemplify the universal values in line with the mission of Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation and The Korea Society. The Korea Society and Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation is proud to present Ilyon Woo in a conversation with Ed Park. Ilyon Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Time Magazine called Master Slave Husband Wife an “edge-of-your-seat drama”; The Wall Street Journal pronounced it: “A narrative of such courage and resourcefulness it seems too dashing to be true.... a ‘genuine nail-biter.'” It was one of the New York Times's “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine's “Top Ten Books of 2023,” also named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Boston, Chicago Public Library, and Oprah Daily. A finalist for a Kirkus Prize, the book was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal, nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards, and supported by a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Writing Grant. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. Woo has traveled the country to speak at bookstores, museums, schools, and book festivals, and she has been featured on such programs as NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University. Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams (2023), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days (2008), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney's, and many other publications. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. He currently teaches writing at Princeton University. For more information, please visit the link below: https://www.koreasociety.org/arts-culture/item/1980-y-t-hwang-family-foundation-series-on-ethics-common-values-a-conversation-with-ilyon-woo
Los 14 hijos de El*n M*sk, el repugnante retorno de términos como “retrasado”, la obsesión de los broligarcas con el Coeficiente Intelectual y la fijación de Tik Tok con la armonización facial son todo síntomas de la misma pesadilla. No queremos ponernos catastrofistas pero el horror está aquí y se está dando un nuevo envoltorio a ideas que tienen muy mal pasado. Links artículos: Sobre el encuentro de natalistas y tecnopuritanos: US natalist conference to host race-science promoters and eugenicists (The Guardian) Perfil de Simone y Malcolm Collins, el matrimonio del ‘pronatalismo hipster' (New York Magazine) ‘Baby Talk', Moira Donegan escribe en Bookforum sobre el pronatalismo entre la izquierda “Idiota”, “imbécil”, “débil mental”: el Gobierno de Milei resucita insultos para clasificar la discapacidad (El País) ‘The cruel kids of the table': los votantes de Trump porque quieren volver a decir “retrasado” (New York Magazine) ‘The basis of eugenics': Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word (The Guardian) Tecnofascistas de alto coeficiente intelectual (columna de Delia Rodríguez, El País) Esterilización forzada: una herida con género y condición (La Vanguardia) ‘From ethics to eugenics, from Nazis to objectification — there's a reason "harmony" is trending now' (The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino, Substack)
In this episode of High Theory, Ryan Ruby talks to us about Poetry. Our standard definition of poetry today is an institutional one, much like contemporary art: if art is what artists and museums and collectors call art, poetry is what poets and professors and publishers say is poetry. Ruby argues that this indefinable thing humans have been doing well nigh forever is better understood as a medium than a form. Poetry is a way of storing and transmitting information, a mechanism of entertainment and authority, and a speech act that attends to changes of state. In the episode, Ryan references Eric Havelock, author of The Muse Learns to Write (Yale UP, 1986), who described the Homeric poems as the encyclopedia of Bronze age Greece. He also cites Marcel Detienne's book The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd, Zone Books, 1996) who describes poetry as a form of “magico-religious speech.” Ryan Ruby is a writer, most recently of the book length poem Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024). It got reviewed in The New York Times. He has also written a novel, titled The Zero and the One (Twelve Books, 2017), and book reviews and essays for all the fancy places: The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, New Left Review, etc. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux. The image for this episode is a still from an animation of a supercomputer simulation of a pair of neutron stars colliding, merging and forming a black hole, created at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Image courtesy of the NASA Goddard Photo and Video Flickr account. This image is in the public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In this episode of High Theory, Ryan Ruby talks to us about Poetry. Our standard definition of poetry today is an institutional one, much like contemporary art: if art is what artists and museums and collectors call art, poetry is what poets and professors and publishers say is poetry. Ruby argues that this indefinable thing humans have been doing well nigh forever is better understood as a medium than a form. Poetry is a way of storing and transmitting information, a mechanism of entertainment and authority, and a speech act that attends to changes of state. In the episode, Ryan references Eric Havelock, author of The Muse Learns to Write (Yale UP, 1986), who described the Homeric poems as the encyclopedia of Bronze age Greece. He also cites Marcel Detienne's book The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd, Zone Books, 1996) who describes poetry as a form of “magico-religious speech.” Ryan Ruby is a writer, most recently of the book length poem Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024). It got reviewed in The New York Times. He has also written a novel, titled The Zero and the One (Twelve Books, 2017), and book reviews and essays for all the fancy places: The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, New Left Review, etc. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux. The image for this episode is a still from an animation of a supercomputer simulation of a pair of neutron stars colliding, merging and forming a black hole, created at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Image courtesy of the NASA Goddard Photo and Video Flickr account. This image is in the public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
In this episode of High Theory, Ryan Ruby talks to us about Poetry. Our standard definition of poetry today is an institutional one, much like contemporary art: if art is what artists and museums and collectors call art, poetry is what poets and professors and publishers say is poetry. Ruby argues that this indefinable thing humans have been doing well nigh forever is better understood as a medium than a form. Poetry is a way of storing and transmitting information, a mechanism of entertainment and authority, and a speech act that attends to changes of state. In the episode, Ryan references Eric Havelock, author of The Muse Learns to Write (Yale UP, 1986), who described the Homeric poems as the encyclopedia of Bronze age Greece. He also cites Marcel Detienne's book The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd, Zone Books, 1996) who describes poetry as a form of “magico-religious speech.” Ryan Ruby is a writer, most recently of the book length poem Context Collapse: A Poem Containing the History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024). It got reviewed in The New York Times. He has also written a novel, titled The Zero and the One (Twelve Books, 2017), and book reviews and essays for all the fancy places: The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, New Left Review, etc. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux. The image for this episode is a still from an animation of a supercomputer simulation of a pair of neutron stars colliding, merging and forming a black hole, created at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Image courtesy of the NASA Goddard Photo and Video Flickr account. This image is in the public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry
What's to be done about immigration? Find us on Youtube. In this episode, Mike Cosper talks with Roger Berkowitz—founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College—to talk about power, populism and the plight of the refugee. It's a conversation not quick with answers but committed to thoughtful engagement with the most important questions. GO DEEPER WITH THE BULLETIN: Everything is on sale! Grab some Bulletin merch. Find us on YouTube. Rate and review the show in your podcast app of choice. ABOUT THE GUEST: Roger Berkowitz is founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. Berkowitz is the author of The Gift of Science, the introduction to On Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt, and The Perils of Invention. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review online, and Democracy. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2024 Compassion Award given by Con-solatio and the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany. ABOUT THE BULLETIN: The Bulletin is a weekly (and sometimes more!) current events show from Christianity Today hosted and moderated by Clarissa Moll, with senior commentary from Russell Moore (Christianity Today's editor in chief) and Mike Cosper (director, CT Media). Each week, the show explores current events and breaking news and shares a Christian perspective on issues that are shaping our world. We also offer special one-on-one conversations with writers, artists, and thought leaders whose impact on the world brings important significance to a Christian worldview, like Bono, Sharon McMahon, Harrison Scott Key, Frank Bruni, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Paris Marx is joined by Will Tavlin to discuss how the Netflix model transformed film into the Typical Netflix Movie and how the company uses claims about data to deceive the public.Will Tavlin is a New York-based writer who has written for n+1, Bookforum, and the Columbia Journalism Review.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Will wrote about Netflix and the Typical Netflix Movie for n+1.Support the show
On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, Paris Marx is joined by Will Tavlin to discuss how the Netflix model transformed film into the Typical Netflix Movie and how the company uses claims about data to deceive the public.Will Tavlin is a New York-based writer who has written for n+1, Bookforum, and the Columbia Journalism Review.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
For NSP 62 we spoke with Natasha Lennard about journalism, the 2024 U.S. election, state-cautious communism, and more! Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum, and Dissent, among others. She is the associate director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism program at The New School. She is the author of “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life" (Verso Books). She is working on her next book, on how we might better conceptualize uncertainty and certainty, also for Verso. Links: Personal Site https://natashalennard.com/ The Intercept https://theintercept.com/staff/natasha-lennard/ Being Numerous https://www.versobooks.com/products/863-being-numerous Thanks for listening! Please like, comment, subscribe, and share! --- If you'd like to see more anarchist and anti-authoritarian interviews, please consider supporting this project financially by becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/nonserviammedia Follow Non Serviam Media Collective on: Mastodon kolektiva.social/@nonserviammedia Bluesky bsky.app/profile/nonserviammedia.bsky.social As well as Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and X/Twitter. Connect with Lucy Steigerwald via: mastodon.social/@LucyStag bsky.app/profile/lucystag.bsky.social x.com/LucyStag lucysteigerwald.substack.com/
On November 14, in a conversation moderated by Data & Society Senior Researcher Ranjit Singh, Madhumita Murgia and Armin Samii discussed Murgia's new book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI. Together, they explored living with data by describing their journeys into understanding it, reporting on it, and resisting it. While Murgia's journalistic journey began with tracing the flow of her personal data sold by data brokers, Samii used his expertise as a computer scientist to build UberCheats, an algorithm auditing tool that extracts GPS coordinates from UberEats receipts to calculate the difference between the actual miles a courier traveled and those Uber claimed they did. In Code Dependent, Samii's story is the focus of a chapter on how data-driven systems come to play the role of the boss.Purchase a copy of Code Dependent: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9781250867391Learn more at datasociety.net (https://datasociety.net)
Jo is refreshed by Trouble in the Cotswalds by Rebecca Tope but Charlotte quickly ruins their peace by connecting the sex in Heather Lewis's violent novel Notice with Miranda July's NBA-shortlisted All Fours. The effervescent Emma Robinson joins to share her love for Dianne Brill's Boobs, Boys, and High Heels, which inspires further reflection on 90s era beauty books and instruction manuals.Other books mentioned in this episode: Steven Saylor's Murder on the Appian Way, Rachel Cusk's Aftermath, Gemma Hartley's Fed Up, Shelia Heti's Motherhood, Bobbi Brown's Teenage Beauty, Amanda Brooks' Internet Escort's Handbook, and Sydney Barrow's Mayflower Madam and Just Between Us Girls.Charlotte's review of All Fours and Gemma Hartley's Fed Up, both in Bookforum. Inspired at once by radical philosophers and tulips, Emma Cager Robinson is looking for beauty. As a mechanism for change and source of inspiration, Emma uses beauty as the driving force behind her activism. With a focus on Consciousness Raising and creating “Insurgents,” Emma uses media of all forms to shift the way we interrogate culture and the systems we interact with on a daily basis. A Texan at heart, she's especially impassioned about spreading this energy through the South; as a means of completing ancestral business, and working in a long line of women committed to making the world suck less for their families and communities.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte's most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How Donald Trump built a movement. Find us on Youtube. On this deep-dive episode of The Bulletin, Mike Cosper welcomes Roger Berkowitz for a conversation about political movements and what liberals got wrong about MAGA. GO DEEPER WITH THE BULLETIN: Find Roger's books here. Order Mike Cosper's book The Church in Dark Times (releasing November 19) Follow the show in your podcast app of choice. Find us on YouTube. Rate and review the show in your podcast app of choice. Leave a comment in Spotify with your feedback on the discussion—we may even respond! ABOUT THE GUEST: Roger Berkowitz is founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College. Berkowitz is the author of a number of books including The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, On Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (forthcoming, 2024), and The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review online, Democracy, and many other publications. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2024 Compassion Award given by Con-solatio and the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany. ABOUT THE BULLETIN: The Bulletin is a weekly (and sometimes more!) current events show from Christianity Today hosted and moderated by Clarissa Moll, with senior commentary from Russell Moore (Christianity Today's editor in chief) and Mike Cosper (director, CT Media). Each week, the show explores current events and breaking news and shares a Christian perspective on issues that are shaping our world. We also offer special one-on-one conversations with writers, artists, and thought leaders whose impact on the world brings important significance to a Christian worldview, like Bono, Sharon McMahon, Harrison Scott Key, Frank Bruni, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Lauren Oyler's “Revenge Plot”, a literary diary of her trip to this year's Republican convention in Milwaukee, is the cover story of this month's Harper's. So when I talked today with the Berlin based writer, we discussed both the revengefulness of the Republican party and what she calls the “risk aversion” of the Democrats. While Oyler cares a lot about the outcome of today's election, she is wary of what she calls the “constant catastrophizing” both on the left and right of American politics. While this probably won't be the final election in the history of American democracy, she suggests, it might be the first 21st century Presidential contest not dramatically shaped by the internet. LAUREN OYLER's essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, and other publications. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. The day has come, it's Tuesday, November the 5th. Election Day. We don't know who's won, but many people are going to the polls. One person who won't be going to the polls is my guest today, Lauren Oyler. She's a distinguished American writer, bestselling writer, essayist, critic. But she happens to be, as I joked before, we went live in exile in Berlin. She lives there in Germany, but she's also the author of an excellent piece, it's the cover story of Harper's this week: "Reunion or Revenge: The GOP Identity Crisis." According to Lauren, they're on the brink. I'm not sure of what. Lauren is joining us from Berlin in Germany. Lauren, what's the view from there? Americans looking as crazy as ever?Lauren Oyler: We're looking for a bar to go to. To be honest, we've been we've been we've been caucusing, trying to figure out where we can watch the the results. And we just found there's one place. But, you know, it doesn't the results aren't really start coming in until midnight here. So the debate is about whether we will stay up--or, people have some bad memories of doing that in 2016. I personally have a bad memory of doing that in 2016 as well. So the view is we're looking at our phones.Keen: So I assume the bad memory was not that you drank too much or ate too much.Oyler: No, I did. I certainly did. I'm just I was with my boyfriend at the time and we had gotten in a fight earlier that day about Hillary Clinton. And I, I just remember being like, I just don't care. I just don't care. And then we went to the bar with our friends and got quite drunk. And and then we were walking home and I didn't live here at the time, so I didn't have we didn't have cell phone service. So we walked home at like three in the morning. We were really drunk and we were like, Well, we won't know anything. And then we got home and we like, laid in bed in the dark and and looked at our phones and we were like, no, this is terrible. So and then just laid in bed again, really drunk looking at our phones.Keen: It's something that could have occurred in one of your books or maybe in a in a DeLillo book. So are the Germans shocked? I mean, they they they've made a culture out of being a shock to other people that they particularly shocked this time around?Oyler: No, I don't think so. I remember right before I went to report this story, I was in a restaurant down the street from my house and I listened to--I was overhearing a conversation with this German guy, was talking to these people and he was like, he was he was like, Yeah, have you heard they have the plague in Colorado now? He's like, Yeah, this is crazy. Imagine if we had the plague in Berlin. Like, it was really like, I don't really think they sort of like, Yeah, this is crazy, but it's, you know, it's not it's not the first time. And I think to and in Europe, it used to be that you were reviled as an American. Certainly when I first moved here in 2012, there was still that kind of anti-American sentiment. But now far right populism has spread across the West and everybody is sort of commiserating with with you and just kind of like, you know, it could happen. It could happen to us at any time. It basically is the idea.Keen: The plague has come home to Germany from Colorado. So let's get to the piece, Lauren, you went to Milwaukee to cover the GOP's identity crisis. And it's a long essay. Very...to use the word Oyler-ish in the sense that it's it's a very creative piece of work, creative nonfiction, although some people might say there's a fictional element there. What was your overall take on this odd convention and why was it that it's almost five months ago now?Oyler: Yeah. Well, I think the big the the big concern that I had going into it was that, you know, you're right, it would be coming out it came out in the middle of October, and I would be reporting on something that had happened in July, which, of course, in the past would have been perfectly normal for this kind of piece of this kind of like literary new journalism type thing. Many, many great pieces about political conventions that I'm sure your listeners, listeners will be familiar with, things like Norman Mailer, they come out late. But, you know, now--Keen: It's timeless as well in their own way. I mean--Oyler: It's supposed to be timeless, but now everybody's sort of attitude towards the news is like, I need to hear it right now. And then it the cycle, the cycle, the cycle and it goes away. So you sort of forget about it. So I kind of was grateful for the assignment because the assignment was basically like write something of lasting literary value about about the circus and spectacle, which was very interesting. And, you know, it was sort of you're following the news as it's happening and you're like, well, I can't really like you just have to be aware of the general narrative as time has gone on, you can't really be too obsessed with anyone's story because as I learned when former President Trump was almost assassinated while I was on the plane there, like something can just completely derail the whole plan. But I had never been to a political convention before. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed doing that kind of reporting. And I was surprised at how at the dissonance between what was being reported by these live up to the minute coverage, like blogs or social media or things like this. The difference between the analysis that those those journalists would generally produce and what I was interested in or even like what I thought the mood was, frankly, as, as the title of the piece and the sort of the tag line suggests, like it was a bit fraught, I think, for the Republicans. I think I think the liberal media generally tends to want to keep to the storyline that they are evil masterminds of the chaos that they saw. But I what I saw there at least, was kind of a fracturing basically.Keen: Right? I mean, I think that the more I watch or listen to liberal media or mainstream media, they behave as if they're the grownups and. And perhaps some of these photos actually underline the fact that it's the Republicans who were the children. For better or worse, they're out of control. They need to be sent to their room and perhaps spanked, although I'm guessing most liberal media people don't believe in spanking anymore. I'm curious, Lauren. I had lunch with Rick MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's few months ago in New York. And like all publishers of traditional magazines, he claims poverty, not enough money to go around. Couldn't you find someone a bit closer? I mean, I assume he paid for you to fly from Berlin to Milwaukee. That's quite a long way. Why didn't he find a local person, or do you think he chose you, or they chose you, the editor chose you because you bring a slightly foreign perspective?Oyler: Do you don't think I'm such a good writer that it's worth flying me over there?Keen: Did they pay for first class?Oyler: No, it was was economy, which was good, actually, because I got I had some interesting conversations with my senior and they did say, you know, we won't pay for paper business, but I did buy the expensive internet in the end. But and I think I was staying in a Hampton Inn. Do you know how do you know how the--Keen: My God. So they put you up in a Hampton Inn?Oyler: Do you know how it works? So when you go to a convention, there's like the convention as the press, the press corps or the convention, if you like, a place to stay. And so many of the delegates were staying like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Illinois, and I was in the same hotel as the USA Today people. So that speaks to me being like the, you know, the national and the the government's like belief in the value of Harper's magazine in comparison to other other places. So it was maybe like 20 minute drive away anyway. Non sequitur. So why do you think they asked me to go? Maybe because I do have a little bit of foreign perspective, I think to it is not you know, it is nice to have a literary writer juice politics coverage. You know, there's a long history of this. Norman Mailer is a wonderful introduction to this book that I have about ranting about journalists and reporters and why it's important to bring a novelistic eye to things. Joan Didion, obviously famously, and all sorts of other examples. George Saunders did a did a Trump rally in 2016. I think Patricia Lockwood did one as well. So I think there's that kind of tradition that that Harper's is a part of and wants to sort of continue in the face of maybe people saying that literary writing has no place in society anymore. But also, I assume that my being from Appalachia has something to do with it because, yes, as you say, I live in Berlin, but I was born and grew up in West Virginia, and although we did not know J.D. Vance was going to be selected as the VP when they assigned me this piece, it wasn't always a strong possibility. And I think the region sort of exerts a pull on the national media at least every four years. So I would assume that that also has something to do with it.Keen: That's interesting that, you know, the the other side of the Appalachian coin from J.D. Vance. You mentioned earlier, Lauren, that the the media reported on this differently from bloggers and some of the online crowd. What are the differences? Can you generalize about how the USA Today crowd covered it verses bloggers who perhaps weren't there or watching online?Oyler: Yeah, well, I think there is a certain kind of convention story that is just like we're here, there's someone on TV, they're doing a stand up. They have someone shooting them and they're just like, I'm here live at the convention. Like, here's how crazy it is. But the thing that I talk about in the piece especially is this Ezra Klein sort of blog about the convention. And I believe the headline that he wrote was for his podcast about it was I watched the Republican National Convention. Here's whatever, and that kind of dramatic headline style that that has been honed on the Internet--Keen: And this was a New York Times piece--Oyler: Well, the New York Times Piece...I watched the Republican National Convention on television. Why does that...anyone can watch the Republican National Convention on television. And they want it to be like a dramatic sort of...a little bit dangerous feeling that it did have at points. But but the thing that was surprising to me was how unenthusiastic many of the people there were or who were just there because, you know, they go every been ten times or whatever.Keen: I mean, you have some great photos in the piece of people looking pretty miserable, which of course probably makes most of us feel better about it. And I mean this one in particular for people watching a couple of white middle class people with cheese hats, one with a "Make America Great Again" sign, the other, "bring back common sense." They look most uncommon and most miserable.Oyler: And it's not to say that there wasn't, there were many sort of disturbing moments of enthusiasm, I think. But they weren't always the people on stage that you would--the biggest applause that I remember was not for Trump or for J.D. Vance. Of course, those went on forever. But this sort of passion, like the sort of scary passion that the media wants to find it in the Republicans. I noticed it most with Peter Navarro, who had just gotten out of prison that day and offering to give a trial, which was so bizarre and people were just screaming their heads off for him.Keen: And he's a China hater.Oyler: Yes, I can never remember what the sort of White House department of something that they invented that he was the head of. It was some kind of trade council.Keen: Like Go to War with China Department.Oyler: Yes. Yes. And he had just been let out of prison and he was missing a tooth. Which was really bizarre. And then Tucker Carlson, everybody was going crazy for it because he's like a celebrity. But there was not this kind of excitement for, say, Kid Rock or something like this. Or even Hulk Hogan.Keen: Yeah. So here's the question for you. Lauren, I think you're as well-positioned in every sense to to answer this question, which is the question I struggle with and I've talked to I've talked about endlessly on this show and I haven't resolved I'm sure I've bored most of my viewers and listeners. You mentioned Hulk Hogan, of course, the ultimate wrestler. In fact, I had Peter Osnos on the show last week. It was the original editor of Art of the Deal, and he said when he was editing out of the deal, he went with Trump to a wrestling contest, and Trump was enormously popular there back then, 30 or 40 years ago. To what extent is this whole--and I use this word carefully--spectacle, just wrestling. To what extent is it just another version of reality television and everyone understands in an odd kind of way that they're participating in this weird narrative. You've done a lot of thinking and writing on this in terms of the Internet, although some of the people participating in this are pre-Internet people. I mean, Trump is Mr. Reality television. So this goes back before the Internet. But to what extent is this, I don't know, reality, hyper reality, beyond reality, and how does it connect with--there is a reality of America on November the 5th, 2024. I hope that's a--I'm not sure it's a particularly clear question, but gives you an opportunity to talk about how you perceive this whole spectacle or circus.Oyler: Well, I think it's I think that the Republican Party and I think the American society in general, certainly American media, has been in a kind of transitional phase since 2020. Don't quote me on that, but like generally, like since Trump's term was a very crystal clear political moment in the country, I think. And it did make a lot of people sort of immediately think back and say what, what did I miss about the last ten, 15 years that led to this? Like, why didn't I see this coming? Why didn't I expect Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016? And that led to all this kind of--the things that you're referencing, which are, you know, reality, the effects of reality television and the effects of social media, you know, the sort of the the sense that--the desire for kind of like a more immediate relationship to our media that develops--all these things kind of developed in tandem, which is to say that, you know, someone who's watching the Hills on MTV, which is sort of my demographic, is not going to be the same kind of person who's watching wrestling per say. But there are many things that those two kinds of programing have in common, right? And it is kind of the ironic presentation of reality and scare quotes, right? And I think that Donald Trump, obviously a reality television host himself and and and certainly involved in professional wrestling can like sort of tap into could tap into that. But I don't think we're in that period anymore. I don't you know nobody is we aren't I hope we don't have graduate students writing dissertations on the on the Kardashians anymore which is what, you know that was such a prominent force in the media and in the sort of 2010s during Obama's administration. And I don't know exactly like what is next, right? The conversations we're having now are all about AI. They're all about Elon Musk. But it's certainly not this like pro-wrestling spectacle thing anymore. And I think you can see that because it's not as if that was that was not new, part of part of the spectacle that was created by the by the Hulk Hogan stuff was like that it was so surprising. But you can't keep bringing Hulk Hogan out every for, you know, you can't have them every four years. I'm sorry.Keen: An immortal Hulk Hogan or for that matter, Trump.Oyler: Yeah, yeah. And I do think that--picking J.D. Vance as the vice presidential nominee does indicate that they are trying to sort of move forward and kind of set the path for Trumpism after Trump. As many...that's not my phrase. It's a phrase everybody everybody uses, because also Trumpism is the most successful kind of Republican movement in a long time. You might remember the Tea Party didn't arrive. But there's a lot of dissent about that, I think. I think a lot of older people in the party that I talked to when I was at the convention were dissatisfied with Trump. And they would say, you know, I actually never liked him. I didn't vote for him in the primary in 2016. I would prefer he not do this. I overheard a man giving an interview to some some wire service and he, he really sounded like he was having an identity crisis. Like he was like, I don't know. This is not the party I grew up with. This is not the party I joined. What am I going to do? So there are lots of these older guys who feel that way. And then on the other side, there are lots of these young guys who I talked to who are kind of young Republicans in their early 20s, and they also don't really care. It's not like they're excited about Donald Trump. They're like excited by the kind of meme-ified free market capitalism opportunities that the Republicans sort of scoop up, right? Like they like crypto. They like, you know, they're like they have some really confused ideas about tariffs, which if you if you press them on it a little bit, you would say maybe you actually should vote for a Democrat because Trump is just putting more tariffs on things, just all sorts of things.Keen: By the way, it's the first time in this conversation, Lauren, I've heard the the West Virginian twang when you when you said tariffs. Say it again.Oyler: Tariffs? I mean, I can do it all day if you want. I was anticipating you asking me to perform the accent. Maybe when we talk about a little bit more about J.D. Vance.Keen: Yeah.Oyler: But but, yeah--Keen: Tariffs, and what about China? Could you do China?Oyler: Well, you know, I lived in Beijing for about two months.Keen: I mean, JD, is he the fool here or is he the one who's being made to look like a fool, do you think?Oyler: I think he's allowing himself to be made to look like a fool. I don't think that...Keen: Does he know what he's doing here?Oyler: Yeah. I mean, does he know what he's doing entirely? No. Does he know what he's doing? More than, like, Donald Trump's kids? Yes.Keen: It isn't hard, especially the boys. The girls disappeared, right? I think our girls have disappeared.Oyler: And yeah, good for them. I think I saw on Twitter that it's Ivanka's 43rd birthday today.Keen: Maybe a happy birthday, Ivanka, if you're well, I'm sure you've got better things to do. Although, she does seem to be participating. I'm sure she's severely embarrassed now by the whole thing.Oyler: Yeah, I think that that's a big issue for, you know, they're just they're struggling to have like a base for Trump anymore. And there is like a base for Republican, like a Republican Party base. But it doesn't seem like there's that many.Keen: Yeah, and your essay is entitled "The GOP's Identity Crisis." Maybe it should be "The Trump Family's Identity Crisis."Oyler: Yeah. I mean, he's he's not going to be around for that much longer.Keen: Yeah. I mean, what you said was interesting about talking to a lot of older people who suggested they don't like Trump. I mean, if he loses today, who knows what's going to happen? But if he does indeed lose and relatively decisively in the sense that it's clear that he lost. Do you think the knives are going to be out in your experience in Milwaukee? Yeah, there are enough people in the Republican Party will say enough is enough. This guy's a loser and we need to move on.Oyler: I mean, I think you can't lose two times in a row. You know, I mean, I think that there is enough...It's it's hard to say, well, what are the billionaires going to do? Like, what's Elon Musk going to do? What? Like, where's the money going to go? I don't know. I think they are trying to set up...to me at the convention, it seemed to me that, like J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy are the are the people that are sort of creating the most enthusiasm. But at the same time, you do have this kind of thing which the Democrats start with in 2016 and in 2020, which is that the younger members of the party have sort of radically different kind of Internet inflected ideas about what they want from the party. And the older guard is sort of scandalized a little bit by that. And it's kind of like a power struggle that will be interesting to watch if if Trump loses. And even if he wins, frankly.Keen: The narrative, the traditional narrative in mainstream media over the last few days has been mostly about men. Men, male and female voters, black and white voters, which is always a feature. And young and old voters. What wisdom did you derive on those fronts from from Milwaukee? Were there any young people there or any black people there? Were there any women there?Oyler: Were there any young people, black people or women there? Yes, there were there. It does skew older. It's very white. And, you know, the women who are there generally wives, even if they're also delegates, like they're not the main event. They don't have a Sarah Palin at this point right? There was...many of the women who spoke on stage were given a pink backdrop. They're very welcoming to women and minorities and young people. The rhetoric is all very much, we're not racist. America is not racist country. This is not a racist party. Over and over again, Tim Scott gave a big speech about how the Republicans aren't racist. Amber Rose Kanye West's ex-girlfriend, gave a big speech about how Republicans aren't racist. There was all this kind of state saying how not racist they were. And, you know, on the ground, obviously most people are white, most people are old, and most people are men. So, it was not super convincing, but it is kind of interesting to watch them say that because, of course, even ten years ago, they would have never cared about any of that, any of those kinds of points.Keen: Early on in the piece, you mentioned DeLillo. To what extent did he, especially in White Noise, did he predict all this? I mean, not just him, but that school of American writing.Oyler: But do you think they're predicting it or they're just observing their own time, and actually, it hasn't changed?Keen: I guess, yeah. I remember a review, I think it was Andrew Hagan's review in the New York Review of Books after 9/11, in which they were reviewing one of one of DeLillo's books about terrorism. I know Hagan wrote about DeLillo in the sense that reality kind of overtaking, maybe, his prediction or his his kind of work. It must be, again, to use a word, surreal here to to see this world that DeLillo already imagined in practice.Oyler: Well, I think he's probably talking about Underworld. But I think it's maybe our idea of of history being kind of flawed rather than DeLillo's being overtaken. I do think DeLillo has some struggles writing about the Internet, but that's fine. But I think, too, because I was reading so much of these convention pieces from the 60s and 70s, the conversation is the same. And that's nonfiction, right? And so I actually think this kind of like apocalyptic rhetoric and and ever greater spectacle, it does sort of get ever greater, but it has always been getting ever greater. And so I don't know that DeLillo has been like overtaken, because also people can read. People read, you know, Libra now, which is all about in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Trump. Everybody was talking about Libra, which is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the kind of, let's say, deep state apparatus surrounding that event. And also, you know, White Noise is a satirical novel. But but I think there was sort of some airborne toxic events in the United States.Keen: Yeah. I mean, he actually did write that in the book. I think about that. In a small town.Oyler: Exactly. But I believe White Noise is based on also a real incident. And DeLillo tends to work with actual news stories. Underworld is also sort of heavily researched and based on on on real, real events. So I think actually, maybe we we have to sort of admit that like as as as writers, as pundits, as journalists, as as whatever, it's in our best interest to say now is totally different. Right now, more than ever, everything's totally different. We're in a new paradigm. We're in a new era. This is especially bad. You know, you keep hearing this is the most important election of our lives. And we've been hearing that for every single election. And it's always been that kind of story. I can't really remember what your question was, but my my feeling about DeLillo is, like, amazing author. One of the best we have.Keen: Yeah, I know. I agree. And this idea of it being the most important election and of course, until the next one. This idea of an identity crisis. Lauren, what is an identity crisis? You noted that America is in a transitional stage. I mean, countries are always in transitional stages. They're always changing. Gramsci I think wrote that these kind of periods are a time for monsters. So we imagine the worst. What, to you, is an identity crisis, and why is the GOP going through it and not the Democrats? Might one argue that it's actually much healthier to face up to this crisis than to basically ignore it as the as the Democrats seem to be doing?Oyler: Yeah. Well, I think the Democrats, for all their faults, sort of dealt with this in the last two elections. And actually, you could say too the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was also a kind of identity crisis moment for them because the party didn't really want him, right? And Hillary's people, I believe, in 2008 were really critical of anyone who would go work for Obama, and it was it was actually like quite a big conflict. So you could say that basically the Democrats have been going through it as well. And now they've kind of they lost so humiliatingly in 2016 that they kind of had to do something about it, and they basically strong armed the left wing of the party in 2020, which for people of my generation, it was quite upsetting or like, galvanizing in some way, but you just don't really see so much...for someone who was really paying attention in 2020, the dissent against Kamala Harris is so much less than the dissent against Joe Biden in 2020. Does that sound right to you?Keen: Yeah, but I'm not sure you...I mean, if America is indeed in what you call this transitional stage where things the nature of the country, perhaps what we might think of as its kind of operating system is changing so dramatically. The Republicans are trying to face up to it and perhaps making fools of themselves, but at least they're addressing it. Why? Why the Republicans? Why the Democrats? So maybe America really isn't...I mean, this idea of a transitional stage is always true. So it's no more transitional in 2024 than it was in 2020 or 1920.Oyler: Yeah. Well, I think the Democrats have proven themselves to be quite denialists, right? Like they're very centrist. So the radical wing of the Republican Party. You could argue that J.D. Vance is part of part of the radical wing of the Republican Party. So I just think that the the Democrats are risk averse. They're very risk averse. And the things that they want are a return to normalcy when Republicans want like a radical reshaping of the government and society. They want...I went to some Moms for Liberty event where, you know, they weren't talking about this on the convention floor, but the Republicans give hearing to people who want to abolish the Department of Education. I can't remember what Trump's specific view on that is, but that's an incredibly radical proposal.Keen: I mean, Michael Lewis wrote a whole book on that: The Fifth Risk.Oyler: Yeah. But, it's not inconceivable that they would do that.Keen: Well, they did it. I mean, they did it in in 2016. I don't know if you're with the Department of Education, but some of these departments, they essentially shut down or appointed people with so hostile to the bureaucratic state that they by definition were going to ruin it.Oyler: Yeah. And then there was the the acronym R.A.G.E, Retire All Government Employees, and this kind of stuff. So but my point is that they you know, they see themselves as a revolution--the Republicans see themselves as a revolutionary party, and the Democrats are emphatically not. They're defining themselves against Republicans. So they're like, of course we're not America is not in an identity crisis. We just need to, like, get back to normal. But to go back to the phrase identity crisis, I think, too, is a reference also to J.D. Vance, whose whole career is, I argue, based on a sort of perversion of liberal identity politics, or an appeal to a kind of liberal identity politics. And the Republican Party's use of him or his use of them, is also based on this kind of Appalachian identity he has has created for himself in the media.Keen: Lauren, whatever happens today, the country's still profoundly divided. One side's going to win, one side is going to lose, but not by much. Lots of people have written about America in a process of divorce. You've presented the Democrats as denialists and the Republicans as so aggressively trying to figure themselves out in a slightly absurd way. Is this like a kind of traditional divorce where one partner denies there's any problems and the other exaggerates them? I don't know what the outcome of that kind of divorce usually is.Oyler: I don't know. Are you divorced?Keen: Yeah, but I'm not a denialist.Oyler: So you're so you're like--Keen: I mean, I was divorced.Oyler: What?Keen: I mean, I was. So...I've married and divorced.Oyler: Okay. But you have been through that. You've experienced--Keen: Yeah, I've done a divorce. Have you?Oyler: No. Never been married.Keen: But you've written about maybe not marriage, but you've written about...split ups, shall we say? I mean, you book Fake Accounts, which was a big hit, is about individuals and how they relate to one another. Is this like, maybe not a divorce, but a breakup in a in a weird kind of way, which, you know, you can't really breakup because you can't split the country in two?Oyler: Well, I don't think so, because I think it's probably...the thing about a romantic relationship is generally you are choosing in some way at least, to be in it and you're sort of declaring your your desire to be in it at some point in time. So if you're breaking it up, you're kind of it's seen as a failure, right? Whereas if you're an American citizen and you were just born in the country, you can't really control where you were born and you can't really, you know, there are only so many things you can do about that, and about your stake in the American political system and whether it breaks out. But are you asking for going is if this sort of south is going to secede or something like that--Keen: No, I'm saying, does this all tie into perhaps our therapeutic culture? I mean, is it coincidental that the kind of language that's being used both by the participants and observers like yourself is the same kind of language used by therapists, people addressing marriage breakups, relationship breakups, denialism, risk aversity, revenge plots, all this sort of thing?Oyler: Well, I think all the political parties are just made up of individual people, and as an individual person, the metaphors that we have at hand are our personal interpersonal metaphors. But I believe I'm a little rusty on this, but I believe Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud makes a similar kind of argument, right? Which is that there's a interpersonal metaphor that can be expanded to encompass the society. And you can read society psychoanalytically. I'm not a Freudian or even pro psychoanalysis per say, but it's not like it's actually not a new tendency that we we want to speak in these terms, especially in politics, which is different from government, right? Like in politics, all of the rhetoric, all of the language that politicians use and that they construct in order to make their case is incredibly personal and incredibly designed to incite emotion. That may remind you of things that happen in in private life, say. But I mean, are we getting a divorce? Like, we can't get a divorce. The Democrats or Republicans can't get a divorce. Maybe they need to grow up rather rather than split up.Keen: Finally, Lauren, I think your latest collection of essays is, No Judgment, I'm being critical...one of your strengths as a writer, thinker, or broadcaster, is your distance. I saw you had two interviews recently, one with GQ that says you don't take your work too seriously and then one with Vanity Fair, which suggests you care a lot. I wonder, and that's probably true of most of us, that we both hopefully don't take ourselves too seriously, but we also, in our own way, care a lot. Is this something that we should care about? I mean, so much hysteria. You noted earlier, every election is the most important election in American history. 2028 will no doubt be the same. You write without judgment, I think, that the piece also is written, in a sense, without judgment. But are you concerned with America? I mean, is this something to really worry about, or is it just one more scene and in the surreal history of the United States of America?Oyler: Well, I think, of course, it's something to care about. The idea I don't really care about things is obviously not totally true. But I think you can't care about the horse race aspect of of politics and you can't...the constant catastrophizing in the media hasn't worked. It's not accurate and it doesn't work. But of course it would be...I would prefer Donald Trump not win. Like, that will have many effects on even the country where I live, which is Germany. But to that point, I don't live in the United States and I don't live in the United States kind of for political reasons. And, of course, it shouldn't be a horrible catastrophe there the way that it is. Should care about it? Yeah. I think that if people don't care about it, or especially if young people don't care about it, it is a sense of that nothing that you do really matters, and like throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks politically. And that moment where everyone thought that they could do sort of political activism on social media has thankfully gone away. But there's been nothing to replace it to produce the kind of political subject for young people. So, I don't you know, I don't know what to do.Keen: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I want to end this now because you've been very generous with your time. But I think your point, which hasn't really been made before...2024 is the first post-Internet election. Before, everyone was always obsessed with the Internet, always talking about how important it is. And now, you just don't read much about it. It's either it's the electric system, so it's just sort of ingrained into the system, or we've gone beyond the Internet, God knows where. But the Internet doesn't really feature in the discussion anymore.Oyler: No, I think that that's true. And I think that that's good because people are sort of accepting that it's a part of life now. I think the reason we focused on it so much in the previous two decades was because it felt like things were really radically changing. And maybe this sense that I have that we're transitioning into a new era and we don't really know what is the important thing to focus on is because it was so clear, I think, for many people that things were changing in a particular way with social media and social media was having these kind of drastic facts. And some people were in denial about that, and they would say, social media does matter. It's not real. Now, you can't really say that. But I think I noticed just before we got on the call that there was a New Yorker news, a breaking news story that The New Yorker published that that Russia was sort of inserting like kind of really bizarre election interference propaganda that was so bad. And it's not even going to be a big news story, right? Whereas that was such a huge news story in 2016 and 2020. And now we just sort of accept, yes, the foreign governments are going to attempt to use the Internet to interfere in our elections and we will almost certainly do the same. So, to relate this back to your question, should we all care? I think it's good to be realistic about these things, but it's hard to know where to put the emphasis at this point.Keen: Well, Lauren, Lauren Oyler, the author of Revenge--Revenge Plot, Not Revenge Post.Oyler: I thought you were going to say "romantic movie," which is cool.Keen: You've given me the title of this piece. 2024 is the first post-Internet election. I think that's very profound of you. Thank you so much, Lauren. And I hope I hope you're happy, because I think you and I probably agree on the kind of outcome of the election. But it's not the end of the plot, the revenge plot, whatever other kind of plot you want. We have to get you back on the show, Lauren, once the fog has cleared and we have a better idea of America post-2024. Thank you so much. And keep well and safe in Berlin. Really, I really appreciate it.Oyler: Thanks. Have a good night. This is a public episode. 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Show Notes and Links to Porochista Khanpour's Work For Episode 258, Pete welcomes Porochista Khakpour, and the two discuss, among other topics, her harrowing departure from Iran to the US at a young age, her voracious reading and writing and storytelling, amazing life experiences that have fed her writing, her love of contemporary stan culture and KPop, how her latest book's release is different, seeds for Tehrangeles, modern wellness and conspiracy theory cultures, her experiences with the real Tehrangeles, the role of the outsider as a writer, and so much about themes and topics related to her novel, like celebrity worship, assimilation, cancel culture, and racism. Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in the greater Los Angeles area. She is the critically acclaimed author of two previous novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion; a memoir, Sick; and a collection of essays, Brown Album. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, and many other publications. Her latest book is Tehrangeles. She lives in New York City. Buy Tehrangeles Porochista's Official Website Porochista's Wikipedia Page “Writing Iranian America…”-2020 Interview from Columbia Journal At about 1:45: Pete gets the wrong vegetable in remembering his first exposure to Porochista's excellent work At about 2:45, Porochista talks about the year in publishing and the ways in which this year's tragedies have been in juxtaposition to careful and affectionate feedback for her novel At about 7:30, Porochista and Pete discuss some politicians' cowardice and Porochsta's book as a “weird distraction” At about 10:20, Pete asks Porochista about writing satire in an increasingly off-its-hinges world At about 13:20, Porochista talks about the 1%, richest of the richest, and how “this sort of madness of wealthy people during the beginning of the pandemic” At about 15:10, Porochsta gives background on the acquisition of her novel At about 17:25, The two highlight Danzy Senna's great work At about 18:20, Porochista cites examples of “dark humor” that at times run through Persian cultures At about 20:10, Porochista reflects on the idea of “perpetual outsiders” and the effect on writing At about 21:40, Porochista details her family's fleeing Iran and the traumas and memories that came with her odyssey to arriving in the US At about 24:30, Porochista traces the way that Iran was often viewed by Americans at the time in which her family arrived in the US At about 25:15, Porochista responds to Pete's questions about her early reading and writing and language life, both in English and Persian At about 31:45, At about 32:50, Porochista talks about she's been described as a “maximalist” and the connection to Persian as her first language At about 34:35, Porochista talks about representation in the texts she read growing up and her early love of particular works that allowed her to learn about the Western canon in order to enjoy it and resist it At about 37:30, Porochista charts her reading journey from Faulkner to Morrison to Sartre to the Beat Poets and describes her self-designed silent book reading “retreat” At about 40:20, Porochista describes her reading and writing as responses to her life experiences and her identity revolving around writing At about 41:35, Porochista describes transformative and formative texts and mentors and her time at Sarah Lawrence College and Oxford At about 43:50, Porochista talks about the ways in which her reading was affected by how women writers are often limited, and how this connects to her seeking out adventure and life experience in living as a writer, including her going to William Faulkner Country At about 49:45, The two make appreciations of James Joyce's work At about 50:55, Porochista makes a case for contemporary writing as comprising a “golden era” At about 52:00, Pete wonders if and how Porochsta has been influenced by Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace At about 54:45, Porochista talks about ways in which Less than Zero and American Psycho and Donna Tartt's work have affected the sensibility of Tehrangeles and especially its ending At about 59:15, Porochista talks about “dream” casting in case the novel becomes a movie, including Tara Yummy At about 1:01:00, Porochista talks about the “twisted logic” found on many of the chat rooms/forums she spent time in for book research At about 1:04:15, Porochista talks about how Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Alcott's experience informed the writing of Tehrangeles At about 1:07:55, The two discuss how Shahs of Sunset affected the novel At about 1:10:00, Porochista explains her rationale in making the book's reality show producers a collective At about 1:10:45, Porochista responds to Pete's question about the book's epitaphs At about 1:13:55, Porochista talks about the book's untranslated Persian section and “progress” in people's understanding At about 1:15:20, Pete cites and quotes the book's opening litany and the exposition of Book I At about 1:16:20, Porochista describes a raucous scene where Roxana, a main character, goes through a “zodiac reassignment” At about 1:17:50, Porochista digs into Roxana's “Secret” At about 1:19:10, The two lament Kanye West's horrible recent behavior and other misogynists and abusers, in connection with the setting of the book At about 1:22:30, The two discuss the world of influencers and their effect on younger generations in line with the characters of the book At about 1:24:20, Pete recounts the Milani family members and their views of the At about 1:26:00, Porochista recounts inspiration for Violet's sweets diet from an interview with Momofuku's Christina Tosi and Porochista's time at Sarah Lawrence At about 1:28:00, The two discuss Violet's experience with a racist and demeaning model shoot that plays on her Iranian heritage At about 1:29:30, Porochista reflects on Tehrangeles culture and its connection to religion At about 1:30:35, Porochista discusses KPop and “stan culture” and how Mina “found her voice” through these online forums At about 1:34:20, Porochista talks about purposely focusing on realistic and empathetic portrayals of gender identity At about 1:38:30, The two discuss Hailey as representative of the intersections between Covid conspiracy theories and racism and “hidden” CA racism and wellness culture At about 1:40:00, Porochista talks about her own experiences with the “dark wu wu” of the wellness cultures during her own fragile At about 1:44:00, The two discuss Ali (Al) and his leaving Iran behind and how he seeks Americanization and how he makes his fortune At about 1:46:15, Porochista likens events of the book, “The World of Al” to the DJ Khaled song At about 1:48:05, The two discuss Roxana's desire to have a blowout early Covid-era party and how the physical “wings” of the house connect to the sisters' different growing pains and goals and ethics At about 1:50:40, The two riff on some beautifully absurd scenes in the book, including a pet psychic's appearance At about 1:51:50, Porochista gives background on deciding to do untranslated Persian in the book and about Homa and the ways she doesn't want to be part of Tehrangeles; also Editor Maria Goldberg Love At about 1:55:10, Pete asks about the rationale and background for the book's ending using stream of consciousness At about 1:57:15, Porochista shouts out Golden Hour Books and City of Asylum Books, and other places to buy her book, including Shawnee, Kansas' Seven Stories, run by 17 yr old Halley Vincent At about 1:59:45, Porochista shouts out the stellar Deep Vellum and Verso and writers like At about 2:01:05, Porochista talks about exciting upcoming projects You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch this and other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode. I am very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. A big thanks to Rachel León and Michael Welch at Chicago Review. Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This month's Patreon bonus episode features segments from conversations with Deesha Philyaw, Luis Alberto Urrea, Chris Stuck, and more, as they reflect on chill-inducing writing and writers that have inspired their own work. I have added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show. This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com. Please tune in for Episode 259 with Jessica Whipple. Jessica writes for adults and children, and her poetry has been published recently in Funicular, Door Is a Jar, and many more. She has published two children's picture books in 2023: Enough Is… and I Think I Think a Lot. The episode will air on October 29. Lastly, please go to ceasefiretoday.com, which features 10+ actions to help bring about Ceasefire in Gaza.
In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo's acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in a narrative that conjures scenes that resonate with Libra, Mao II, and other of DeLillo's portraits of the artist (while also raising the question of whether DeLillo has a cat). Novelists Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis make their way into our analysis of this miniature fiction, and we consider as well the meaning of the Jerusalem Prize, the “nonchalant terror” of everyday life, and the young woman writer the essay at its end envisions taking up this legacy of lonely work. Texts mentioned or cited in this episode: Don DeLillo, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” 1999 Jerusalem Prize For the Freedom of the Individual in Society acceptance address. Jerusalem: Jerusalem International Book Fair, 1999. Reprinted in German translation (“Der Narr in seinem Zimmer”) in Die Zeit (March 29, 2001). See also: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?op=AND&sort=score+desc%2C+pub_date_si+desc%2C+title_si+asc&search_field=advanced&all_fields_advanced=&child_oids_ssim=17371596&commit=SEARCH ---. “On William Gaddis.” Conjunctions (Issue 41, Fall 2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20031123133017/http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c41-dd.htm[Incorrectly placed in Bookforum in the episode.] ---. “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997. “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, the Gun.” Dir. Kim Evans. BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc&t=63s William Gaddis, The Recognitions. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955.
Notes and Links to Mirin Fader's Work For Episode 257, Pete welcomes Mirin Fader for her second Chills at Will visit, and the two discuss, among other topics, her love of contemporary fiction, how her second book's release is different than that of her first, seeds for her latest book-Dream, about the great Hakeem Olajuwon-coming from her previous blockbuster about Giannis Antetokounmpo, her finding stories within stories while researching the book, and the wonders and legends of Hakeem Olajuwon, from his start in handball and soccer to the ignorant and racist ways he was often viewed, to the role that discipline, creativity, and his faith play in his daily life. Mirin Fader is a senior staff writer for The Ringer. Her first book, Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA Champion, was a New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, Wall Street Journal Bestseller, USA Today Bestseller, Publishers Weekly Bestseller. She has profiled some of the NBA's biggest stars, including Giannis Antetokounmpo, Ja Morant, DeMar DeRozan, and LaMelo Ball, telling the backstories that have shaped some of our most complex, most dominant, heroes. Fader wrote for Bleacher Report from 2017 to 2020 and the Orange County Register from 2013 to 2017. Her work has been featured in the “Best American Sports Writing” series and honored by the Pro Basketball Writers Association, the Associated Press Sports Editors, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, the Football Writers Association of America, and the Los Angeles Press Club. Buy Dream Mirin Fader's Website See Mirin on Tour! At about 2:50, Mirin discusses her love of fiction and beloved contemporary texts, including Tommy Orange's latest, and Sudanese writer, Rania Mamoun's latest At about 4:40, Mirin responds to Pete's question about any sort of competitiveness within writers in Mirin's cohort, and Pete and Mirin stan Wright Thompson At about 6:30, Pete highlights Demar Derozan's recent book and Mirin's profile of him for The Ringer At about 9:45, Mirin gives background on her profile of Bronny James and what “lane” she focused on for the piece At about 12:30, Some all-time NBA rankings! At about 14:45, Pete cites the book about Giannis and its lasting greatness At about 15:05, Pete asks Mirin about the run-up to her second book and feedback At about 16:10, Mirin mentions the nostalgia associated with Hakeem Olajuwon At about 17:30, Mirin talks about the “unheralded” nature of Hakeem, as well as the emergence of international basketball players, particularly with African players, for which he was a “prequel” At about 19:25, Mirin gives background on Ben Okri's quote for her epigraph and its connection to Hakeem and devotion and creativity At about 20:10, The two discuss the book's Prologue and LeBron James famous trip to train with Hakeem in 2011 At about 22:40, Henri Yranndo and his importance to Hakeem and his spiritual resurgence is referenced At about 24:00, Mirin discusses her wonderful experiences in going to Hakeem's mosque in Houston At about 25:00, Pete asks Mirin to expand on Hakeem as a “hidden one,” and connections to a hadith quoted from the Koran At about 26:30, The two discuss the book's beginning, and Mirin talks about the bustling city of Lagos, Hakeem's childhood (and later American media racism in describing his youth), and how his father taught him to be proud of his size At about 29:10, Mirin talks about Hakeem's early athletic feats outside of basketball, and how he was “recruited” to finally give in and play basketball At about 31:20, Pete and Mirin reflect on the sad fact that so many interviewees for the book have died recently and how this affects her urgency to get stories on paper At about 32:35, Mirin responds to Pete's wondering about how Hakeem's 1980 Nigerian National Team appearance affected his growth At about 34:10, The “Dream Shake” and Yomi Sangodeyi's greatness and tutoring are explored At about 35:00, Christopher Pond and the supposed origin story of Hakeem's Univ. of Houston landing, as well as problematic parts of the story are probed At about 38:50, Mirin talks about Hakeem's time in Houston and the city's growing Nigerian population At about 40:10, Mirin expands upon the ignorant and racist ways in which Hakeem was written about, especially in his earlier years, and she shares the story of how him “changing his name” Was emblematic of his humble nature At about 42:55, Mirin highlights how Hakeem was never seen as a draft mistake, even though he was drafted over Michael Jordan, and Pete cites Frank Guidry's book on Houston and how the Forde Center helped Hakeem improve greatly as a Rocket At about 44:15, Pete cites Hakeem's moving letter referenced in the book, and how Mirin charts his rediscovering his faith through some amazing and makes it clear that he never “converted” to Islam At about 46:45, The two reflect on and express the amazement and respect for Hakeem's Ramadan fasting during his playing days At about 47:45, Pete and Mirin stan Hakeem's unforgettable series against David Robinson At about 48:45, Mirin talks about how Hakeem's faith calls for him to not display iconography and show humility and how the book's cover satisfied the requirements of being respectful At about 50:45, Mirin shouts out Brazos Bookstore and Skylight Books as good places to buy her book, and shouts out her first tour You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch this and other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode. I am very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. A big thanks to Rachel León and Michael Welch at Chicago Review. Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This month's Patreon bonus episode features segments from conversations with Deesha Philyaw, Luis Alberto Urrea, Chris Stuck, and more, as they reflect on chill-inducing writing and writers that have inspired their own work. I have added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show. This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com. Please tune in for Episode 258 with Porochista Khakpour, the critically acclaimed author of two previous novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion; a memoir, Sick; and a collection of essays, Brown Album. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, and many other publications. Her latest book, a chaotic and satirical stellar work, is Tehrangeles. This episode will air on October 22. Lastly, please go to ceasefiretoday.com, which features 10+ actions to help bring about Ceasefire in Gaza.
Episode 74 of The Mental Game features Julie Kliegman, author of Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes. Fueled by interviews with Olympians like Chloe Kim and McKayla Maroney, NBA players Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, and so many more, Mind Game illustrates the complete story of how elite athletes navigate mental performance and mental illness—and what non-athletes can learn from them. The project was Kliegman's first book (another is in the works already). Before venturing into the book world, they worked at Sports Illustrated and at The Ringer, with work published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bookforum, Slate and more. Kliegman first joined The Mental Game in 2022 and now makes a triumphant return, diving into: -The lesser-known "pioneers" of the sports mental health movement. -How Simone Biles sparked a much-needed mental health reckoning in sports. -What they learned from deep talks with McKayla Maroney and Kevin Love. -And much, much more. The Mental Game podcast is produced by Sam Brief and music is courtesy of David Brief and Channel J. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, TuneIn and Stitcher. The Mental Game is a proud partner of Laaser's Ladybug Society, which is a designated 501c3 organization combatting the stigmas that surround mental health by actively fundraising to support mental health initiatives and innovations in our school system. The mental health challenges faced by our youth are unprecedented and it is time to get off the bench and get in the game as we fight for the mental well-being of the next generation. Learn more and join the fight at LaasersLadybugs.org! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sam-brief/support
"A woman in trouble" In her monograph Inland Empire (Fireflies Press, 2021), film critic Melissa Anderson explores meaning (or the impossibility thereof) in the David Lynch film of the same title. We talk everything from Laura Dern (a LOT of Laura Dern), to the Hollywood nightmare of trying to "make it in the movies," to the contradictions of film criticism, to the (a)political legacy of Lynch's work. Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns. From 2015 to 2017, she was the senior film critic for the Village Voice. She is also a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum. Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
"A woman in trouble" In her monograph Inland Empire (Fireflies Press, 2021), film critic Melissa Anderson explores meaning (or the impossibility thereof) in the David Lynch film of the same title. We talk everything from Laura Dern (a LOT of Laura Dern), to the Hollywood nightmare of trying to "make it in the movies," to the contradictions of film criticism, to the (a)political legacy of Lynch's work. Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns. From 2015 to 2017, she was the senior film critic for the Village Voice. She is also a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum. Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
"A woman in trouble" In her monograph Inland Empire (Fireflies Press, 2021), film critic Melissa Anderson explores meaning (or the impossibility thereof) in the David Lynch film of the same title. We talk everything from Laura Dern (a LOT of Laura Dern), to the Hollywood nightmare of trying to "make it in the movies," to the contradictions of film criticism, to the (a)political legacy of Lynch's work. Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns. From 2015 to 2017, she was the senior film critic for the Village Voice. She is also a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum. Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
"A woman in trouble" In her monograph Inland Empire (Fireflies Press, 2021), film critic Melissa Anderson explores meaning (or the impossibility thereof) in the David Lynch film of the same title. We talk everything from Laura Dern (a LOT of Laura Dern), to the Hollywood nightmare of trying to "make it in the movies," to the contradictions of film criticism, to the (a)political legacy of Lynch's work. Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns. From 2015 to 2017, she was the senior film critic for the Village Voice. She is also a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum. Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Christine Smallwood is the author of La Captive (Fireflies Press, 2024) and the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have been published in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches courses on the nineteenth-century novel and other topics. Recorded April 16, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University Edited by Michele Moses Music by Dani Lencioni Art by Leanne Shapton Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf
Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novel Tehrangeles, available from Pantheon. Khakpour was born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She is the critically acclaimed author of two previous novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion; a memoir, Sick; and a collection of essays, Brown Album. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, and many other publications. She lives in New York City. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Judith Butler discusses their new book "Who's Afraid of Gender?" published by Farrar Straus Giroux. Named a "Most Anticipated Book of 2024" by Time, Elle, Kirkus, Literary Hub, The Millions, & Electric Literature. Purchase book here: https://citylights.com/whos-afraid-of-gender/ Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book "Gender Trouble" redefined how we think about gender & sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—& even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual & gender violence, & strip trans & queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence. The aim of "Who's Afraid of Gender?" is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, & transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects & displaces anxieties & fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” & xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, & leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, "Who's Afraid of Gender?" is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements & to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom & solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless. Judith Butler is the author of several books including "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'," "The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Excitable Speech, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly," & "The Force of Non-Violence." In addition to numerous academic honors & publications, Butler has published editorials & reviews in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Nation, Time Magazine, the London Review of Books, & in a wide range of journals, newspapers, radio & podcast programs throughout Europe, Latin America, Central & South Asia, & South Africa. They live in Berkeley. Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry & prose, including "Like Love: Essays and Conversations" (2024), the national bestseller "On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint" (2021), National Book Critics Circle Award winner and international bestseller "The Argonauts" (2015), "The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning" (2011), "Bluets" (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), "The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial" (2007), & "Women, the New York School, & Other True Abstractions" (2007), "Something Bright, Then Holes" (2007), & "Jane: A Murder" (2005; finalist, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). A recipient of a 2016 MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, she is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Originally broadcast from City Lights' Poetry Room on Thursday, March 28, 2024. Hosted by Peter Maravelis. Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. citylights.com/foundation
If you liked Davy Chou's excellent 2022 movie, Return to Seoul, then Tracy O'Neill's new memoir, Woman of Interest, might be for you. Both movie and book are about an a female adoptee's return to South Korea in search of their mysterious birth mother. Chou's movie features a heartbreakingly lost Ji-Min Park wandering through life in the West and finally stumbling emptily onto the foggy truth of her Korean origins. O'Neill's non-fictional quest for her mother, in contrast, contains more agency and her quest eventually resulted in what her publisher describes as “the priceless power of self-knowledge.” There's is an awkwardness to my conversation with O'Neill which actually makes her appear more like the lost heroine in Return To Seoul than she might like to acknowledge. Or maybe, as some think, I'm just an aggressively insensitive interviewer. Tracy O'Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was named a Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellow. O'Neill teaches at Vassar College, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
Since May 2021, G19: The Graduate Student Collective of C19 has produced and published The New Book Forum, an online interview series that facilitates conversations between graduate students and the author of a recent book in the field of 19th-century American literature. This episode is hosted by the forum's founders, Rachael DeWitt (Columbia University), Max Chapnick (Northeastern University), and Allison (Ally) Fulton (University of California Davis) who discuss the project's beginnings and the insights they've gleaned since. They share a short selection from an April 2023 interview with Autumn Womack on her book The Matter of Black Living (2022), and then reflect on three years of conversations on new directions in the field, scholarly publication, and bringing the nineteenth century into the classroom. They wrap up by discussing some favorite interview moments and anticipate where the forum is headed in the future. Post-production support by Julia Bernier (Washington & Jefferson College). Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S07E05Transcript
In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, authors Warren Zanes and Thad Ziolkowski talk about writing and addiction. From their personal struggles in using drugs while creating art to the complexities in writing about addiction in general, their conversation is thought-provoking, sincere, and often very funny. Our Guests:Warren Zanes is the New York Times bestselling author of Dusty in Memphis, the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 Series, Petty: The Biography; Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records; and Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. With Garth Brooks, Zanes has worked on five books in the artist's Anthology Series. As a teenager he was a member of the Del Fuegos and made three records for Slash/Warner Bros. Zanes holds a PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester and presently teaches at New York University. He is a Grammy-nominated producer of the PBS series Soundbreaking and was a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. He conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World, and served as writer for The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash. Zane's work has appeared in Rolling Stone and the Oxford American, and he has served as Vice President of Education and Public Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, for ten years, Executive Director of The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. Thad Ziolkowski is the author of Our Son the Arson, a collection of poems, the memoir On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and Wichita, a novel. His most recent book, The Drop, which explores the relationship between surfing and addiction, was published by HarperWave, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2021. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure, Interview Magazine, 4Columns, and Galerie. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University. Books:A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available on our website.Resources:The Washington Post George Harrison: Living in the Material WorldRoom at the Top - Tom PettyRThe Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup. Recording and editing by Timmy Kellenyi, Bree Testa, and Derek Mattheiss at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica. Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff. Thank you to the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids' Room for their hard work and love of books! If you liked our episode please like, follow, and share! Stay in touch!Email: wbpodcast@watchungbooksellers.comSocial: @watchungbooksellersSign up for our newsletter to get the latest on our shows, events, and book recommendations!
Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was published in 2013 and was named one of that year's best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter. We talked about Adelle's job working at a big box store, the societal problems of low wage jobs, creating omniscient point of view, Jane Austin, George Eliot, Middlemarch, creating a common enemy in a story, and showing her novel to her former co-workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Acclaimed memoirist and teacher Vivian Gornick joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about the origins of her approach to memoir, the crucial difference between situations and stories, why implicating ourselves in our work makes us trustworthy to our reader, clarifying our narratives, how she discovered what her story was truly about, why some writing questions are unanswerable, and her well-loved and oft-repeated advice: “In order for the drama to deepen we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” Also in this episode: -Autofiction -the importance of trusted readers and editors -seeing ourselves clearly Books mentioned in this episode: -Autofiction by Annie Ernaux -The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick -Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick -The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick Vivian Gornick is a feminist critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist who was born in the Bronx and grew up in a family of working-class immigrants. Meghan O'Rourke of The Yale Review describes her as having written some of the most remarkable journalism of our time. “Her career got its start in the heady days of second-wave feminism, which she wrote about for the alternative weekly The Village Voice. In her work, she cultivated a fierce and unapologetic intellectual voice that could also be intensely personal. Another way to put it: she made powerful, no-holds-barred arguments, but she was also a gifted storyteller.” She is the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship and her essays and articles have appeared in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, Threepenny Review, and the Women's Review of Books. She taught for many years in MFA programs all over the country, including those at the University of Houston, the University of Arizona, Sarah Lawrence College, and the New School in New York City, and in 2015 she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Some of her books include The Men In My Life, The End of the Novel of Love, Approaching Eye Level, Essays in Feminism, The Odd Woman and the City, Fierce Attachments, and The Situation and the Story. — Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://twitter.com/RonitPlank https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers
Danielle Amir Jackson is a Memphis-born writer and critic, and the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, Bookforum, Lapham's Quarterly, the Criterion Collection, and elsewhere. Honey's Grill: Sex, Freedom, and Women of the Blues, her first book, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Originally based in Oxford, Mississippi, hence its name, Oxford American is both a literary and general interest magazine intent on honoring the cultural wealth of the South. Four writings are discussed, beginning with “What If It All Burned Down?” by Katrina Andy, which as its title suggests, is loaded with questions about the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. It happens at the Andry Plantation north of New Orleans, in the aftermath of the successful Haitian Revolution. Two other writings involve music: there's “How to Take It Slow” by Lauren Du Graf and “Coming Up Fancy” by Jewly Hight. The first portrays Shirley Horn, emphasizing her unique singing and piano style as well as her being such a homebody that she took a pressure cooker along with her on musical road tours. The second takes the song “Fancy” as sung by Reba McEntire and others and explores what home means when it isn't a place of comfort. The episode's fourth entry, “The Mustang” by Gwen Thompkins, is an evocative piece about a family journey to see grandparents at the same time that the narrator's parents' marriage is coming to an end. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Danielle Amir Jackson is a Memphis-born writer and critic, and the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, Bookforum, Lapham's Quarterly, the Criterion Collection, and elsewhere. Honey's Grill: Sex, Freedom, and Women of the Blues, her first book, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Originally based in Oxford, Mississippi, hence its name, Oxford American is both a literary and general interest magazine intent on honoring the cultural wealth of the South. Four writings are discussed, beginning with “What If It All Burned Down?” by Katrina Andy, which as its title suggests, is loaded with questions about the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. It happens at the Andry Plantation north of New Orleans, in the aftermath of the successful Haitian Revolution. Two other writings involve music: there's “How to Take It Slow” by Lauren Du Graf and “Coming Up Fancy” by Jewly Hight. The first portrays Shirley Horn, emphasizing her unique singing and piano style as well as her being such a homebody that she took a pressure cooker along with her on musical road tours. The second takes the song “Fancy” as sung by Reba McEntire and others and explores what home means when it isn't a place of comfort. The episode's fourth entry, “The Mustang” by Gwen Thompkins, is an evocative piece about a family journey to see grandparents at the same time that the narrator's parents' marriage is coming to an end. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Writer and art critic, Rahel Aima, who grew up and currently lives in Dubai, talks to us about living in the Gulf, a region rapidly developing itself as the place to be for smart cities and high-tech living. Rahel explores a concept she has been thinking about for some time, the Khaleeji Ideology, which meets at the intersection of technology, economy, the environment and nation building, as a way of understanding developments in the contemporary Gulf. This episode also features comment from Michael Mason, Director of the LSE Middle East Centre and Professor of Environmental Geography at LSE, who explores the rise of “progressive” urban development projects in the Gulf, and whether technology can be the solution to pressing environmental challenges of our time. Rahel Aima is a writer, critic, and editor from Dubai. She writes about art, technology and the Gulf. Her work has been published in Artforum, Artnews, ArtReview, The Atlantic, Bookforum, frieze, Mousse and Vogue Arabia, amongst others. Read Rahel's ‘The Khaleeji Ideology' here: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/horizons/498319/the-khaleeji-ideology/.
In the wake of Congressional investigations into a wave of so-called “anti-Semitism” on university campuses, college administrators are bending over backwards to appease Right Wing politicians and wealthy donors at the expense of civil liberties, and free speech and academic freedom protections. They particularly operationalize notions of public safety and feelings of safety to mute protests over the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, a genocide enabled by these same universities and the United States as a whole. Thus we see a warped set of values and priorities wherein the most principled people are being disciplined, suspended, and expelled from campus. Hamza El Boudali, a student activist, Nicole Morse, a professor long involved in the movements for Palestinian rights and LGBTQ justice, and Natasha Lennard, a journalist from The Intercept who has been covering these cases join us for a conversation that ranges from the immediate case at Columbia to a broad discussion of attacks on education by the right wing. We end with arguments for the future.Hamza El Boudali is a master's student at Stanford University studying Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Born in Morocco and raised in New Hampshire, he is a practicing Muslim interested in Muslim and Islamic causes worldwide. He is a former co-President of the Muslim Student Union at Stanford and he is passionate about advocacy for Palestine as well as other oppressed Muslim groups around the world such as the Uyghurs, Rohingya, Kashmiris, etc. After graduation, he plans to study the traditional Islamic sciences and combine his interest in AI with Islamic studies, philosophy, and intellectual activism.Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum, Dissent, and the New York Times, among others. She is the associate director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism graduate program at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Violence: Humans in Dark Times (with Brad Evans, CityLights, 2018), and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (Verso, 2019). She is working on her next book, on conceptualizing uncertainty, for Verso Books.Nicole Erin Morse is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Their research has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, Jump Cut, Discourse, and elsewhere, and their book Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art was published by Duke University in 2022. They are a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has landed them on Turning Point USA's Professor Watchlist.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit femchaospod.substack.comKat and Phoebe discuss the mass bisexuality of Gen Z and the BookForum takedown of Lauren Oyler.LINKS:Kat on the bi boom: Gen Z-ers Are Identifying as Bisexual En Masse. Why? - Air MailPhoebe on straight women: Straightness Studies | Who Do We Think We Are? | Issues | The Hedgehog ReviewStatistics! LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Now at 7.6%Rod Dreher fre…
Troy Vettese is an environmental historian who specializes in environmental economics, animal studies, and energy history. In 2019 he completed his doctorate in history at New York University. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at Harvard University as a William Lyon Mackenzie King postdoctoral research fellow. He has collaborated with Drew Pendergrass, an environmental engineer, on numerous projects including their book Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics . Troy is currently revising his dissertation on neoliberal environmental thought into a book, tentatively titled 'Beyond Externality'. In addition to his academic work, Vettese writes on a wide array of environmental topics for a popular audience, and has had essays published in the Guardian, the New Statesman, Jacobin, N+1, Book Forum, and Boston Review. In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what's real?” & “who matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube. 00:00 Clips! 01:04 Welcome 02:58 Troy's Intro - Half-Earth Socialism "what does it look like to have an ecologically stable society... a good relationship with other beings on this planet and also to ensure a good life for everyone" - The Half-Earth Socialism computer game & maybe a future board-game 05:44 What's Real? - #Ecosocialism and #neoliberalism in conversation with each other - Growing up in a fairly conservative but non-religious household - Being a Young Tory, reading Milton Friedman - In early 20's "a crisis of faith in terms of this conservative worldview" due to the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis - Reading Marx and New Left Review - Exploring the environmental crisis - A sensitive child, then a toxic masculinity phase as a teenager (callous, eating meat, machismo), then, alongside the crisis of faith in conservatism, a wish to return to childhood passion for nature - Gravitating towards ecosocialism - Didn't "grow up with red diapers" (being brought up in a left wing family) so feeling inoculated as knows the political right very well as "I came from the right to the left" - #greenwashing measures "I wanted to understand where these ideas had come from... no one had done an intellectual history of these things" - Challenging the common leftist view that the right & neoliberalism doesn't have any real intellectual depth "I took it more seriously than most socialists" - "I thought the left should have more concrete ideas of their own... match the rigour of these conservative ones" - "'We'll figure it out after the revolution'... that's not enough" - Mother who ran for the Green party in elections - Not religious now - "Sceptical of thinking that there's one true path... one true way of relating to each other or to animals"... relativism, Kuhnian (paradigms)? - The neoliberal view of the market as the optimal information processor - Being rational but also appreciating the spiritual/subliminal/subjective? "that's why I'm a big bird watcher" - The "spark bird" that gets you into #birdwatching - #deleuze "Becoming animal" vs. #Haraway's notion of "becoming with" 17:50 What Matters? 27:33 Who Matters? 54:15 A Better World? 01:29:55 Follow Troy ...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info. Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall via this simple form. Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on FaceBook. Come join us there! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sentientism/message
On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Michael Wheaton interviews Zachary Pace.Zachary Pace is a writer and editor whose first book is I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am (Two Dollar Radio, 2024), and whose writing has been published in the Baffler, BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, Frieze magazine, Interview magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.Michael Wheaton is the publisher of Autofocus Books and producer ofThe Lives of Writers. His essay Home Movies is out now from Bunny Presse.____________FULL CONVERSATION topics include:-- going into the office-- working in publishing -- challenges of living in NYC-- finding a subject-- moving to essay from poetry -- early writing tied up in other media-- music as gateway into poetry-- the new essay collection I SING TO USE THE WAITING-- trouble-- other people as mirrors-- research in the writing process-- growing up on media pre-internet-- child psychology-- celebrating the self and others-- choosing essay subjects in a collection-- continuing to write about music and listening____________Podcast theme music provided by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex and Culdesac. Here's more of his project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.
Ep. 233: Christine Smallwood on Chantal Akerman and La Captive Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week a new book on Chantal Akerman by Christine Smallwood enters the world, a volume about Akerman's wholly original Proust adaptation La Captive that's the latest in the Fireflies Press series of Decadent Editions focused on films of the 2000s. So I was delighted to speak with Smallwood about Akerman and her film's hypnotic exploration of the strange relationship between a wealthy odd young man Simon (Stanislas Mehrar) and his lover, Ariane (Sylvie Testud), reworking the fifth volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Note: The episode opens with a passage about La Captive from Smallwood's book. Smallwood is the author of the novel The Life of the Mind and a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Review of Books, Harper's, Bookforum and The New York Times Magazine. La Captive will screen March 30 at Metrograph followed by Vertigo, with Smallwood in person. On March 19 at Light Industry, she'll present an illustrated lecture adapted from her book. Please support the production of this podcast by signing up at: rapold.substack.com Photo by Steve Snodgrass
Julie Kliegman is the author of Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes. Her work has appeared in outlets including Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The Ringer, BuzzFeed News, Vulture, The Verge, and Washington Monthly. In Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, Julie offers insight into how elite athletes navigate mental performance and mental illness—and what non-athletes can learn from them. She explores the recent mental health movement in sports, the history and practice of sport psychology, the stereotypes and stigmas that lead athletes to keep their troubles to themselves, and the ways in which injury and retirement can throw wrenches in their mental states. Kliegman also examines the impacts of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, substance use, and more, with a keen eye toward moving forward with acceptance, progress, and problem-solving.If you're looking to improve your coaching please consider joining the Hoop Heads Mentorship Program. We believe that having a mentor is the best way to maximize your potential and become a transformational coach. By matching you up with one of our experienced mentors you'll develop a one on one relationship that will help your coaching, your team, your program, and your mindset. The Hoop Heads Mentorship Program delivers mentoring services to basketball coaches at all levels through our team of experienced Head Coaches. Find out more at hoopheadspod.com or shoot me an email directly mike@hoopheadspod.comMake sure you're subscribed to the Hoop Heads Pod on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there please leave us a 5 star rating and review. Your ratings help your friends and coaching colleagues find the show. If you really love what you're hearing recommend the Hoop Heads Pod to someone and get them to join you as a part of Hoop Heads Nation.Grab your notebook and a pen before you listen to this episode with Julie Kliegman, author of Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes.Website - https://juliekliegman.com/index.htmlEmail - jmkliegman@gmail.comTwitter - @jmkliegmanVisit our Sponsors!Dr. Dish BasketballFind the perfect shooting machine for your team during Dr. Dish Basketball's Fall in Love with More Reps Sale. Now until 2/29, choose between two major offers- $2,000 Off a Dr. Dish CT+ and free shipping OR $6,000 Off two Rebel+!Fast Model SportsFastModel Sports has the most compelling and intuitive basketball software out there! In addition to a great product, they also provide basketball coaching content and resources through their blog and playbank, which features over 8,000 free plays and drills from their online coaching community. For access to these plays and more information, visit
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Bestselling author, Adelle Waldman, spoke with me about her former life as a journalist, writerly wish fulfillment, and going undercover for her latest workplace novel, Help Wanted. Adelle Waldman is a journalist and the bestselling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Economist, NPR, The New Republic, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and many others. Her latest novel, Help Wanted, is from W.W. Norton in March of 2024, and described as a “funny, eye-opening tale of work in contemporary America.” It has been named one of New York Magazine's "23 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2024," VOGUE's Best Books of the Year So Far, ELLE's Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction of 2024, Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024, and one of Kirkus's Most Anticipated Books of 2024. A starred Kirkus Review called the book, "The workplace dramedy of the year." Publishers Weekly said of the book, "A bracing and worthwhile glimpse of the high stakes faced by low-wage workers." Adelle attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, among others. [Discover The Writer Files Extra: Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox at writerfiles.fm] [If you're a fan of The Writer Files, please click FOLLOW to automatically see new interviews. And drop us a rating or a review wherever you listen] In this file Adelle Waldman and I discussed: Why she turned to journalism as a day job Writing a hard-to-like protagonist The breakout success of her first novel How co-workers and friends at a Big Box store inspired her latest Found comedy, unfortunate nerds, unrealistic dreams And a lot more! Show Notes: adellewaldman.com Help Wanted: A Novel by Adelle Waldman (Amazon) Adelle Waldman Amazon Author Page Kelton Reid on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jordan talks with Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) about money, freedom, his recent period of creative fecundity, and the enduring power of art.MENTIONED:The Golden Bowl by Henry JamesAppropriate by Branden Jacobs-JenkinsFamily Meal by Bryan WashingtonZero K by Don DeLilloAgnes MartinRumaan Alam is the author of three novels: Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. Other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the New Republic. He studied writing at Oberlin College and now lives in New York with his family. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Purchase your own copy of Queer Data Studies here: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/9780295751979.
Introducing our new podcast all about the future of magazines — and the magazines of the future. Check out episode 1, our interview with Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones.—Radhika Jones was named editor in chief of Vanity Fair in November 2017, the fifth editor in the magazine's storied history. Her hiring was met with some surprise, and more than a little skepticism. The Guardian called her bookish, as if that's an insult. She arrived at Vanity Fair from a path that included stints at The New York Times where she was the editorial director of the book section and Time magazine where she managed the Time 100, as well as The Paris Review, Art Forum, Book Forum, and Grand Street.Now, more than six years later, Jones sits at the center of a massive media ecosystem that encompasses digital, social, print, video, and experiential platforms. The magazine has been called the curator of American culture, and sits under the flagship of Condé Nast. The good news is the numbers, including print, are not just good, they're up across all platforms.We caught up with Jones after she had put Vanity Fair's flagship Hollywood issue to bed, but before the whirlwind of events that culminates in the very famous party the magazine hosts once the Oscars are done. The Hollywood issue is out today. Print Is Dead (Long Live Print!) is a production of Magazeum & MO.D ©2021–2024
In this first episode for 2024, we discuss a slightly different article: Matthew Wilcoxen's own ‘The Bible is not “like any other book”': Katherine Sonderegger and the Bible as Vestigium Trinitatis' (IJST, September 2023). This was an article which discussed Sonderegger's recent Systematic Theology Vol. 2 and was presented at a Book Forum at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting 2023. It was followed by Sonderegger's own response to Matthew's article, as well as two other panellists:Kirsten Sanders "A Treasure hidden in a field: Katherine Sonderegger on Scripture"and Philip G. Ziegler "To Think and to Speak of the Living God: Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology, Volume 2"
In Season One, we looked at the representation of arts educators on television with Christina Anthony (Episode 8, for those who want to give it a listen). This season, we are taking a look at a few arts educators from the big screen, and who better to speak with than Dana Stevens, Slate's film critic since 2006 and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest (the magazine's weekly culture podcast). She has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Bookforum. Her first book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, NPR, and Publishers Weekly. Your homework, should you choose to accept it, is a rewatch of DEAD POETS SOCIETY, CAMP, and WHIPLASH. Check out more from Dana: Her (amazing) Buster Keaton book on Amazon: https://bit.ly/danastevensbusterkeaton Slate Culture Gabfest: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/culture-gabfest/id1482212953 IG: @thehighsign Century Tree; composed by Victoria Williams; performed by Aisha Dehaas, Idina Menzel, John Eric Parker; ℗ 2003 Universal Classics Group, a Division of UMG Recordings Inc.
Literary agent Emma Dries is a writer and editor, and an agent at Triangle House Literary, where she represents literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and academic crossover, with a special interest in climate writing. She began her career in editorial, working with bestselling and award winning authors at Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday, Ecco, and Flatiron Books. She has a BA in History from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins, where she also taught undergraduate fiction and poetry. Her writing has been published in Lit Hub, Bookforum, Outside and Dwell and she was the finalist for the Boston Review 2021 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. Emma joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about about unlikeable characters in fiction, query letters, MFAs, when you know a manuscript is ready to send out, ageism, a conversation you should have with an agent before signing, and much more. For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. You can also support the show by buying books at our new bookstore on bookshop.org. We've stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our own personal favorites. By purchasing through the store, you'll support both independent bookstores and our show. Finally, on Spotify you can listen to an album's worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners. (Recorded on January 20, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessWe reflect on an (overdetermined) nine-month anniversary for Ordinary Unhappiness, including conversations with guests and reading recommendations – and then we take your calls! The mailbag includes a question about the libidinal dimensions of leftist political organizing, why people feel driven to do it, and if they'd be happier if they were less engaged; a question about growing up in and then leaving a tight-knit religious community, and how much genuine psychic change any of us can experience when it comes to ingrained patterns of relating to the self and others. Texts we discussed and recommended:New Parapraxis (Issue 3, The Wish): https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/magazineHannah Zeavin, “What's Behind the Freud Resurgence?” in The Chronicle of Higher Education: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-old-mans-back-againAlex Colston, “This War Is Causing Mass Trauma. How We Respond Matters,” in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gaza-trauma-israel/, written in response to Mohammed R. Mhawish's All We Want in Gaza Is to Live https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-dispatch-survival/ Lydia Polgreen, “Born This Way? Born Which Way?” in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/opinion/politics/life-without-regret.html Moira Donegan, “Radical Attention” (on Judith Herman) in Bookforum: https://www.bookforum.com/print/3001/pioneering-therapist-judith-herman-s-studies-of-trauma-and-justice-25213Interview with Mariame Kaba, “Hope is a Discipline,” available as audio or transcript here: https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/activism/hope-is-a-discipline/George E. Vaillaint's The Wisdom of the Ego, available at Bookshop.orgHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you've traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
Rumaan Alam is the bestselling author of the novel Leave the World Behind, available in trade paperback from Ecco Books. In 2020, it was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it is now a major motion picture, directed by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali. Alam's other books include Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the 1950s and 60s, Coenties Slip—an obscure street on the lower tip of Manhattan overlooking the East River—was home to some of the most iconic artists in history, and who would define American Art during their time there: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, these artists created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation. Prudence Peiffer is the kind of art historian who understands the importance of context and place, and her book, “The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever” provides the kind of rich context and human detail that textbooks could only dream of. She joined me to discuss the history of these artists, why we have such a hard time seeing artists as people, the friction between accessible artists and their inaccessible art, why watching Robert Indiana eat a mushroom for 39 minutes is actually totally beautiful, and what it means to authentically nudge art history towards inclusion. Prudence Peiffer is an art historian, writer, and editor, specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is Director of Content at MoMA, New York. She was a Senior Editor at Artforum magazine from 2012-2017, and Digital Content Director at David Zwirner in 2018. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Artforum, and Bookforum, among other publications. Her book, “The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever” has been longlisted for the National Book Award. See the images: https://bit.ly/3rOM7vE Music used: The Blue Dot Session, “Skyforager” Rufus Wainwright, “11:11” Support the show: www.patreon.com/lonelypalette
Roxane Gay is the author of the essay collection Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business, available from Harper. Roxane's other books include the essay collection Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; the memoir Hunger, which was a New York Times bestseller and received a National Book Critics Circle citation; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney's, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has also been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and other anthologies. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram YouTube TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices