Podcasts about my brilliant friend

In Ep. 194, Catherine (@GilmoreGuide) and Sarah head back to the year 2017 in the book world with this second annual special retrospective episode!  They share big bookish highlights for that year, including book news, award winners, and what was going on in the world outside of reading. They also talk about how their own 2017 reading shook out, including their favorite 2017 releases.  Plus, a quick run-down of listener-submitted favorites!  This episode is overflowing with great backlist titles to add to your TBR!   This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Highlights The big news that was going on outside the book world. The book stories and trends that dominated 2017. How similar 2017 and 2025 are. The 2017 books that have had staying power.⁠ Was this as dismal a year in books as Sarah remembers? Sarah's and Catherine's personal 2017 reading stats.⁠ Listener-submitted favorites from 2017.⁠ Bookish Time Capsule (2017) [2:12] The World Beyond Books No books mentioned in this segment. The Book Industry Wonder by R. J. Palacio (2012) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [9:59] Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (2015) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [10:04] A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[10:40] The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [10:44] Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [12:08] My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [12:18] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:03] If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:13] We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [13:23] Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:46] Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:48] The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:50] Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (2025) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [14:57] Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [15:03] James by Percival Everett (2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [15:04] Bookish Headlines and Trends Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [20:41] A Promised Land by Barack Obama (2020) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [20:43] The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (2006) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [20:48] My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [23:04] The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring (2023) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [23:31] Big Books and Award Winners of 2017 A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (2012) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:01] Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:06] The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [26:21] Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:27] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:48] Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (2022) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [28:09] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [28:39] Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [29:23] Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [29:40] Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [31:31] Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2008) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [32:09] Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [32:51] Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [33:16] Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [33:41] Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [34:32] Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [34:38] Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [35:09] The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [35:52] What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [36:56] Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [37:21] The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [37:45] Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [38:04] The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, 3) by N. K. Jemisin (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [38:30]  Our Top Books of 2017 The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [40:46] Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [41:20] Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [41:22] Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:02] If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:16] Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolitio (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:23] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:36] This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [42:38] Trophy Son by Douglas Brunt (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:48] White Fur by Jardine Libaire (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [43:05] Final Girls by Riley Sager (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [46:38] Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [46:44] Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [46:46] Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [46:49] The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:10] Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman (1995) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:15] Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:19] The Heirs by Susan Rieger (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:34] The Takedown by Corrie Wang (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:53] Feast of Sorrow by Crystal King (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [48:01] Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [48:09] Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) | Amazon | Bookshop.org   [48:17] Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [48:28] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [48:33] Listeners' Top Books of 2017 Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [49:33] Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [49:51] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:03] The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[50:07] Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [50:13] Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:15] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [50:18] The Alice Network by Kate Quinn (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [50:24] This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:25] Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:27]

The celebrated artist, Sir Grayson Perry, has a new exhibition of work, Delusions of Grandeur, made in direct response to the masterpieces at the Wallace Collection in London (until 26th October). He candidly admits he initially found the Collection's opulence difficult to work with, until he created an alter-ego artist, Shirley, who was inspired by the aesthetic.In recent years museums and art galleries have become a regular battleground in the culture wars. One of today's anti-woke warriors is the writer Lionel Shriver. Her latest satirical novel, Mania, imagines a world where intellectual meritocracy is heresy; the words 'stupid' and 'smart' are no longer acceptable, and novels like The Idiot and My Brilliant Friend are banned.In Shriver's imaginative world language and thought is heavily policed, speech is free only if it doesn't offend. The academic Fara Dabhoiwala has written about the emergence of this contested idea, in What Is Free Speech? He shows in the shifting story of the last three hundred years that freedom of speech is not an absolute from which different societies have drifted or dissented, but a much more mercurial, complicated matter.Producer: Katy Hickman

After enjoying her new book Open Socrates so much (and having written about her previous book Aspiration in Second Act), I was delighted to talk to Agnes Callard, not least because, as she discusses in Open Socrates, she is a big Tolstoy admirer. We talked about Master and Man, one of my favourite Tolstoy stories, but also about the value of reading fiction, the relationship between fiction and a thought experiment, and other topics of related interest. George Eliot makes an appearance too. In the discussion about the use of fiction in philosophy classes, I was slightly shocked to hear about how much (or how little) reading her undergraduates are prepared to do, but I was interested that they love Pessoa. Agnes has previously written that the purpose of art is to show us evil. Here is Agnes on Twitter. Transcript below, may contain errors!I found this especially interesting.Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.Transcript (AI generated)Henry: Today, I am talking to Agnes Callard, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, author of Aspiration, and now most recently, Open Socrates. But to begin with, we are going to talk about Tolstoy. Hello, Agnes: .Agnes: Hello.Henry: Shall we talk about Master of Man first?Agnes: Yeah, absolutely.Henry: So this is one of Tolstoy's late stories. I think it's from 1895. So he's quite old. He's working on What is Art? He's in what some people think is his crazy period. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about because you write a lot in Open Socrates about Tolstoy's midlife crisis, for want of a better word. Yeah. So what did you think?Agnes: So I think it's sort of a novel, a story about almost like a kind of fantasy of how a midlife crisis could go if it all went perfectly. Namely, there's this guy, Brekhunov, is that his name? And he is, you know, a landowner and he's well off and aristocratic. And he is selfish and only cares about his money. And the story is just, he takes this, you know, servant of his out to, he wants to go buy a forest and he wants to get there first before anyone else. And so he insists on going into this blizzard and he gets these opportunities to opt out of this plan. And he keeps turning them down. And eventually, you know, they end up kind of in the middle of the blizzard. And at kind of the last moment, when his servant is about to freeze to death, he throws himself on top of the servant and sacrifices himself for the servant. And the reason why it seems like a fantasy is it's like, it's like a guy whose life has a lacuna in it where, you know, where meaning is supposed to be. And he starts to get an inkling of the sort of terror of that as they're spending more and more time in the storm. And his initial response is like to try to basically abandon the servant and go out and continue to get to this forest. But eventually he like, it's like he achieves, he achieves the conquest of meaning through this heroic act of self-sacrifice that is itself kind of like an epiphany, like a fully fulfilling epiphany. He's like in tears and he's happy. He dies happy in this act of self-sacrifice. And the fantasy part of it is like, none of it ever has to get examined too carefully. It doesn't like, his thought doesn't need to be subjected to philosophical scrutiny because it's just this, this one momentary glorious kind of profusion of love. And then it all ends.Henry: So the difficult question is answered the moment it is asked. Exactly, exactly, right?Agnes: It's sort of, it's, I see it as like a counterpart to the death of Ivan Ilyich.Henry: Tell me, tell me more.Agnes: Well, in the death of Ivan Ilyich, the questions surface for even, you know, when death shows up for him. And he suddenly starts to realize, wait a minute, I've lived my whole life basically in the way that Brekhunov did. Basically in the way that Brekhunov does as, you know, pursuing money, trying to be a socially successful person. What was the point of all that? And he finds himself unable to answer it. And he finds himself, it's the exact opposite. He becomes very alienated from his wife and his daughter, I think.Henry: Yeah.Agnes: And the absence of an answer manifests as this absence of connection to anyone, except an old manservant who like lifts up his legs and that's the one relief that he gets. And, you know, it's mostly in the gesture of like someone who will sacrifice themselves for another. Right, that's once again where sort of meaning will show up for a Tolstoy, if it ever will show up in a kind of direct and unashamed way.Henry: Right, the exercise of human compassion is like a running theme for him. Like if you can get to that, things are going great. Otherwise you've really screwed up.Agnes: Yeah, that's like Tolstoy's deus ex machina is the sudden act of compassion.Henry: Right, right. But you think this is unphilosophical?Agnes: I think it's got its toe in philosophical waters and sort of not much more than that. And it's in a way that makes it quite philosophical in the sense that there's a kind of awareness of like a deep puzzle that is kind of like at the heart of existence. Like there's a sensitivity to that in Tolstoy that's part of what makes him a great writer. But there's not much faith in the prospect of sort of working that through rationally. It's mostly something we just got a gesture at.Henry: But he does think the question can be answered. Like this is what he shares with you, right? He does think that when you're confronted with the question, he's like, it's okay. There is an answer and it is a true answer. We don't just have to make some, he's like, I've had the truth for you.Agnes: Yes, I think that that's right. But I think that like the true answer that he comes to is it's compassion and it's sort of religiously flavored compassion, right? I mean, that it's important. It's not just. Yeah, it's a very Christian conclusion. Right, but the part that's important there in a way, even if it's not being Christian, but that it's being religious in the sense of, yes, this is the answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to what the answer is, it's not going to be the right answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to why it's the answer, you're going the wrong way. That is, it's gotta, part of the way in which it's the answer is by faith.Henry: Or revelation.Agnes: Or, right, faith, exactly. But like, but it's not your task to search and use your rational faculties to find the answer.Henry: I wonder though, because one of the things Tolstoy is doing is he's putting us in the position of the searcher. So I read this, I'm trying to go through like all of Tolstoy at the moment, which is obviously not, it's not currently happening, but I'm doing a lot of it. And I think basically everything in Tolstoy is the quest for death, right? Literature is always about quests. And he's saying these characters are all on a quest to have a good death. And they come very early or very late to this. So Pierre comes very early to this realization, right? Which is why he's like the great Tolstoy hero, master of man, Ivan Ilyich, they come very, and Tolstoy is like, wow, they really get in under the wire. They nearly missed, this is terrible. And all the way through this story, Tolstoy is giving us the means to see what's really going on in the symbolism and in all the biblical references, which maybe is harder for us because we don't know our Bible, like we're not all hearing our Bible every week, whereas for Tolstoy's readers, it's different. But I think he's putting us in the position of the searcher all the time. And he is staging two sides of the argument through these two characters. And when they get to the village and Vasily, he meets the horse thief and the horse thief's like, oh, my friend. And then they go and see the family and the family mirrors them. And Tolstoy's like, he's like, as soon as you can see this, as soon as you can work this out, you can find the truth. But if you're just reading the story for a story, I'm going to have to catch you at the end. And you're going to have to have the revelation and be like, oh my God, it's a whole, oh, it's a whole thing. Okay, I thought they were just having a journey in the snow. And I think he does that a lot, right? That's, I think that's why people love War and Peace because we go on Pierre's journey so much. And we can recognize that like, people's lives have, a lot of people's lives happen like that. Like Pierre's always like half thinking the question through and then half like, oh, there's another question. And then thinking that one through and then, oh, no, wait, there's another question. And I think maybe Tolstoy is very pragmatic. Like that's as philosophical as most people are going to get. Pierre is in some ways the realistic ideal.Agnes: I mean, Pierre is very similar to Tolstoy just in this respect that there's a specific like moment or two in his life where, he basically has Tolstoy's crisis. That is he confronts these big questions and Tolstoy describes it as like, there was a screw in his head that had got loose and he kept turning it, but it kept, it was like stripped. And so no matter when you turned it, it didn't go. It didn't grab into anything. And what happens eventually is like, oh, he learns to have a good conventional home life. Like, and like not, don't ask yourself these hard questions. They'll screw you up. And I mean, it's not exactly compassion, but it's something close to that. The way things sort of work out in War and Peace. And I guess I think that you're sort of right that Tolstoy is having us figure something out for ourselves. And in that way, you could say we're on a journey. There's a question, why? Why does he have us do that? Why not just tell us? Why have it figured out for ourselves? And one reason might be because he doesn't know, that he doesn't know what he wants to tell us. And so you got to have them figure out for themselves. And I think that that is actually part of the answer here. And it's even maybe part of what it is to be a genius as a writer is to be able to write from this place of not really having the answers, but still be able to help other people find them.Henry: You don't think it's, he wants to tell us to be Christians and to believe in God and to take this like.Agnes: Absolutely, he wants to tell us that. And in spite of that, he's a great writer. If that were all he was achieving, he'd be boring like other writers who just want to do that and just do that.Henry: But you're saying there's something additional than that, that is even mysterious to Tolstoy maybe.Agnes: Yeah.Henry: Did you find that additional mystery in Master in Man or do you see that more in the big novels?Agnes: I see it the most in Death of Ivan Ilyich. But I think it's true, like in Anna Karenina, I can feel Tolstoy being pulled back and forth between on the one hand, just a straight out moralistic condemnation of Anna. And of, there are the good guys in this story, Levine and Kitty, and then there's this like evil woman. And then actually being seduced by her charms at certain moments. And it's the fact that he is still susceptible to her and to the seductions of her charms, even though that's not the moral of the story, it's not the official lesson. There's like, he can't help but say more than what the official lesson is supposed to be. And yeah, I think if he were just, I think he makes the same estimation of himself that I am making in terms of saying, look, he finds most of his own art wanting, right? In what is art? Because it's insufficiently moralistic basically, or it's doing too much else besides being, he's still pretty moralistic. I mean, even War and Peace, even Anna Karenina, he's moralistic even in those texts, but his artistry outstrips his moralism. And that's why we're attracted to him, I think. If he were able to control himself as a writer and to be the novelist that he describes as his ideal in what is art, I don't think we would be so interested in reading it.Henry: And where do you see, you said you saw it in Ivan Ilyich as well.Agnes: Yes, so I think in Ivan Ilyich, it is in the fact that there actually is no deus ex machina in Ivan Ilyich. It's not resolved. I mean, you get this little bit of relation to the servant, but basically Ivan Ilyich is like the closest that Tolstoy comes to just like full confrontation with the potential meaninglessness of human existence. There's something incredibly courageous about it as a text.Henry: So what do you think about the bit at the end where he says he was looking for his earlier accustomed fear of death, but he couldn't find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear whatsoever because there was no death. Instead of death, there was light. Suddenly he said, oh, that's it, oh bliss.Agnes: Okay, fair enough. I'd like forgotten that.Henry: Oh, okay. Well, so my feeling is that like you're more right. So my official thing is like, I don't agree with that, but I actually think you're more right than I think because to me that feels a bit at the end like he saw the light and he, okay, we got him right under the line, it's fine. And actually the bulk of the story just isn't, it's leading up to that. And it's the very Christian in all its imagery and symbolism, but it's interesting that this, when it's, this is adapted into films like Ikiru and there was a British one recently, there's just nothing about God. There's nothing about seeing the light. They're just very, very secular. They strip this into something totally different. And I'm a little bit of a grumpy. I'm like, well, that's not what Tolstoy was doing, but also it is what he was doing. I mean, you can't deny it, right? The interpreters are, they're seeing something and maybe he was so uncomfortable with that. That's why he wrote what is art.Agnes: Yeah, and that's the, I like that. I like that hypothesis. And right, I think it's like, I sort of ignore those last few lines because I'm like, ah, he copped out at the very end, but he's done the important, he's done the important, the important work, I think, is for instance, the scene with, even on his wife, where they part on the worst possible terms with just hatred, you know, like just pure hatred for the fact that she's forcing him to pretend that he isn't dying. Like that is like the profound moment.Henry: What I always remember is they're playing cards in the other room. And he's sitting there, he's lying there thinking about like the office politics and curtain, like what curtain fabrics we have to pick out and the like, his intense hatred of the triviality of life. And I love this because I think there's something, like a midlife crisis is a bit like being an adolescent in that you go through all these weird changes and you start to wonder like, who am I? What is my life? When you're an adolescent, you're told that's great. You should go ahead and you should, yes, lean into that. And when you're like in your forties, people are going, well, try and just put a lid on that. That's not a good idea. Whereas Tolstoy has the adolescent fury of like curtains and cards. Oh my, you know, you can feel the rage of his midlife crisis in some of that seemingly mundane description. Yeah. I think that's what we respond to, right? That like his hatred in a way.Agnes: Yeah. I mean, maybe we, many of us just have trouble taking ourselves as seriously as Tolstoy was able to, you know? And that's something, there's something glorious about that, that anyone else would listen to the people around them telling him, hey, don't worry, you're a great guy. Look, you wrote these important novels. You're a hero of the Russian people. You've got this wife, you're an aristocrat. You've got this family, you've got your affairs. I mean, come on, you've got everything a man could want. Just be happy with it all, you know? Many of us might be like, yeah, okay, I'm being silly. And Tolstoy is like, no one's going to tell me that I'm silly. Like I'm the one who's going to tell myself, if anything. And that kind of confidence is, you know, why he's sort of not willing to dismiss this thought.Henry: Yeah, yeah, interesting. So how do you think of Master and Man in relation to all the others? Because you know Tolstoy pretty well. You teach him a lot. How do you place it? Like how good do you think it is?Agnes: I don't teach him a lot. I'm trying to think if I ever taught Tolstoy.Henry: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I read that you had.Agnes: I've taught The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's the one, I have taught that one. I wish, I mean, I would love to teach. I just can't imagine assigning any of these novels in a philosophy, my students wouldn't read it.Henry: They wouldn't read it?Agnes: No.Henry: Why?Agnes: It's pretty hard to get people to read long texts. And I mean, some of them certainly would, okay, for sure. But if I'm, you know, in a philosophy class where you'd have to kind of have pretty high numbers of page assignments per class, if we're going to, I mean, you know, forget War and Peace. I mean, even like Ivan Ilyich is going to be pushing it to assign it for one class. I've learned to shorten my reading assignments because students more and more, they're not in the habit of reading. And so I got to think, okay, what is the minimum that I can assign them that where I can predict that they will do it? Anyway, I'm going to be pushing that next year in a class I'm teaching. I normally, you know, I assign fiction in some of my classes but that's very much not a thing that most philosophers do. And I have to sign it alongside, you know, but so it's not only the fiction they're reading, they're also reading philosophical texts. And anyway, yeah, no, so I have not done much, but I have done in a class on death, I did assign Ivan Ilyich. I don't tend to think very much about the question, what is the level of quality of a work of art?Henry: Well, as in, all I mean is like, how does it compare for you to the other Tolstoy you've read?Agnes: I, so the question that I tend to ask myself is like, what can I learn from it or how much can I learn? Not, it's not because I don't think the question of, the other one is a good one. I just think I trust other people's judgment more than mine unlike artistic quality. And I guess I think it's not as good as Death of Ivan Ilyich and I kind of can't see, like, it's like, what do I learn from it that I don't learn from Death of Ivan Ilyich? Which is like a question that I ask myself. And, there's a way in which that like that little final move, maybe when I'm reading Death of Ivan Ilyich, I can ignore that little final bit and here I can't ignore it. Tolstoy made it impossible for me to ignore in this story. So that's maybe the advantage of this story. Tolstoy makes his move more overt and more dominating of the narrative.Henry: Yeah, I think also, I've known people who read Ivan Ilyich and not really see that it's very Christian. Yeah, oh yeah.Agnes: I don't think I- Much less.Henry: Yeah.Agnes: That's what I'm doing. I'm erasing that from the story.Henry: But that's like much less possible with this one. I agree.Agnes: Right, exactly. That's sort of what I mean is that- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, here the message is more overt. And so therefore I think it's actually a pretty important story in that way. Like, let's say for understanding Tolstoy. That is, if you were to try to take your view of Tolstoy and base it on Death of Ivan Ilyich, which sometimes I do in my own head, because it's occupied such an important place for me, then this is a good way to temper that.Henry: Yeah, they make a nice pairing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let's pick up on this question about philosophers and fiction because you write about that in Open Socrates. You say, great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from. So it makes questions askable, but then you say only in relation to fictional characters, which you think is a limitation. Are you drawing too hard of a line between fictional characters and real people? Like if someone said, oh, we found out, we were in the archives, Ivan Ilyich, he didn't, it's not fiction. He was just a friend, just happened to a friend, basically word for word. He just did the work to make it kind of look okay for a novel, but basically it's just real. Would that really change very much?Agnes: I think it wouldn't, no. So it might change a little bit, but not that much. So maybe the point, maybe a better thing I could have said there is other people. That is one thing that fictional people are is resolutely other. There's no chance you're going to meet them. And like they are, part of what it is for them to be fictional is that, there isn't even a possible world in which you meet them because metaphysically what they are is the kind of thing that can't ever interact with you. And, like the possible world in which I run into Ivan and Ivan Ilyich is the world in which he's not a Tolstoy character anymore. He's not a character in a novel, obviously, because we're both real people. So I think it's that there's a kind of safety in proving the life of somebody who is not in any way a part of your life.Henry: The counter argument, which novelists would make is that if you gave some kind of philosophical propositional argument about death, about what it means to die, a lot of people just wouldn't, they'd like, maybe they'd understand what you're saying, but it just wouldn't affect them very much. Whereas if they've read Ivan Ilyich, this will actually affect them. I don't want to say it'll resonate with them, but you know what I mean. It will catch them in some way and they're more likely then to see something in their own life and be like, oh my God, I'm appreciating what Ivan Ilyich was telling me. Whereas, this is the argument, right? The statistics of social science, the propositions of philosophy, this just never gets through to people.Agnes: Yeah, so one way to put this is, novelists are fans of epiphanies. I mean, some novelists, like Tolstoy, it's quite explicit. You just get these epiphanies, right? Like in this story, epiphany. James Joyce, I mean, he's like master of every story in Dubliners, epiphany. Novelists have this fantasy that people's lives are changed in a sudden moment when they have a passionate, oh, I just read this story and I'm so happy about it. And I don't actually doubt that these things happen, these epiphanies, that is people have these passionate realizations. I don't know how stable they are. Like they may have a passionate realization and then, maybe it's a little bit the novelist's fantasy to say you have the passionate realization and everything is changed. In this story, we get around that problem because he dies, right? So, that, I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce. I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce is in my head. The final story in Dubliners is the dead. And there's this like, amazing, I don't know who read the story.Henry: Yeah, yeah. Also with snow, right?Agnes: Yeah, exactly.You know, and it's this amazing where this guy is realizing his wife, their relationship is not what he thought it was, whatever. But then the story ends, does he really change? Like, do they just go on and have the same marriage after that point? We don't know. I mean, Joyce avoids that question by having the story end. But, so you might say, you know, novelists like epiphanies and they're good at writing epiphanies and producing epiphanies and imagining that their readers will have epiphanies. And then there's a question, okay, how valuable is the epiphany? And I think, not nothing. I wouldn't put it at zero, but you might say, okay, but let's compare the epiphany and the argument, right? So, what philosophers and the social scientists have, what we have is arguments. And who's ever been changed by an argument? And I think I would say all of human history has been changed by arguments and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever done anything to stably change us is arguments. If you think about, like, what are the things we've moved on? What are the things we've come around on? You know, human rights, there's a big one. That's not a thing in antiquity. And it's a thing now. And I think it's a thing because of arguments. Some of those arguments, you know, are starting to come in their own in religious authors, but then really come in, the flourishing is really the enlightenment. And so you might think, well, maybe an argument is not the kind of thing that can change very easily an adult who was already pretty set in their ways and who is not going to devote much of their time to philosophizing. It isn't going to give them the kind of passionate feeling of your life has suddenly been turned around by an epiphany, but it might well be that if we keep arguing with each other, that is how humanity changes.Henry: I think a lot of the arguments were put into story form. So like the thing that changed things the most before the enlightenment maybe was the gospels. Which is just lots of stories. I know there are arguments in there, but basically everything is done through stories. Or metaphor, there's a lot of metaphor. I also think philosophers are curiously good at telling stories. So like some of the best, you know, there's this thing of micro fiction, which is like very, very short story. I think some of the best micro fiction is short stories. Is a thought experiment, sorry. Yeah. So people like Judith Jarvis Thompson, or well, his name has escaped my head, Reasons and Persons, you know who I mean? Derek Parfit, right. They write great short stories. Like you can sit around and argue about long-termism with just propositions, and people are going to be either like, this makes total sense or this is weird. And you see this when you try and do this with people. If you tell them Parfit's thought experiment that you drop a piece of glass in the woods, and a hundred years later, a little girl comes in and she cuts up. Okay, everyone's a long-termist in some way now. To some extent, everyone is just like, of course. Okay, fine. The story is good. The famous thought experiment about the child drowning in the pond. And then, okay, the pond is like 3000. Again, everyone's like, okay, I get it. I'm with you. Philosophers constantly resort to stories because they know that the argument is, you have to have to agree with you. You've got to have the argument. The argument's the fundamental thing. But when you put it in a story, it will actually, somehow it will then do its work.Agnes: I think it's really interesting to ask, and I never asked myself this question, like what is the relationship between a thought experiment and a story? And I think that, I'm fine with a thought experiment with saying it's a kind of story, but I think that, so one feature of a thought experiment is that the person who is listening to it is given often a kind of agency. Like, which way do you push the trolley? Or do you care that you left this piece of glass there? Or are you, suppose that the pond was so many miles away but there was a very long hand that reached from here and you put a coin in the machine and at the other end, the hand will pull the child out of the water. Do you put the coin in, right? So like you're given these choices. It's like a choose your own adventure story, right? And that's really not what Tolstoy wrote. He really did not write choose your own adventure stories. There's a, I think he is-Henry: But the philosopher always comes in at the end and says, by the way, this is the correct answer. I'm giving you this experiment so that you can see that, like, I'm proving my point. Peter Singer is not like, it's okay if you don't want to jump into the pond. This is your story, you can pick. He's like, no, you have to jump in. This is why I'm telling you the story.Agnes: That's right, but I can't tell it to you without, in effect, your participation in the story, without you seeing yourself as part of the story and as having like agency in the story. It's by way of your agency that I'm making your point. Part of why this is important is that otherwise philosophers become preachers, which is what Tolstoy is when he's kind of at his worst. That is, you know, the philosopher doesn't just want to like tell you what to think. The philosopher wants to show you that you're already committed to certain conclusions and he's just showing you the way between the premises you already accept and the conclusion that follows from your premises. And that's quite-Henry: No, philosophers want to tell you the particular, most philosophers create a thought experiment to be like, you should be a virtue ethicist or you should give money away. Like they're preaching.Agnes: I don't think that is preaching. So I think that, and like, I think that this is why so many philosophical thought experiments are sort of meant to rely on what people call intuitions. Like, oh, but don't you have the intuition that? What is the intuition? The intuition is supposed to be somehow the kind of visceral and inchoate grasp that you already have of the thing I am trying to teach you. You already think the thing I'm telling you. I'm just making it clear to you what you think. And, you know, like there's like, I want to go back to the gospels. Like, I think it's a real question I have. I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I feel like something I sometimes think about Jesus and I say this as a non-Christian, is that Jesus was clearly a really exceptional, really extraordinary human being. And maybe he just never met his Plato. You know, he got these guys who are like telling stories about him. But like, I feel like he had some really interesting thoughts that we haven't accessed. Imagine, imagine if Socrates only ever had Xenophon. You know, if Socrates had never met Plato. We might just have this story about Socrates. Oh, he's kind of like a hero. He was very self-sacrificing. He asked everyone to care about everybody else. And he might like actually look quite a bit like Jesus on a sort of like, let's say simplistic picture of him. And it's like, maybe it's a real shame that Jesus didn't have a philosopher as one of the people who would tell a story about him. And that if we had that, there would be some amazing arguments that we've missed out on.Henry: Is Paul not the closest thing to that?Agnes: What does he give us?Henry: What are the arguments? Well, all the, you know, Paulian theology is huge. I mean, all the epistles, they're full of, maybe, I don't know if they're arguments more than declarations, but he's a great expounder of this is what Jesus meant, you should do this, right? And it's not quite what you're saying.Agnes: It's conclusions, right?Henry: Yes, yes.Agnes: So I think it's like, you could sort of imagine if we only had the end of the Gorgias, where Socrates lists some of his sayings, right? Yes, exactly, yes. You know, it's better to have injustice done to you than to do injustice. It's better to be just than to appear just. Oratories should, you should never flatter anyone under any circumstances. Like, you know, there's others in other dialogues. Everyone desires the good. There's no such thing as weakness of will, et cetera. There are these sort of sayings, right? And you could sort of imagine a version of someone who's telling the story of Socrates who gives you those sayings. And yeah, I just think, well, we'd be missing a lot if we didn't hear the arguments for the sayings.Henry: Yeah, I feel stumped. So the next thing you say about novelists, novelists give us a view onto the promised land, but not more. And this relates to what you're saying, everything you've just been saying. I want to bring in a George Eliot argument where she says, she kind of says, that's the point. She says, I'm not a teacher, I'm a companion in the struggle of thought. So I think a lot of the time, some of the differences we're discussing here are to do with the readers more than the authors. So Tolstoy and George Eliot, Jane Austen, novelists of their type and their caliber. It's like, if you're coming to think, if you're involved in the struggle of thought, I'm putting these ideas in and I'm going to really shake you up with what's happening to these people and you're going to go away and think about it and Pierre's going to stay with you and it's really going to open things up. If you're just going to read the story, sure, yeah, sure. And at the end, we'll have the big revelation and that's whoopee. And that's the same as just having the sayings from Socrates and whatever. But if you really read Middlemarch, one piece, whatever, Adam Bede is always the one that stays with me. Like you will have to think about it. Like if you've read Adam Bede and you know what happens to Hetty at the end, this has the, oh, well, I'm not going to spoil it because you have to read it because it's insane. It's really an exceptional book, but it has some of those qualities of the thought experiment. She really does put you, George Eliot's very good at this. She does put you in the position of saying like, what actually went right and wrong here? Like she's really going to confront you with the situation but with the difficulty of just saying, oh, you know, that's easy. This is what happened. This is the bad thing. Well, there were several different things and she's really putting it up close to you and saying, well, this is how life is. You need to think about that.Agnes: So that last bit, I mean, I think that this is how life is part. Yeah. Really do think that that's something you get out of novels. It's not, so here's how you should live it or so here's why it makes sense, or here are the answers. It's none of the answers, I think. It's just that there's a kind of, it's like, you might've thought that given that we all live lives, we live in a constant contact with reality but I think we don't. We live in a bubble of what it's, the information that's useful to me to take in at any given moment and what do I need in order to make it to the next step? And there's a way in which the novel like confronts you with like the whole of life as like a spectacle or something like that, as something to be examined and understood. But typically I think without much guidance as to how you should examine or understand it, at least that's my own experience of it is that often it's like posing a problem to me and not really telling me how to solve it. But the problem is one that I often, under other circumstances, I'm inclined to look away from and the novelist sort of forces me to look at it.Henry: Does that mean philosophers should be assigning more fiction?Agnes: I, you know, I am in general pretty wary of judgments of that kind just because I find it hard to know what anyone should do. I mean, even myself, let alone all other philosophers.Henry: But you're the philosopher. You should be telling us.Agnes: No, I actually just don't think that is what philosophers do. So like, it was like a clear disagreement about, you know, is the, like George Eliot's like, I'm not a teacher, but the philosopher also says I'm not a teacher. I mean, Tolstoy was like, I am a teacher.Henry: Yeah, I'm a teacher.Agnes: I'm ready to guide you all.Henry: You should take notes.Agnes: But I think it's right that, yeah. So I think it's like, you know, maybe they have some other way of forcing that confrontation with reality. But I, my own feeling is that philosophers, when they use examples, including some of the thought experiments, it's sort of the opposite of what you said. It's kind of like they're writing very bad fiction. And so they'll come up with these, like I am philosophy. We have to, we're forced to sort of come up with examples. And, you know, I discuss one in my aspiration book of, oh, once upon a time, there was a guy. And when he was young, he wanted to be a clown, but his family convinced him that he should be an investment banker and make money. And so he did that. But then when he was older, he finally recovered this long lost desire. And then he became a clown and then he was happy. It's a story in an article by a philosopher I respect. Okay, I like her very much. And I haven't read it in a long time. So I'm hoping I'm summarizing it correctly. But my point is like, and this is supposed to be a story about how sort of self-creation and self-realization and how you can discover your authentic self by contrast with like the social forces that are trying to make you into a certain kind of person. But it's also, it's just a very bad piece of fiction. And I'm like, well, you know, if I'm say teaching a class on self-creation as I do sometimes, I'm like, well, we can read some novelists who write about this process and they write about it in a way that really shows it to us, that really forces us to confront the reality of it. And that story was not the reality. So if you have some other way to do that as a philosopher, then great. I'm very instrumental about my use of fiction, but I haven't found another way.Henry: Which other fiction do you use in the self-creation class?Agnes: So in that class, we read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. And we also read some Fernando Pessoa.Henry: Pessoa, what do your students think of Pessoa?Agnes: They love it. So when I first assigned it, I'm like, I don't know what you guys are going to make of this. It's kind of weird. We're reading like just, you know, 20 pages of excerpts I like from the Book of Disquiet. I mean, it's like my own text I'm creating, basically. I figure with that text, you can do a choose your own adventure. And they like it a lot. And I think that it really, that, you know, the thing that really resonates with them is this stuff where he talks. So there are two passages in particular. So one of them is, one where he talks about how he's like, yeah, he meets his friend. And he can't really listen to what his friend is saying, but he can remember with photographic precision the lines on the face when he's smiling, or like, it's like what he's saying is, I'm paying attention to the wrong thing. Like I'm paying attention to the facial expressions and not to the content. And that I'm somebody who's in a world where my organization of my own experience is not following the rules that are sort of being dictated to me about how my experience is supposed to be organized. And that's sort of his predicament. So that's a thing that they like. And then there's a wonderful passage about how I keep trying to free myself from the social forces oppressing me. And I take away this noose that's around my neck. And as I'm doing it, I realize my hand is attached to a noose and it's pulling me. Like I'm the one who's doing, I'm the one who's suffocating myself all along when I'm trying to free myself from social forces, it's me who's doing the oppressing. Anyway, so those are some passages that we talk about that they like. They like it a lot. They have a lot less trouble making something of it than I had expected that they would.Henry: Is this because he, is he well-suited to the age of social media and phones and fragmented personalities and you're always 16 different people? Is it that kind of thing?Agnes: Partly it's the short texts. I mean, as I said, meeting a problem, right? And so, yeah. So like they like Nietzsche too, probably for the same reason, right? I mean, anything where the-Henry: The aphorism.Agnes: Yeah, exactly. Like no joke. You know, it's not the era for War and Peace. It's the era for the Nietzschean aphorism.Henry: This is so depressing. I thought this wasn't true.Agnes: Yeah, I think it's true. I like, I had a conversation with a student in my office yesterday about this and about how like just his own struggles with reading and how all his friends have the same problem. And, you know, I have made some suggestions and I think maybe I need to push them harder in terms of, you know, just university creating device-free spaces and then people having like, I think we have to view it the way we view exercise. Like none of us would exercise if we didn't force ourselves to exercise. And we use strategies to do it. Like, you know, you have a friend and you're going to go together or, you know, you make a habit of it or whatever. I mean, like, I think we just have to approach reading the same way. Just let's accept that we're in an environment that's hostile to reading and make it a priority and organize things to make it possible rather than just like pretending that there isn't a problem. But yeah, there is. And it's hard for us to see. So you're not as old as me, but I'm old enough that all of my reading habits were formed in a world without all of this, right? So of course it's way easier for me. Even I get distracted, but, you know, for me spending a couple of hours in the evening reading, that's like a thing I can do. But like a lot of people, okay, I was at a like tech, in a little tech world conference in California. And it was early in the morning and my husband wasn't awake yet. So I was just, and it was one of these conferences where there's like a little group room and then you have your own, like we had like a hotel room type room, but like then I would had to be in the room with my husband who was sleeping. I couldn't turn the light on. So it was early. I woke up at four. So I went to the group room just to read. And I'm sitting there reading and someone came up to me and they were like, I can't believe you're just sitting there like reading. I don't think I've seen someone read a book in, you know, he's like ever or something, maybe. I mean, he's a half my age. Like he's like, that's just not a thing that people do. And it was like, he's like, it's so on brand that you're reading, you know? But it's like, it's, I think it's just, it's much harder for people who have grown up with all of this stuff that is in some way hostile to the world of reading. Yeah, it's much harder for them than for us. And we should be reorganizing things to make it easier.Henry: Yeah, I get that. I'm just, I'm alarmed that they can't read, like the depth of Ivan Ilyich. It's like, I don't know, it's like 50 pages or.Agnes: Yeah, for one class, no.Henry: It's very short. It's very short.Agnes: That's not short. 50 pages is not short.Henry: It's an hour or two hours of reading.Agnes: It's like, yeah, between two and three. They also read slower because they don't read as much.Henry: Okay, but you know what I'm like…Agnes: Yeah, right, three hours of reading is a lot to assign for a class. Especially if, in my case, I always also assign philosophy. So it's not the only thing I'm assigning.Henry: Sure, sure, but they read the philosophy.Agnes: Same problem. I mean, it's not like some different problem, right? Same problem, and in fact, they are a little bit more inclined to read the fiction than the philosophy, but the point is the total number of pages is kind of what matters. And from that point of view, philosophy is at an advantage because we compress a lot into very few pages. So, but you know, and again, it's like, it's a matter of like, it's probably not of the level. So I can, you know, I can be more sure that in an upper level class, students will do the reading, but I'm also a little bit more inclined to assign literature in the lower level classes because I'm warming people up to philosophy. So, yeah, I mean, but I think it is alarming, like it should be alarming.Henry: Now, one of the exciting things about Open Socrates, which most people listening to this would have read my review, so you know that I strongly recommend that you all read it now, but it is all about dialogue, like real dialogue. And can we find some, you know, I don't want to say like, oh, can we find some optimism? But like, people are just going to be reading less, more phones, all this talk about we're going back to an oral culture. I don't think that's the right way to phrase it or frame it or whatever, but there's much more opportunity for dialogue these days like this than there used to be. How can Open Socrates, how can people use that book as a way of saying, I want more, you know, intellectual life, but I don't want to read long books? I don't want to turn this into like, give us your five bullet points, self-help Socrates summary, but what can we, this is a very timely book in that sense.Agnes: Yeah, I kind of had thought about it that way, but yeah, I mean, it's a book that says, intellectual life in its sort of most foundational and fundamental form is social, it's a social life, because the kinds of intellectual inquiries that are the most important to us are ones that we can't really conduct on our own. I do think that, I think that some, there is some way in which, like as you're saying, novels can help us a little bit sort of simulate that kind of interaction, at least some of the time, or at least put a question on the table. I sort of agree that that's possible. I think that in terms of social encounters doing it, there are also other difficulties though. Like, so it's, we're not that close to a Socratic world, just giving up on reading doesn't immediately put us into a Socratic world, let's put it that way. And for one thing, I think that there really is a difference between face-to-face interaction, on the one hand, where let's even include Zoom, okay, or phone as face-to-face in an extended sense, and then texting, on the other hand, where text interaction, where like texting back and forth would be, fall under texting, so would social media, Twitter, et cetera, that's sort of- Email. Email, exactly. And I'm becoming more, when I first started working on this book, I thought, well, look, the thing that Socrates cares about is like, when he says that philosophy is like, you know, when he rejects written texts, and he's like, no, what I want to talk back, I'm like, well, the crucial thing is that they can respond, whether they respond by writing you something down or whether they respond by making a sound doesn't matter. And I agree that it doesn't matter whether they make a sound, like for instance, if they respond in sign language, that would be fine. But I think it matters that there is very little lag time between the responses, and you never get really short lag time in anything but what I'm calling face-to-face interaction.Henry: Right, there's always the possibility of what to forestall on text. Yeah. Whereas I can only sit here for like 10 seconds before I just have to like speak.Agnes: Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.Henry: So this, I do have a really, I'm really interested in this point. Your book doesn't contain scientific information, sociological studies. It's good old-fashioned philosophy, which I loved, but if you had turned it into more of a, this is the things you're telling me now, right? Oh, scientists have said this, and sociologists have said that. It could have been a different sort of book and maybe been, in some shallow way, more persuasive to more people, right? So you clearly made a choice about what you wanted to do. Talk me through why.Agnes: I think that it's maybe the answer here is less deep than you would want. I think that my book was based on the reading I was doing in order to write it, and I wasn't, at the time, asking myself the kinds of questions that scientists could answer. Coming off of the writing of it, I started to ask myself this question. So for instance, that's why I did all this reading in sociology, psychology, that's what I'm doing now is trying to learn. Why is it that we're not having philosophical conversations all the time? It's a real question for me. Why are we not having the conversations that I want us to be having? That's an empirical question, at least in part, because it's like, well, what kinds of conversations are we having? And then I have to sort of read up on that and learn about how conversation works. And it's surprising to me, like the amount of stuff we know, and that it's not what I thought. And so I'm not, maybe I'm a little bit less hostile than most philosophers, just as I'm less hostile to fiction, but I'm also less hostile to sort of empirical work. I mean, there's plenty of philosophers who are very open to the very specific kind of empirical work that is the overlap with their specialization. But for me, it's more like, well, depending on what question I ask, there's just like, who is ready with answers to the question? And I will like, you know, kind of like a mercenary, I will go to those people. And I mean, one thing I was surprised to learn, I'm very interested in conversation and in how it works and in what are the goals of conversation. And of course I started with philosophical stuff on it, you know, Grice and Searle, speech act theory, et cetera. And what I found is that that literature does not even realize that it's not about conversation. I mean, Grice, like the theory of conversational implicature and you know, Grice's logic on conversation, it's like if you thought that making a public service announcement was a kind of conversation, then it would be a theory of conversation. But the way that philosophers fundamentally understand speech is that like, you know, speakers issue utterances and then somebody has to interpret that utterance. The fact that that second person gets to talk too is not like part of the picture. It's not essential to the picture. But if you ask a sociologist, what is the smallest unit of conversation? They are not going to say an assertion. They're going to say something like greeting, greeting or question answer or command obeying or, right? Conversation is like, there's two people who get to talk, not just one person. That seems like the most obvious thing, but it's not really represented in the philosophical literature. So I'm like, okay, I guess I got to say goodbye philosophers. Let me go to the people who are actually talking about conversation. You know, I of course then read, my immediate thought was to read in psychology, which I did. Psychology is a bit shallow. They just don't get to theorize. It's very accessible. It's got lots of data, but it's kind of shallow. And then I'm like, okay, the people who really are grappling with the kind of deep structure of conversation are sociologists. And so that's what I've been reading a lot of in the past, like whatever, two months or so. But I just wasn't asking myself these questions when I wrote the book. And I think the kinds of questions that I was asking were in fact, the kinds of questions that get answered or at least get addressed in philosophical texts. And so those were the texts that I refer to.Henry: So all the sociology you've read, is it, how is it changing what you think about this? Is it giving you some kind of answer?Agnes: It's not changing any, my view, but any of the claims in the book, that is the exact reason that you brought out. But it is making me, it's making me realize how little I understand in a sort of concrete way, what like our modern predicament is. That is, where are we right now? Like what's happening right now? Is the question I ask myself. And I get a lot of, especially in interviews about this book, I get a lot of like, well, given where things are right now, is Socrates very timely? Or how can Socrates help or whatever? And I'm like, I don't think we know where things are right now. That is that given that, where is it? Where is it that we are? And so part of what this kind of sociology stuff is making me realize is like, that's a much harder question than it appears. And even where do we draw the lines? Like, when did now start happening? Like my instinct is like, one answer is like around 1900 is when now started happening. And, and so like, so I guess I'm interested both at the very micro level, how does the conversational interaction work? What are the ways in which I am deciding in this very conversation, I'm deciding what's allowed to be in and what's not allowed to be in the conversation, right? By the moves I'm making, and you're doing the same. How are we doing that? How are we orchestrating, manipulating this conversation so as to dictate what's in it and what's out of it in ways that are like below the surface that we're not noticing, that we either that we are doing it or that we're doing it ourselves. Neither of us is noticing, but we're doing that. So that's at the micro level. And then at the macro level is the question about when did now start happening? And what are the big shifts in like the human experience? And, are we at a point somehow in human history where culture like as a mechanism of coordination is a little bit falling apart and then what's going to come next? That's like a kind of question that I have to put in that kind of vague way. So maybe the right thing to say is that reading all these sociology texts has like, has given me a sets of questions to ask. And maybe what I'm trying to do is, it's like, what my book does is it describes a kind of ideal. And it describes that ideal, you know, using the power of reason to see what would it take to sort of set us straight? What is the straightened version of the crooked thing that we're already doing? And I think that that's right, but that's not at all the same thing as asking the question like, what's our next step? How do we get there from here? That's the question I'm asking now. But part of trying to answer the question, how do we get there from here is like, where are we now? And where are we both very, very locally in an interaction, what are we doing? And then in a big picture way, where are we? What is the big, what is like, you know, in the Taylor Swift sense, what era are we in? And, you know, I guess I still feel like we are, we are living in the world of Fernando Pessoa, Robert Musso, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hermann Bruch, Franz Kafka, like that set of writers, like around 1900-ish set of writers who didn't all know each other or anything, didn't coordinate, but they all, there was this like primal scream moment where they were like, what the hell is going on? What has happened to humanity? Where are the rules? Like, who are we supposed to be? I mean, of all of those, I would pull out Musso as like the paradigm example. So this is me, I guess, taking inspiration from literature again, where I feel like, okay, there's something there about we're lost. There's an expression of, there's a thought we're lost. And I'm trying to understand, okay, how did we get lost? And are we still in that state of being lost? I think yes. And let's get a clear, once we get very clear on how lost we are, we'll already start to be found. Cause that's sort of what it is to, you know, once you understand why you're lost, like that's situating yourself.Henry: Those writers are a long time ago.Agnes: Yeah, I said around 1900.Henry: Yeah, but you don't, you don't, but there's nothing more recent that like expresses, like that's a very long now.Agnes: Yeah. Well, yes, I agree. So I say, when did now start happening? I think it started happening around 1900. So I think-Henry: So are we stuck?Agnes: Yeah, kind of. I think, so here's like a very, he's like a very simple part of history that must be too simple because history is not, is like, it's very mildly not my strong suit. I can't really understand history. But it's like, there is this set of writers and they don't really tell stories. It's not their thing, right? They're not into plot, but they are issuing this warning or proclamation or crisis, like flashing thing. And then what happens? What happens after that? Well, World War I happens, right? And then, you know, not very long after that, we got World War II and especially World War II, the result of that is kind of, oh no, actually we know what good and bad are. It's like fighting Nazis, that's bad. And, you know, so we got it all settled. And, but it's like, it's like we push something under the rug, I guess. And I think we haven't dealt with it. We haven't dealt with this crisis moment. And so, you know, I think I could say something very similar about Knausgaard or something that is, I think he's kind of saying the same thing and his novel has a novel, whatever you want to call it, the, you know, I'm talking about the later one. That's the kind of weird sort of horror quadrilogy or something. It has this feeling of like trying to express a sense of being lost. So there's more recent stuff that, a lot of it's autofiction, the genre of autofiction has that same character. So yeah, like maybe there is some big progress that's been made since then, but if there is, then it has passed me by.Henry: Agnes: Callard, thank you very much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

This week's book guest is My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.In this episode Sara and Cariad discuss school, communism, slimy dads, scary dads, writing as freedom and when names are quite similar.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Trigger warning: In this episode we mention sexual assault.My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is available to buy here.Tickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukSara's debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad's book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Cariad's children's book The Christmas Wish-tastrophe is available to buy now.Follow Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before Hammo embarks on his favourite lists for 2024, he wanted to talk to you about two TV shows (Silo and My Brilliant Friend), and two comic series (Ice Cream Man and Something is Killing the Children) that he's thoroughly enjoying. The last recommendations for the year! Bonus Squid - Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we are discussing the much praised, and beloved novel, "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante. We delve into Ferrante's mysterious identity and discuss criticism in the modern age. But mostly we discuss this brilliant, personal, and captivating novel. One of the great things about this novel is the many layers it contains and we geek out on how Ferrante uses all the tools in a writers toolbox to create a memorable novel. Finally, we discuss our sports teams and how they're disappointments often lead us to serious books. And we're using that scenario to create a reading plan for some of our longer books on our TBR. As always thanks for listening and enjoy! Contact Us: Instagram @therewillbbooks Twitter @therewillbbooks Email willbebooks@gmail.com Goodreads: Therewillbebooks ko-fi.com/therewillbbooks patreon.com/therewillbbooks

Highlights of what's new in streaming for the week of September 7, 2024. Hulu The Old Man, season 2 (Sep. 13) How to Die Alone, season 1 (Sep. 13) In Vogue: The 90s (Sep. 13) Netflix Hot Wheels: Let's Race, season 2 (Sep. 9) Ahir Shah, End (Sep. 10) Jack Whitehall: Fatherhood with my Father (Sep. 10) Boxer (Sep. 11) The Circle, season 7 (Sep. 11) Outlaw (Sep. 11) Technoboys (Sep. 11) Ángel Di María: Breaking Down the Wall (Sep. 12) Billionaire Island, season 1 (Sep. 12) Emily in Paris, season 4, part 2 (Sep. 12) Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter (Sep. 12) Midnight at the Pera Palace, season 2 (Sep. 12) Uglies (Sep. 13) Disney+ LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy (Sep. 13) Max Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos (Sep. 7) My Brilliant Friend, season 4 (Sep. 9) Civil War (Sep. 13) Peacock His & Hers (Sep. 8) Colin Jost and Michael Che Present: New York After Dark (Sep. 12) Amazon Prime Video The Money Game (Sep. 10) Thursday Night Football (Sep. 12, 8pm ET / 5pm PT) The Grand Tour: One for the Road (Sep. 13) Hallmark+ Celebrations With Lacey Chabert, season 1 (Sep. 10) The Chicken Sisters, season 1 (Sep. 10) The Jane Mysteries: A Deadly Prescription (Sep. 10) Love on the Danube: Love Song (Sep. 10)

Geri Jewell is a Comedian/Actor/Motivational Speaker/Author and (thanks to Norman Lear) the trailblazing first person with a visible disability to appear as a TV show regular! Geri went straight from special ed to special treatment as a Facts of Life cast member, portraying Blair's Cousin Geri and providing essential representation for kids growing up and living with Cerebral Palsy. Geri's life and career have always been an inspiration, as evidenced by her brand new coffee table book 'Geri's Jewels & Gems', which will provide you with a fresh, positive perspective on the inevitable hardships and struggles we all face. Brace for Geri's sunny outlook, grit and determination to shift your mood and encourage you to pursue your own dreams! As a child, Geri's imagination took her to Wimbledon, standup comedy stages and Hollywood. She was soon exchanging letters with Carol Burnett, performing at the Comedy Store and playing doubles with John McEnroe and Arthur Ash! Her mother had warned her, “Be careful what you wish for.” Geri teaches us that kids with disabilities often grow up emotionally stunted because so much emphasis is placed on their physical development. Cast in an NBC sitcom at the age of 23, Geri was a rich target for unscrupulous managers and “friends.” She frequently lost her way while being misunderstood, underestimated and searching for the courage to live an openly gay life. The physical beating of Cerebral Palsy can be very painful and poor balance leads to debilitating falls. Geri was recovering from back and neck surgery, waiting in line at CVS to purchase botox for her neck pain when David Milch approached her and felt inspired to cast her in Deadwood! Your next miracle could be just around the corner! Geri talks to us about her first inspirational book called I'm Walking As Straight As I Can, her determination to defy expectations, how CP has provided her with unique insights into the human condition and her intention to help others reach their potential. Then Geri's best friend, hearing impaired comedian Kathy Buckley joins us on the panel  to share more truly adorable anecdotes and adventures. Plus, Fritz and Weezy are recommending My Brilliant Friend on HBO and Daughters on Netflix.Path Points of Interest:Geri JewellGeri Jewell on WikiI'm Walking As Straight As I Can by Geri JewellGeri's Jewels and Gems by Gery JewellGeri Jewell on YoutubeGeri Jewell at Ability MagazineGeri Jewell on FacebookKathy BuckleyKathy Buckley on InstagramMy Brilliant Friend on HBODaughters - NetflixMedia Path PodcastGift Of Democracy

If you're a reader of the New York Times – or a lover of books – you might know about the paper's project this summer counting down the top hundred books of the century so far. Number one on the list? “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante. It is the first of four novels that tell the story of the friendship between Lila and Elena, two working class girls growing up in post-World War II Naples. In 2018 HBO adapted the series for television. Diane hosted a discussion of “My Brilliant Friend” as part of her Readers Review series back in 2015 on The Diane Rehm Show. She and her guests dug into the characters, the setting, and the mystery surrounding the author's identity. Diane's guests included Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, and The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University; Louis Bayard Author, "Roosevelt's Beast." His other books include "The Pale Blue Eye," "The School of Night" and "Mr. Timothy," a New York Times Notable Book. He teaches fiction writing at The George Washington University; and Professor of contemporary Italian culture, Georgetown University; author of "The Tigress in the Snow: Motherhood and Literature in Twentieth-Century Italy" and of the novel "Un Paese Di Carta."

The biggest stories on the internet from August 27th, 2024. Timestamps: 1:27 Jools Lebron, creator of the demure trend, is struggling to monetise the viral trend after a random man trademarked the saying before she could  5:32 BookTok comes for commentary creator Mina Le over her review of My Brilliant Friend 9:53 Alix Earle makes statement about racist Ask.fm posts Find our podcast YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC18HclY7Tt5-1e3Z-MEP7Jg  Subscribe to our weekly Substack: https://centennialworld.substack.com/  Join our Geneva home: https://links.geneva.com/invite/7eb23525-9259-4d59-95e3-b9edd35861a5  Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infinitescrollpodcast/ Follow Lauren on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenmeisner_/ 

This July, The New York Times Book Review published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The top choice was “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.The book is the first novel in Ferrante's so-called Neapolitan quartet, which tracks the lifelong friendship between Lenù and Lila, two women from a rough neighborhood in Naples, Italy, even as family, relationships and work pull their lives in different directions.In this week's episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles. 

El pasado mes de julio, el diario estadounidense The New York Times publicó una lista de “Los 100 mejores libros del Siglo XXI” que no tardó en dar de qué hablar. En este episodio, entretenido y profundo como el resto, Dani y Carla se sumergen en los libros que ellas han leído de la polémica lista y los que creen son los grandes ausentes. Si son amantes de la lectura o están buscando qué leer no pueden dejar de escuchar este episodio. Además, las invitamos a participar en el club de lectura de nuestro Patreon en el que ya discutimos “Los días del abandono” de Elena Ferrante (puesto 92 en la lista) y en la que seguramente seguiremos leyendo esos títulos y otros de interés. Libros de la lista del New York Times (con su posición correspondiente) leídos por Dani y Carla: 92 “Los días del abandono”, Elena Ferrante. 91 “La mancha humana”, Philip Roth. 81 “Temporada de huracanes”, Fernanda Melchor. 80 “La niña perdida”, Elena Ferrante. Libro 4 de la serie de “Las dos amigas”. 79 “Manual para mujeres de la limpieza”, Lucía Berlín. 59 “Middlesex”, Jeffrey Eugenides. 38 “Detectives salvajes”, Roberto Bolaño. 27 “Americanah”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 13 “El año del pensamiento mágico”, Joan Didion. 11 “La maravillosa vida breve de Óscar Wao”, Junot Díaz. 9 “Nunca me abandones”, Kazuo Ishiguro. 1 “La amiga estupenda”, Elena Ferrante. Libro 1 de “Las dos amigas”. La lista completa la pueden conseguir en un post publicado el 15 de julio en el Instagram de @nytbooks. Otros libros mencionados en el episodio: “Los años”, Annie Ernaux. “Fármaco”, Almudena Sánchez. “Me llamo Lucy Barton”, Elizabeth Strout. “Las Malas”, Camila Sosa Villada. “Pura pasión”, Annie Ernaux. “El acontecimiento”, Annie Ernaux. “Medio sol amarillo”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “Criar en feminismo”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “Lo que no tiene nombre”, Piedad Bonnet. “Noches azules”, Joan Didion. “Despojos: Sobre el matrimonio y la separación”, Rachel Cusk. “Un trabajo para toda la vida: Sobre la experiencia de ser madre”, Rachel Cusk. “2666”, RobertoBolaño. “La hija oscura”, Elena Ferrante. “La vida mentirosa de los adultos”, Elena Ferrante. “Una educación”, Tara Westover. “Nada se opone a la noche”, Delphine De Vigan. Charlas TED “Todos deberíamos ser feministas”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Series “Olive Kitteridge”, HBO. “My Brilliant Friend”, HBO. “La vida mentirosa de los adultos”, Netflix. Películas “La hija oscura”. “Nunca me abandones”. Podcast “Grandes infelices. Luces y sombras de grandes novelistas”. Spotify. Patrion Apóyanos en Patrion  / podemosvivirestahistoria   Suscríbete, déjanos un comentario  y comparte con tus amigas ¿Dónde nos puedes encontrar? En nuestra redes sociales: • Carla Candia Casado es @agobiosdemadre • Daniela Kammoun es @danikammoun

ciao, brilliant friends! get ready to talk about translated fiction and dive into the world of Elena Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend”. join us for a whirlwind discussion where we navigate through poorly pronounced Italian words, questionable cover designs, and the magical art of translated fiction.from dissecting the brilliance of Ann Goldstein's translation to brief mentions of Italian cultural icons like the Lizzie McGuire movie and Stefano from A Series of Unfortunate Events, we're leaving no stone unturned.can we relate to Lila and Elena's adventures as much as we relate to Lizzie's Roman holiday? let's find out!so grab your espresso and channel your inner Italian stallion as we laugh, cry, and discuss all things "My Brilliant Friend." tune in and let's get lost in translation together!synopsis music by William Kingspecial things mentioned in the episode:Have Italian Scholars figured out the identity of Elena Ferrante? The Unmasking of Elena Ferrante An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante - Whoever You AreWhy Australia Has Better Covers for Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Serieschoose our next podcast read by going here and voting in the first week of each month!make sure you subscribe to hear our groundbreaking thoughts as soon as they are unleashed. if you want to be on the same page as us, follow us at talklit.gethit on Instagram and TikTok.theme music born from the creative genius of Big Boi B.talk lit, get hit acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands and waterways where we record this podcast. further, we acknowledge the cultural diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and pay respect to Elders past, present and future.

In this week's episode, I take a look at how to make a bad book cover, and things that you should avoid on your book's cover. I also take a look back at my top 10 bestselling books of 2023. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered! Reference links to books mentioned in the show. The Fellowship of the Ring: https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=BREM+US+PB+FOTR My Brilliant Friend: https://www.amazon.com/My-Brilliant-Friend-Neapolitan-Novels/dp/1609450787 TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 183 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 12th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about how to make a bad book cover. We'll also take a look back at my top 10 best selling books of 2023. Before we do that, let's have this week's Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS. That's JANGHOSTS and that will be included in the show notes with a link. The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered. Let's also have an update on my current writing projects. As of right now, I am 97,000 words into Shield of Storms, which puts me on Chapter 18 of 21, though the final draft will probably have a slightly different number of chapters as I move things around. I am hoping to get to 100,000 words before the end of the day when I finish recording this. We'll see how the rest of the day goes. Once Shield of Storms is out, my next book will be Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am 59,000 words into that and I will finish that up and have it come out relatively quickly after Shields of Storms is released. I'm also 12,000 words into Half-Elven Thief, but that will be a ways off yet because once Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is finished, I want to write Ghost in the Veils first so I can make its recording slot in April. In audio news, as I mentioned last week, the audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation is out, as excellently narrated by CJ McAllister and you can get that at all audiobook stores.   00:01:51 Top 10 Ebooks, Audiobooks, and Print Book Sales for 2023 As I mentioned before, I wanted to take a look back at my top ten books and audiobooks of 2023, and I did that because it's time to start figuring out taxes for 2023, which means checking paperwork, making sure your books are balanced, making sure all your receipts are properly organized, filing for 1099s, and all the other various little chores that go into preparing to file your taxes, at least in the United States. It also means finding out the top 10 bestselling books of 2023. So to start with, here are my Top 10 bestselling ebooks of 2023. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that 2023 was the year of the Dragonskull series: #1: Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer #2: Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock #3: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #4: Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods #5: Cloak of Dragonfire #6: Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians #7 Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire #8 Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #9 Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves #10 Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So basically my best selling ebooks of 2023 were the Dragonskull series plus Cloak of Dragonfire. This bodes well for both Shield of Storms, which is a direct follow up to Dragonskull, and Cloak of Titans later this year. Audio, of course, has become an increasingly important format, so here are my Top 10 bestselling audiobooks across all platforms for 2023: #1: The Ghosts: Omnibus One #2: Frostborn: The Shadow Prison #3: Frostborn: The World Gate #4: Frostborn: The High Lords #5: Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince #6: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight #7: Frostborn: Excalibur #8: Frostborn: The Gorgon Spirit #9: Frostborn: The False King #10: Frostborn: The Dark Warden   So for audio, 2023 was nearly almost entirely the year of Frostborn, but people still really like the big omnibus audiobooks like The Ghosts: Omnibus One. Paperbacks for me are a much smaller sales channel than either ebooks or audiobooks. I sell more in both ebook and audio than I do in paperback, but as it turns out, it's really easy to run the report of bestselling paperbacks. So with that in mind, here are my Top 10 bestselling paperbacks of 2023: #1: The Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide #2: The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide #3: The Ubuntu Beginner's Guide #4: Frostborn: The Gray Knight #5: Frostborn:  The Eightfold Knife #6: Sevenfold Sword: Champion #7: Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #8: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #9: Malison: The Complete Series #10: Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So those were my top 10 bestselling paperback books of 2023. I don't really write about technology very much anymore, and I stopped shortly before I started recording this podcast in 2019. I enjoyed writing about technology quite a bit, but there are only so many hours in the day and the money is just a lot better for epic fantasy fiction, and there's less research involved, too. That said, I'm glad that people are still finding my tech books helpful enough to buy. My all-time favorite review of the Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide came from a math professor who said he hated the book, but he couldn't find a better introduction to the Windows Command Line environment, and so he still recommended it to his students. So thanks for reading those books, everyone, and as I said before, I'm still working on Shield of Storms, so hopefully we'll have a new book very soon. 00:05:34 Main Topic of the Week: What Makes a Bad Book Cover? So let's move on to our main topic this week: how to make a bad book cover (from which we hopefully will learn how to make a good book cover). Since I started doing my own covers and spending a lot more time with Photoshop in 2020, obviously this is something I have given a great deal of thought to over the last four years and throughout the entire time I've been self-publishing. So I thought it would make an interesting topic for a show. Let's start off with some specific examples of a bad book cover. One of the most famous ones is The Fellowship of the Ring cover by Barbara Remington, which Tolkien famously did not care for (I'll include a link to it in the show notes, so you can follow if you're curious). It just looks very ‘60s, very psychedelic, and just not at all related to anything connected to what the Lord of the Rings is actually about. Another fairly well-known example of a bad cover is the original cover of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which is a 1950s story about a woman coming of age in the poor outskirts of Naples. But if you look at the cover (especially the cover linked in the show notes), it looks like kind of a romance novel or a story about a wedding. It doesn't at all reflect what the book is actually about. So as we strive to make good covers, one that will draw readers into books, what should we keep in mind? I think there are to start with three key points to keep in mind when preparing a book cover or consulting with your cover designer about what you would like your book cover to do. First, taste is highly subjective and that leads directly to the second point, which is you're not going to be able to make a book cover that everybody likes, just as you are not going to be able to write a book that everyone likes. The point is to write a book that your audience that you have in mind will enjoy and the cover by extension will be a sort of a guide that can help your audience find the book and let them know that this is the kind of book they would like, that the cover will telegraph in essence, that this is the kind of book that particular reader would like. Three, the main thing is to provide key information about the book, namely the author and the title, easily and quickly with a quick preview of the book through the design of the cover. You want, when you look at a book cover, to immediately in a fraction of a second to be able to grasp the three important points: the name of the book, the author of the book, and the genre of the book. Those should all be immediately apparent when you look at the book cover and anything that gets in the way of that is not a good design element for a book cover. So with that in mind, what shouldn't a book cover do and what design elements do you massively want to avoid on your book cover? First of all, you should avoid bad fonts or fonts that are hard to read. It's important to remember that in a book cover, two of the three things that it needs to convey at a glance are the author name and the title of the book. And if you have bad typography on your book cover, that will sink you. In fact, you can almost get away with having a bad looking image for your book cover, so long as the typography for the author name and the title is suitable. So what constitutes an unsuitable font for a book cover? Colors that are hard to read and shall we say overly artistic or overly stylized fonts that are difficult to read. You know something like wingdings or some really overly complicated font with too many flourishes. You want the font to be able to be easy to read. You want the font to be a color that is easy to read and is visible against the rest of the cover. You don't want the font to be too small either, because then that will make it difficult to read. That ideal is even once in a thumbnail on the Amazon website that you can still pretty easily get the author name and the title. You also will want to avoid design elements that clash. We can all think of examples of badly Photoshopped covers where there's like a Photoshop picture of a horse or cowboy or a Scottish Lord or something that is very badly Photoshopped in and doesn't look at all good. Part of that is avoiding images that are poor resolution. If any element of your cover looks pixelated, it's time to have a rethink and choose different elements. This can be a problem if you're getting stock photos from free stock photo sites, which is not the best idea because just because the site says the stock photos are free and licensed for commercial use doesn't mean that they actually are, because there's not really much of a safeguarding process. You're better off using a reputable stock photo site where you pay for credits and then keep a record of what you use. And that way, if there's any legal challenges or troubles you can say, well, the stock photo I got off iStock Photo in 2019. Here's the record of it and then you would be good to go. Even if you have good images, it's important to make sure that the image matches with the genre of the book. If you have an image that does not match the appropriate historical time period of the book or the fantasy aesthetics, that won't work. For example, you have a Regency romance book set in 19th century England and the woman on the cover is wearing a leather jacket and jeans, that would immediately be a bad cover design element. To return to the topic of The Lord of the Rings, you have a cover of the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn is dressed like a Wall Street broker and Frodo is wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and a backward baseball cap, that would also be a poor choice for cover design. You'll also want to avoid major inaccuracies on the cover. This is not hugely important but it can significantly annoy a subset of readers. Like for example, a cover of Anne of Green Gables where the Anne on the cover is blonde when in the book Anne quite famously has red hair (and in fact it's a plot point, if I remember right). You probably don't want to include ad copy on the cover because that is a waste of valuable real estate. Now granted, if you get, like an endorsement from like a major celebrity or some sort of significant author in your field, it's probably a good idea to put the blurb on your cover then. Like, if you are writing a mystery and say you get, like blurbs from like John Sanford or Harlan Coben or Karin Slaughter or other, you know, major mystery writers, you know, that's probably good idea to put that on the cover. However, if you're picking quotes off Goodreads or Amazon or something to put on your book cover, that's probably not a good idea. And you may not, in fact, actually have the right to do that based on U.S. law, because technically I believe the copyright for the review belongs to the person who wrote it. So that is something to avoid, you know, taking quotes from reviews from Amazon or Goodreads or TikTok or something, though you can probably make an exception if you like, get a major figure in your genre to endorse your book. Finally, you would also probably want to avoid the default templates provided by Canva or Amazon. If you self-publish a book on Amazon and you don't have a cover, you can use one of the premade ones that Amazon provides. But to be honest, these are not very good and they don't look very good, so it's probably best to avoid those if at all possible. You'll also want to avoid book cover design elements that can actively irritate people. One of those is photographs of people, especially if it's just a stock image. Generally, if you want a stock image to look good as a book cover, it needs to go through Photoshop quite a bit. It needs to, you know, make sure it matches the colors of the background. You might need some color adjustment. You might need some shading. You might need to apply a couple of masks to it to make it look properly good. This is actually one of the reasons why I started using DAZ 3D modeling because it's very hard to find a long string of stock photos with the same character you can use for book covers, whereas with DAZ, as you can generate a character who looks like how you want the character look and then use that over and over again in different poses and so forth and different shadings and different enhancements in Photoshop to keep consistent look across all the covers, which is what I've done for the Caina Ghost series and the Nadia Cloak Mage series, which would be a lot harder to do with stock images. Something else that really tends to annoy people is shirtless men or women in overly revealing outfits. From a purely a publisher's perspective, this can get you in trouble. If you have a book cover that's showing a little too much skin, the various retailers might reject it or you will be able to run ads on the book, or the system will automatically sort it as erotica, which would limit its visibility on the store and therefore its sales potential. One trend from the 2000s and 2010s that used to be popular but now no longer is, is stock photos where the character's head is chopped off and you sort of just see them from the neck down on the cover. That was very popular for a while in the 2010s. It is not popular now and people might complain about your cover if you have that on there. You may also want to avoid images are too abstract or too bland. I'm thinking about, like a lot of modern literary fiction covers have just random color swirls on the cover (it doesn't look good) or the rereleased versions of Robert Jordan's covers for the Wheel of Time. They used to have this really beautiful fantasy artwork on them. Now it's just a vaguely faded symbol from the book. It just doesn't look good compared to the older ones, and I think there was a mistake on the publisher's part. You will also, in my opinion, very much want to avoid AI art. There's a couple of good reasons for this. One is that a very significant subset of the population absolutely hates AI art, refuses to have anything to do with it, and will not buy anything that uses it. Every time a major company like Wizards of the Coast or Microsoft or somebody uses AI art in some sort of advertisement, there is an immediate backlash on social media and you will want to avoid that. More practically, the copyright status of AI art is still a massively open question. As of this recording, which is January 12th, 2024, there are many lawsuits underway to determine whether or not AI generated art and text is in fact a form of copyright infringement, and as of right now, the question is unsettled. A couple of months ago, Amazon started adding a check box to the KDP Publishing forum where you need to disclose if your book uses AI elements, and I strongly suspect part of the reason they did that was in case there's like a Supreme Court ruling in the US or a major piece of legislation that drastically changes the legality of AI generated art and text. Then they have an easy out to immediately wipe all that stuff off the store and say, well, we do our due diligence about this. You can't sue us. So for all those reasons, I do think it is a very, very good idea to avoid any AI images in any book covers or audiobook covers or anything you sell for right now.   00:17:39 What Should a Book Cover Do? So let's move on from the negative to the positive. What should a book cover do? As we mentioned earlier in the show, the book cover has three missions. At a single glance, it should convey the author name, the book title, and the genre of the book. It is in fact fairly simple to convey a genre in a book. It's just the hard part is making it look good. Like for example, if you have a book with a dragon on the cover, obviously that's going to be fantasy. If you have a book with like a spaceship flying near a planet, that is going to be a science fiction book. In fact, I redid all the covers in my Silent Order series to be a spaceship flying near a planet after I read a joke about that in a Penny Arcade comic where one of the characters of comics says they only buy books with spaceships and planets on them, and I realized that would probably be the best way to convey what the Silent Order series was about. And in fact, sales did go up after I changed all those covers. Other examples would be if you see a man and a woman looking longingly at one another, that's going to be a romance novel. If the character is wearing a long coat and has his or her back to the camera walking down a dark street, odds are you've got a mystery. If it's a highly edited photo of like the US Capitol or the White House or something, and the title is something like, you know, Patriot Fury, you're probably looking at a thriller novel. So there's lots of conventions to convey what genre book is and the best way to learn them is, you know, to read a lot and to look at a lot of different book covers, which is in the modern age, very easy to do as you scroll through Amazon or Apple or whatever. The text should also be as easy to read as possible, especially in thumbnail or smaller images, so you may have to make the text what feels like slightly ridiculously large, but so long as it's reasonably easy to read, then you'll have achieved the mission of the text. And if possible, you want to hint at the plot without telling the story. A good example of that would be like an urban fantasy book where the cover shows a woman wearing a leather jacket and you know, magic glowing things glowing around her hand. So that hints at what the plot is going to be about or like a thriller novel where you see a woman in like a tank top and combat pants holding a combat knife and a pistol that hints that is going to be a thriller novel and she'll be, you know, fighting for her life. Finally, the last point is fairly subjective and hard to do, but, if possible, you want to balance uniqueness with being familiar enough where people understand the genre at a glance. You don't want to copy someone else's design for many good reasons, but you want to have one that both expresses the genre of the book yet somehow is a little bit unique and that is something you try to strive for, if possible, with the book cover. So that's it for this week. I hope those tips were helpful. I would just like a minute to thank my transcriptionist. As you might have noticed on The Pulp Writer Show website, we now have transcriptions of the newer episodes and she helped me pull together the research for this episode, so thank you for doing that. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.

09/28/23: Ep. 96 of the Op-Ed Page podcast: Are you a withdraw-er, like me? Main story: Being a withdrawer A strike apology Minaa B: Owning Our Struggles: https://books.apple.com/us/book/owning-our-struggles/id6444666346 The WGA strike is over, the SAG AFTRA strike continues. Quick takes My newsletter on Jann Wenner and how he embodies today's pushback on DEIB: https://open.substack.com/pub/elisacp/p/dei-pushback?r=1egsl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web My TikTok profile: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp My TikTok review of Frankenstein: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp/video/7279126568469941550 My TikTok review of My Brilliant Friend: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp/video/7281307010279460142 My October webinar for the PBWC: #BuffyLifeLesson: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7107457384540745728/  Movies/TV mentioned: None, because strike.  Books mentioned: Tom Lake, the latest from Ann Patchett Crash by Rachel Michelberg Owning Our Struggles by Minaa B A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, inspired by Siobhan Dowd Where to find me: My website: https://elisacp.com  Sign up for my newsletter, This Week-ish with Elisa Camahort Page: https://elisacp.substack.com  Calendly: Schedule an intro session with me!: https://calendly.com/elisacp  Thanks to Ryan Cristopher for my podcast music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ryan-cristopher/1479898729  Road Map for Revolutionaries by me, Carolyn Gerin and Jamia Wilson:  https://elisacp.com/books  Social media handles (I'm on the other platforms too, but this is where I'm spending my time): Threads: @ElisaCP TikTok: @ElisaCP Insta: @ElisaCP LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisacamahortpage/  Please share, subscribe, rate and review!

Ep. 95 of the Op-Ed Page podcast: Persuasion and the (Not) 53% 1.Persuasion and the (Not) 53%) The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas   2.Quick takes My 09/11 Remembrance: https://elisacp.substack.com/p/0911-remembrance My newsletter on how two things can be true: https://elisacp.substack.com/p/multitudes My TikTok profile: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp A TikTok cruise cabin "boxing" from Greece: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp/video/7264196567521840427 A TikTok Broadway Review from New York City: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp/video/7271746120127188266 A TikTok cultural commentary on Barbie, Taylor Swift and Beyonce: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp/video/7266349785274223914 And yes, a TikTok book review: https://www.tiktok.com/@elisacp/video/7278407375696989482 My October webinar for the PBWC: #BuffyLifeLesson: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7107457384540745728/  Movies/TV mentioned: Only Murders in the Building on Hulu Live Action The Little Mermaid on Disney+ Books mentioned: Cat in the Stacks murder mystery series by Miranda James The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (TikTok review above) Thumbs down to My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante In progress with Tom Lake, the latest from Ann Patchett, so far, so good.   Where to find me: My website: https://elisacp.com  Sign up for my newsletter, This Week-ish with Elisa Camahort Page: https://elisacp.substack.com  Calendly: Schedule an intro session with me!: https://calendly.com/elisacp    Thanks to Ryan Cristopher for my podcast music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ryan-cristopher/1479898729    Road Map for Revolutionaries by me, Carolyn Gerin and Jamia Wilson:  https://elisacp.com/books    Social media handles (I'm on the other platforms too, but this is where I'm spending my time): Threads: @ElisaCP TikTok: @ElisaCP Insta: @ElisaCP LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisacamahortpage/    Please share, subscribe, rate and review!

Venezia 2023: I denne festivalepisoden har vi besøk av den italienske kritikeren Tommaso Tocci, og blant titlene vi diskuterer med ham er to italienske filmer som ble vist i hovedkonkurransen. Stefano Sollimas Adagio og Saverio Costanzos Finalmente l'alba er to av et knippe lokale filmer som ble invitert til Venezias hovedkonkurranse i år, og vi benytter anledningen til å snakke om årets trender i italiensk film med vår podkastgjest. Faste lyttere husker kanskje at Tocci har gjestet Filmfrelst tidligere (bl.a. fra Venezia i 2021), og man kan også finne hans anmeldelser på MyMovies.it. Adagio og Finalmente l'alba er vidt forskjellige filmer både sjanger- og formmessig, og i samtalen nedenfor presenterer vi blant annet de to regissørenes bakgrunn – Sollima er utenfor hjemlandet mest kjent for å ha regissert Sicario 2: Soldado (2018), mens Costanzo de siste årene har brukt tiden på Elena Ferrante-adaptasjonen My Brilliant Friend (2018-), en serie som her i Norge har blitt vist på HBO Max. Deretter dykker vi inn i hver av disse to nye filmene, og hvilke signaler de sender om både hovedkonkurransen og ståa i Italia. Mot slutten kaster vi også et blikk på Harmony Korines Aggro Dr1ft og får et hjertesukk fra Tocci om Michael Manns Ferrari, som vi nylig dedikerte en hel festivalepisode til. Montages-redaktør Karsten Meinich fører samtalen med Tommaso Tocci, og episoden inneholder ingen spoilere. God lytting!

David and Perry spend a while discussing the problems with "generative A.I." and then go on to talk about their recent reading. Perry interviews W.H.Chong about his best reading and watching of 2022. Introduction (03:50) General News (02:23) Chengdu World SF Convention (02:19) Discussion on Generative AI (21:32) Ezra Klein podcast on AI What we've been reading lately (54:38) Monash's Masterpiece by Peter Fitzsimons (11:35) Joan by Katherine J. Chen (08:15) Hex by Jenni Fagan (03:21) Rizzio by Denise Mina (02:38) Her by Garry Disher (04:20) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (05:29) Embassytown by China Miéville (05:57) The Employees by Olga Ravn (04:22) Babel by R. F. Kuang (08:21) Discussion with W. H. Chong about his 2022 reading and watching (29:13) The Mountain Under the Sea by Ray Naylor (04:01) Babel by R. F. Kuang (01:37) The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (01:33) The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox (01:15) Everything Everywhere All at Once (01:46) Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (02:42) Drive My Car (00:43) Pinnoccio (03:17) Three Plus One (02:57) Ted Lasso (01:12) My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults (00:50) Prey (03:09) The Last of Us (03:30) Windup (01:41) Image generated by Stable Diffusion

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak with the celebrated translator Ann Goldstein, whose most recent translated work is a novel called Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. Ann Goldstein is a former editor at the New Yorker, where she worked from 1974 to 2017. She began translating Italian literature in the '90s and in 2005 she translated Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment. She went on to translate Ferrante's entire Neapolitan trilogy, starting with My Brilliant Friend. Goldstein's latest translation, Forbidden Notebook, is a novel written by the Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes. First published in Italy in the 1950s, the novel centers around a woman who buys a notebook on a whim, and begins to furtively write in it, hiding it and herself from her husband and her children. Through the notebook, she begins to learn more about her desire, her guilt, and the sacrifices she has made for her family, her past, and her future. Also, Maggie Millner, author of Couplets, returns to recommend The Call-Out: A Novel in Rhyme by Cat Fitzpatrick.

Vibe Check We're ready for the holidays! Also, it's COLD. Danielle has finished her Christmas shopping and Gwen attended TWO Christmas markets.  * Faves of 2022 Both of your girls are dealing with feelings about media consumption—being okay with being behind and not being the target audience for everything anymore. TV Danielle: The Bear on FX/Hulu, Heartstopper on Netflix, Ms. Marvel on Disney+, Abbott Elementary on ABC, My Brilliant Friend on HBO Max, Miss Scarlett and the Duke on PBS Gwen: The Bear, The White Lotus, The Handmaid's Tale, Harry and Meghan doc, Rick and Morty, Abbott Elementary, Hacks, Bad Sisters, Yellowjackets, Wednesday, The Dropout, WeCrashed MOVIES Danielle: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Turning Red, Catherine Called Birdy Gwen: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once; Turning Red, The Princess, Barbarian BOOKS Danielle: Kamila Knows Best by Farah Heron, After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M Lopez, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, Fake It Till You Bake It by Jamie Wesley, Stirring Up Love by Chandra Blumberg, Pride and Protest by Nikki Payne, My Aunt is a Monster by Reimena Yee, Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith Gwen: A Caribbean Heiress in Paris by Adriana Herrera, Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman, The Accidental Pinup by Danielle Jackson MISC. Danielle: Vitamin String Quartet (music), Renaissance by Beyonce (music), It's Been a Minute with new host Brittany Luse (podcast) Gwen: Wet Leg by Wet Leg (music); I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi (podcast), Articles of Interest (podcast, specifically the Prep season); You Must Remember This (podcast, erotic 80s); Spectacle (podcast, true crime); The Missing Pages (podcast, literary scandals); The Pixies (music) * Host Gift Exchange! Danielle's gift from Gwen: a LizzyKate tea sampler: St. Nick's Tea, Cranberry Hibiscus, Masala Chai, and Moroccan Mint and a tea-tasting notebook! Gwen's gift from Danielle: You Already Have the Answers: A Gratitude Journal by Amanda Deibert and a Felt Flower Making Kit  * Goals/Comfort & Joy Last ep, Danielle said she needed to clean her desk. She actually cleaned her desk and her entire house, but now her desk is a mess again. This week, she needs to do ACCIDENTALLY IN LOVE copyedits! She has also been enjoying Doritos 3D Crunch snacks. Gwen wanted to get into a better nighttime face washing routine so she could use her new, fancy La Mer product, and she has started! This time, Gwen wants to start prepping for her big 2023 project: making all of the recipes in America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two Cookbook! Gwen is also having all the egg nog lattes (and neither host likes egg nog on its own). * EMAIL US! Thoughts or questions? Email us at podcast@freshfiction.com. * Find us on the Socials! Gwen Reyes Twitter Facebook Instagram Danielle Jackson Twitter Instagram Fresh Fiction Twitter Facebook Instagram EventBrite

Llegamos a este capítulo de una de nuestras plataformas de streaming favoritas: HBO Max que como dice Charlie destaca por elegir muy bien su contenido, más calidad que cantidad. Hablamos de la grandiosa Station Eleven, Beautiful Boy, Industry, My Brilliant Friend y muchas más, la verdad mucho que recomendar de esta plataforma. No te lo pierdas, te aseguramos que te va a encantar.

On this weeks Book(ish) I sit down with photographer, stylist, blogger and influencer Tamsien West to discuss My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Our conversation includes the ongoing mystery of who Elena Ferrante is, actively trying to widen the type of people you're reading, and the fascinating places you can go when you journal. Enjoy!Books/authors discussed:My Brilliant Friend by Elena FerranteNeverwhere by Neil GaimanBeowulf translated by Maria Dahvana HeadleyThe Artists Way by Julia CameronHiromi KawakamiSayaka MurataYou can follow Tamsien on Instagram at Bubbling Books and Mina and Maud.Follow Bookish Comedy on Twitter and Instagram.Sign up to our newsletter here. Join our facebook group here.You can now physically send us stuff to PO BOX 7127, Reservoir East, Victoria, 3073.Want to help support the show?Sanspants+ | Podkeep | USB Tapes | Merch Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we chat about the magic of newness. This was inspired by the progress we've been making on our teacher training manual for our very first MerryBody Teacher Training next year. If you're feeling a little stuck and bored with everything, tune in.This is what we spoke about during the episodeWhen the day-to-day becomes monotonous, it's easy to feel bored and lose that zest for life.Have you started anything new lately? Have you been curious about something and then dived in deeper?We reference the amazing book series (again!), My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.The attachment tto the ROI (return on investment). But what if the return on the investment was simply the newness of the experience?When you're young, you can develop these strong opinions of yourself. But you're not stuck there. You can make changes.Check out Irene Messias's amazing sculptures and art over here. Check out Damiano's work over here.Check in with yourself when was the last thing you did or brought into your life. Is it time for something new?We would love to hear from you, send us an email to carla@themerrymakersisters.com or emma@themerrymakersisters.com or message us on our Facebook and Instagram accounts @themerrymakersisters.Download our FREE Self Care Checklist and you'll find 50 brand new ideas to practice self care.Always merrymaking,Emma + CarlaP.s if you ever need further help or guidance please contact Lifeline or Beyond Blue. Asking for help is pure courage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi Eavesdroppers! This week Geordie & Michelle are talking about CULTS – yes, it's the topic that just gives and gives and in this episode, Geordie kicks off the ep by talking about The Moonies, otherwise known as the Unification Church! You know, the funny cult from the 70s where loads of people who had never met popped on polyester suits and white dresses and headed to mass weddings to marry a stranger… Well, it turns out that the cult we thought had died out decades ago is still going strong, with links to the far right all over the world – who knew! Tune in to find out more!   Michelle then talks about an Australian cult that's gone global called Universal Medicine, headed up by a bankrupt ex tennis coach turned self-proclaimed Messiah called Serge Benhayon, who is the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci, Pythagoras and others, all at once… Never heard of Universal Medicine? Probably for the best because it's a cult that uses wellness to draw you in, and its beliefs are out of this world… Listen in to find out more and make your own mind up about whether or not you think it's a cult!   We hope you enjoy this week's episode and remember, wherever you are, whatever you do, just keep Eavesdroppin'!   *Disclaimer: We don't claim to have any factual info about anything ever, soooooorrrrrryyyyyyyy   Get in touch with your stories and listen, like, subscribe, share etc…  Or email us at hello@eavesdroppinpodcast.com      Listen here: www.eavesdroppinpodcast.com Or here:  https://podfollow.com/1539144364   WE ARE NOW ON PATREON :) Support your favourite podcast over on Patreon – you have to use this link to find us apparently, otherwise we get lost in the masses…  https://www.patreon.com/eavesdroppin   EAVESDROPPIN' ON SPOTIFY : https://open.spotify.com/show/3BKt2Oy4zfPCxI7LDOQLN4   APPLE PODCASTS : https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eavesdroppin/id1539144364   GOOGLE PODCASTS : https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2VhdmVzZHJvcHBpbi9mZWVkLnhtbA?hl=en   YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqcuzv-EXizUo4emmt9Pgfw   Our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/eavesdroppinpodcast   Or wherever you normally listen…   #cults #moonies #universalmedicine #unificationchurch #sergebenhayon #cultawareness #sects #indoctrination #unimed #cultshit #truecrime #reallife #podcast #comedy  #comedypodcast #truestories #truelife #storytellingpodcast #eavesdroppin #eavesdroppinpodcast            SHOW LINKS The Britannica link where you can learn more about The Moonies: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Unification-Church   The Wikipedia definition of Lovebombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bombing   Some Moonie mass wedding footage from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APeMtKSFsA   Married At First Sight Australia – Michelle's guilty pleasure: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarriedAU   Metallica Enter Sandman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-E-LDc384   The stunning 3rd season of My Brilliant Friend is out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKxgb1oh6FM   And if you're in Australia you can watch Blinded with English subtitles on SBS: https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/blinded   Yep – the Sandman was a make of Holden panel van for surfies! https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/436004807655962581/   The Shinzo Abe assassination and how the Moonies are referenced: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/shinzo-abe-shooting-suspects-motive-casts-spotlight-on-moonies-links-to-politicians   More on Preston Moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyun_Jin_Moon   Antidote – the place to go when you need to be deprogrammed from Moonie thinking: https://antidote.ngo/our-story/   A great overview of the Universal Medicine cult: https://au.news.yahoo.com/guy-predator-international-investigation-australian-cult-leader-serge-benhayon-222033625.html   Loads of info on Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Medicine#cite_note-MOInsideUM-6   The father who had to rescue his daughter from the clutches of the Universal Medicine cult: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560807/Tormented-father-reveals-five-year-plight-save-daughter-9-cult.html   An overview of the Judith Macintyre case where she bequeathed her estate to Serge Benhayon: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/universal-medicines-serge-benhayon-to-inherit-bulk-of-devotees-milliondollar-estate-20151228-glvl7u.html   A woman lost to the cult of Universal Medicine: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-10/mum-joined-universal-medicine-cult-torn-family-apart/100518104   A Vice video on the Universal Medicine cult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kASJzrPl_9Y   Who is Alice A Bailey? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey   Another article about the Universal Medicine cult: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/universal-medicine-cult-founder-exposed-as-charlatan/news-story/626fe650621ee65ba16b1a7af2f62aa7

Full time blogger, at The Literary Lifestyle, Jules Buono joins Kristen Llorca on the Wild Wonder Podcast to explore why books have the power to blow open our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world. On the podcast, Jules chooses our September WILD WONDER BOOKCLUB pick, "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante. Find this book, along with our full bookclub reading list, on Bookshop at https://bookshop.org/lists/wild-wonder-bookclub. To join the Wild Wonder Bookclub, become a subscriber at https://www.patreon.com/wildwonder. For more on Jules and The Literary Lifestyle visit https://www.julesbuono.com/. WILD WONDER PODCAST On the Wild Wonder Podcast, host Kristen Llorca seeks to democratize and demystify holistic wellness practices by speaking with today's leading practitioners. The Wild Wonder Podcast is not possible without your generous support. Become a Patreon subscriber and get instant access to our bookclub, private Discord group, live meet-ups, discounts and more at https://www.patreon.com/wildwonder. Short on funds? Share the podcast with friends in a text, email, or on social media. The Wild Wonder Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Be sure to “follow” to receive notifications when episodes are made available. For everything else, visit us at https://wearewildwonder.com/

If you find yourself forever competing with your friendship group, this episode is for you.The chat was inspired by the book, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, a story revolved around the friendship and rivalry between 2 girls growing up in post WWII Naples. The themes in the book are relatable, even though I grew up in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s. I remember feeling rejected with sense of competition between friends. Feeling lonely, like an outcast. The jealousy and the worry of what others think. Not only a fantastic, can't put it down kinda read, it inspires reflection of your own life.No wonder this book series (yes there are 3 more books to read) is so popular.This is what we spoke about during the episodeYou can be competitive with each other but still, want each other to succeed.Competition can create suffering. Having an ally over a competitor is just a more joyful way to live. When you help each other, it's a productive relationship.Reflect and check in, what's your sense of competition like. Is it bringing good or is it bringing others and yourself down?Jealousy can be a big reason why friendships become toxic. What can you do about it?If it does not come naturally to you, being happy for someone else is a practice.Seek inspiration and motivation from someone else's success. Get out of your ego. Let go of the competition.If you loved this episode, send us an email at carla@themerrymakersisters.com or emma@themerrymakersisters.com or message us on our Facebook and Instagram accounts @themerrymakersisters.Download our FREE Self Care Checklist and you'll find 50 brand new ideas to practice self care.Always merrymaking,Emma + CarlaP.s if you ever need further help or guidance please contact Lifeline or Beyond Blue. Asking for help is pure courage. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On the 52nd episode of BEHOLD!, we highlight the best new shows of 2022 so far - such as HBO's We Own This City, Apple TV+'s Pachinko, HBO Max's Minx, and A24's Irma Vep. Plus we name the 10 best TV series of the mid-year, ranging from returning seasons of Better Things, Atlanta, Better Call Saul, Barry and My Brilliant Friend; to freshman shows like Station Eleven and Severance. Intro - 00:00 We Own This City - 01:07 Pachinko - 27:27 Minx - 51:59 Irma Vep - 1:00:46 Top 10 TV Shows of 2022 (so far) - 1:15:42

Professorn i designhistoria, Sara Kristoffersson, blev centrum i den rasande debatten om lokalen "Vita havet" på Konstfack i Stockholm. Hon var stark motståndare till den grupp studenter som menade att namnet bar på rasistiska konnotationer. I dag gästar hon P1 Kulturs studio med ny bok om skeendet. Dessutom intervjuar vår reporter Konstfacks rektor, Maria Lantz, om hur hon ser på debatten om Vita Havet med något års perspektiv.TREDJE SÄSONGEN AV FERRANTES NEAPELKVARTETT SOM TV-SERIEBara några dagar efter att Ryssland invaderade Ukraina, i slutet av februari, hade tredje säsongen av tv-serien "My Brilliant Friend" premiär på HBO Max. Det är filmatiseringen av Elena Ferrantes så kallade "Neapelkvartett", som görs med en säsong per bok i sviten. Nu fångar vi upp hela denna näst sista säsong tillsammans med Kulturredaktionens Ferrante-älskare Lina Kalmteg och Mattias Berg.POVEL RAMEL FYLLER 100I dag skulle en av landets mest berömda underhållare, artisten Povel Ramel, ha fyllt 100, vilket firas med ett specialprogram med tillbakablickar, musik och samtal kring denne musiker, revymakare och ordvrängare. Det finns även en dokumentär om hans liv att lyssna på i efterhand - och efter sommaren kommer Kulturredaktionens serie "AproPovel" att repriseras. Vi har den seriens skapare, Karsten Thurfjell, i studion.ESSÄ OM BLÄCKFISKENS LIV OCH LEVERNEMed sina många armar och sin decentraliserade kropp är bläckfisken det närmaste en utomjording vi kan komma. Men just därför erbjuder mötet med bläckfisken oss en möjlighet att öva upp vår medkänsla inför det främmande, menar författaren och översättaren Kristoffer Leandoer.Programledare: Cecilia Blomberg Producent: Mattias Berg

In this solo Tori & Lulu episode, we chat best stores to shop at Woodbury Commons. Why turning 31 is scarier than 30. Why Johnny Depp wanted a film crew during his trial against Amber Heard. Lulu gives a review on these shows: Lincoln Lawyer, I Love You For That, My Brilliant Friend, Jennifer Lopez new documentary halftime. Did you watch any of these shows? Did you agree with Lulu takes on them? DM us on Instagram @Gotitfrommymamapodcast https://irislnk.com/Tori  CODE: TORI30 for 30 days of Premium membership  Leave a 5 Star Review on iTunes Follow us on @ToriPiskin @lulupiskin

Such reportage, all the way from the Middle East! David returns, truly out of nowhere, to share unsolicited opinions on Matilda, The Northman, Doctor Strange & the Multiverse of Madness, Rosie Perez, My Brilliant Friend and much more. For new episodes and astrology columns, subscribe to David's free newsletter at davidodyssey.substack.com. To register, or book a private astrology or tarot reading, visit davidodyssey.com. And be sure to subscribe/share/rate and share your love of The Luminaries. See you next time! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alexi Lalas and David Mosse kick off the podcast with a look at the Seattle Sounders' historic win in the CONCACAF Champions League vs. Pumas and celebrate them becoming the first MLS team to ever win the competition (11:30). Then the guys recap all of the MLS action including Seattle's loss to FC Dallas, questionable calls in the Toronto Vancouver game and is Cincinnati finally turning a corner? The guys also breakdown all of the drama surrounding the NWSL Challenge Cup. Later we look at Real Madrid's big comeback win vs. Manchester City in the UEFA Champions League as well as the Europa and Conference League Finals (59:20). Then we did a quick whip around the top 5 leagues in Europe and the EPL title race. Later we answered your questions about Chelsea's new ownership group, Super Clubs, and sandwiches in #AskAlexi (1:27:50). Finally, Alexi ends the show with his One for the Road about what it means to see an MLS team in the Club World Cup (1:42:16). What We've Been Watching: Mosse's Picks: Atlanta, Better Call Saul. Winning Time, They Call Me Magic, My Brilliant Friend, Seinfeld, Taxi Driver Alexi's Picks: Like a Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres, At Close Range Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Emily tells us about feisty and funny Little Thieves by Margaret Owen, while Rebecca shares the very mysterious My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. We discuss what songs make us think of our original characters, discover some new words for very specific emotions, and Rebecca finds us some interesting facts about pseudonyms!    Our infatuations: Little Thieves - Margaret Owen My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante  BTS Butter Grammy Performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFpIwQFNke0  BTS ON Performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZh-w2nysuI  The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig  The Infatuated Mix - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3YjGlH5FkuYe0jLdWTT4oH?si=BmCCbA96TPKD9AJXykhAaA    Follow us: infatuatedpodcast@outlook.com Instagram - https://instagram.com/infatuatedpod Twitter - https://twitter.com/infatuatedpod  Emily's Instagram - https://instagram.com/emiloue_  Emily's Twitter - https://twitter.com/emiloue_ Emily's TikTok - https://tiktok.com/@emiloue Rebecca's Instagram - https://instagram.com/grammour.puss Rebecca's Twitter - https://twitter.com/grammourpuss    Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Alexi Lalas and David Mosse kick off the podcast with a look at all the MLS action this week including San Jose's big win vs. Seattle, the Revs slow season, and Gyasi Zardes' move to Colorado (7:14). Then we cover how Christian Pulisic saved Chelsea in their game vs. West Ham, Yunus Musah's miss in the Copa del Rey final, and why the top five leagues in Europe lack parity (27:50). Later, we answered your questions about CONCACAF Champions League, UEFA Champions League, and why MLS Teams are losing to USL teams in the U.S. Open Cup (52:11). Finally, we end the show with a look at the beef between David Mosse and Luis Aguilar as well as answer if Mosse would ever start his own podcast (1:14:03). Call in with questions for #AskAlexi at (657)-549-2297 What We've Been Watching: Mosse's Picks: Atlanta, My Brilliant Friend, Better Call Saul, Winning Time, Ozark Alexi's Picks: The Invisible Pilot, Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, The Flight of the Phoenix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vibe Check Gwen is feeling cozy! Danielle is tired! Gwen washed and put away all of her clothes after her big move; Danielle made her family pound cake for Easter.  * Main Discussion Let's face it—we love a book adaptation, whether it's on TV or a movie! Gwen:  You, Trainspotting, The Princess Diaries, Atonement, Virgin Suicides, Normal People Danielle: Shakespeare remakes—Romeo & Juliet, Romeo + Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tragedy of Macbeth, 10 Things I Hate About You, O, Hamlet; Austen—Clueless, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta; TV Adaptations—Poldark, Station Eleven, My Brilliant Friend, Good Omens, “YA”: The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, The Hate U Give, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Heartstopper * Interview with ABBY JIMENEZ PART OF YOUR WORLD, now available! Nadia Cakes, Abby's cupcake shop (she won Cupcake Wars!) Movie Deal Announcement for The Happy Ever After Playlist Abby's Page-to-Screen recs: Warm Bodies, The Hating Game Gwen's Page-to-Screen recs: Clueless, My Brilliant Friend Danielle's Page-to-Screen recs: Trainspotting, Little Women Connect with Abby: https://www.authorabbyjimenez.com/ Facebook Page Facebook Group Twitter Instagram TikTok * Goals/Comfort & Joy Last time, Gwen wanted to finish packing and move... and she did! Now she'd like to organize her pantry. Gwen is also really enjoying Julia on HBO Max. Danielle tried to read a nonfiction book but did not. This week, she'd like to write something new, not related to what she's working on right now. Related to writing, Danielle has found comfort in long-form journal writing, and Gwen suggested she consider doing The Artist's Way! * EMAIL US! Thoughts or questions? Email us at podcast@freshfiction.com. * Find us on the Socials! Gwen Reyes Twitter Facebook Instagram Danielle Jackson Twitter Instagram Fresh Fiction Twitter Facebook Instagram EventBrite

En este episodio Tamara y Pablo Pryluja hablan sobre petróleo, la historia de Toyota, la serie sobre Bilardo y la nueva temporada de My Brilliant Friend.

The latest in Tate Britain's series of annual commissions is an installation by the artist Hew Locke. It's called The Procession and is comprised of approximately 150 life-size figures - adults, children, animals - arranged in a hundred-yard-long parade. Each one is unique, dressed in colourful fabrics, many specially printed, and wearing masks. It evokes carnival parades, protest marches and funeral corteges. Tom talks to Hew about how he set about making such an ambitious and complicated artwork and finds out about his fascination with obsolete share certificates. Theatre director Ivo Van Hove and soprano Danielle de Niese join Tom to explore why Jean Cocteau's play La Voix Humane is having a moment, with various stage, screen and opera productions opening this spring. As the war in Ukraine continues, we talk to UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Culture, Ernesto Ottone, about the organisation's activities protecting Ukrainian culture and heritage artefacts. We also discuss UNESCO's recent report on the economic impact of the pandemic on creativity across the globe. And Moment of Joy – our occasional series which celebrates those intense moments when watching a film or a play, reading a book or poem, listening to music or looking at a picture makes your heart soar. Dr Maya Goodfellow, academic and professor at The School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London on why Elena Ferrante's novel ‘My Brilliant Friend' makes her joyful.

Special guest Melissa Rich (@melissa_rich_) joins David to talk about the mother of all Cancerians, Pamela Anderson. The two cover Pam & Tommy, Baywatch, sex symbology, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again and much more. David also talks Euphoria, Scream, The Hand of God, And Just Like That and My Brilliant Friend. Join David's new April astrology course, co-hosted with Ruby McCollister. To register, or book a private astrology or tarot reading, visit davidodyssey.com. And be sure to subscribe/share/rate and share your love of The Luminaries. See you next week! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the seventeenth episode of The Literary Edit Podcast, I was joined by author Chibundu Onuzo, whose debut novel, The Spider King's Daughter, was the winner of a Betty Trask Award, shorted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and Etisalat Literature Prize.   You can read about Chibundu's Desert Island Books here, and the ones we discuss in this episode are:   Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta The Earth Sea Quartet by Ursula Le Guin The First Woman by Jennifer Makumbi Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Ake by Wole Soyinka Outline Series by Rachel Cusk The Horse and His Boy by C.S Lewis Segu by Maryse Conde   Other books we spoke about included Chibundu's books, Sankofa and The Spider King's Daughter, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series.   If you'd like to buy any of the books we discussed in the episode, please consider doing so from the list I created on Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. If you're based in Australia, please consider buying them from Gertrude & Alice, who deliver all over the country. To contact me, email lucy@thelitedit.com   Facebook The Literary Edit   Instagram: @the_litedit @chibundu.onuzo   Twitter: @thelitedit @chibunduonuzo  

Jennifer Deibel spent nearly a decade living in Ireland and Austria, building a family and a deep love for all things Irish. That passion for the Emerald Isle and the Gaelic tongue is still with the Arizona schoolteacher, and fueled her passion for writing her debut novel, “A Dance in Donegal” from Revell Books. Jennifer talks to Olivia about making a “perfect cuppa”, life in the desert as compared to a land of green, and how she identifies with her protagonist, Moira. “A Dance in Donegal” follows Moira from Boston to Ireland in 1920, following through on her mother's dying wish for her daughter to teach in the village where she once lived. There, Moira finds a missing piece of herself, and discovers mysteries surrounding her family's past. In a Moment With Margaret, they talk about books where the setting is as important as the characters. Margaret recommends “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens, Olivia recommends Elena Ferrante's “My Brilliant Friend.”

لؤي يتحدث عن "فيرفلي لاين" - وفيصل يتحدث عن ثندرفورس... يتحدثون عن مسيرت كاثرين هايغل وعودتها للشاشة الصغيرة. وعن مسلسل This is Us و-My Brilliant Friend . ويتحدثون عن عقد نتفلكس مع مليسا مكارثي. Louay talks about Firefly Line - and Faissal talks about Thunderforce, both on Netflix. They talk about Katherine Heigl's career and her return to the small screen. They also discuss This is Us and My Brilliant Friend as alternatives.http://cineholicpodcast.com@Cineholicpod  Host/Producer: Faissal Sam Shaib @samshaibHost/Producer: Louay Kraish @LouayKhraishEditor: Mira Shaib @MiraShaib

Candace believes in the magic a story can hold. Each week she will share a personal story, a guest interview or a conversation on various topics that will leave you enlightened, ignited and inspired.  Her hope is that you walk away from every episode changed, even if it's in the most subtle way. Follow Candace on IG

See Naples and...LIVE! On this week's episode we talk about My Brilliant Friend, the first in a four-novel series by pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante. The books trace the friendship of two girls, Lila and Lenù, growing up in post-war Naples. We talk about genius and learning, monsters and mobsters, and the city of Naples itself, both as a character in the book as well as a destination. What to see, where to go...and what to eat!Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, a four-volume series beginning with My Brilliant Friend, relate the long and complicated friendship between two girls, Lenù and Lila, from their childhood in the slums to old age, when Lila suddenly and mysteriously disappears. The books have become nothing short of a phenomenon, international bestsellers and an HBO miniseries. Some of the fascination no doubt is with Elena Ferrante herself, pen name of an unknown author, but certainly another source of the interest lies in the city of Naples itself, and its fundamental role in all four novels. This is not the Naples of cruise ships and Capri, this is a harsh and often ugly Naples, a city of squalor and violence.Lenù, narrator of My Brilliant Friend, reports that she left Naples definitely in 1995, just as the city was experiencing a renewal because she “no longer believed in its resurrections.” However Naples today is a surprising mix of ancient artifacts, vibrant street life, and amazing food, all with glorious views of Vesuvius and the sea. My Brilliant Friend tours have sprung up around the city, offering glimpses of Naples beyond the tourist center. And the island of Ischia, a pivotal plot location, can be reached by ferry in about an hour. While you are reading the books and watching the miniseries, start planning your next trip to Naples. Be prepared to be surprised.

Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale is written in perfect Italian, but her characters speak the Neapolitan dialect most of the time. Here we discuss what Italian and dialect mean for them and their future. Did you read My Brilliant Friend? Did you like it? Let us know! Get in touch with us on Twitter, and have a look at our Website and our YouTube channel for plenty of free resources to learn Italian. This is an excerpt of the full episode available for our patrons. Look for us on Patreon if you'd like to join the circle and give us a hand :) L'amica geniale (in Italian) on Amazon.com (affiliate link) My Brilliant Friend (English translation) on Amazon.com (affiliate link)

The US accounts for 4 per cent of the world's population, but 25 per cent of the people who have come down with COVID-19 and 25 percent of those who've died from it. How did the richest country in the world --that spends the most on health care--become the sickest? Harold Meyerson comments. Also: in our 'news you can use' segment, Ella Taylor talks about the new L.A. noir detective show, “Perry Mason”--and about the wonderful HBO series "My Brilliant Friend," about two girls growing up poor in Naples in the Fifties. Also later in this hour: Black Lives Matter, and Sandra Bland's was one of them. This week is the fifth anniversary of the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail—July 13, 2015. What happened to Sandra Bland? To understand that, you have to begin way before she died. Debbie Nathan reports on the life, as well as the death, of Sandra Bland.

In this episode of she reads, Alma Limón inspired by Elena Ferrante´s novel "My Brilliant Friend" wanders about what makes a toxic friendship vs a healthy one. She also talks about how painful it is when we feel like we are no longer necessary to the people we love and how this can sabotage our relationships. Lastly, Alma thinks about why it is so hard to acknowledge our own feelings and why we are so inclined to consume emotional pornography. Books Mentioned:Elena Ferrante- My Brilliant FriendRising Strong- Brené Brown-Follow the podcast on Instagram here: shereads.podcastIntro/Outro song by Diego Alí

Zan backs up after the ARIA Awards with minimal sleep but maximal stories about Australian music's night of nights. Knickers the giant cow has everyone talking and we're here for it. And a long long read about Lena Dunham has us questioning our own reactions to this divisive creator. Meanwhile Melania Trump has decked the halls once again and oh boy, it's gonna be a bloody Christmas. Show notes: ARIA snaps: https://www.instagram.com/p/BqvQtg3AE5u/ Knickers the giant cow: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/28/knickers-the-cow-why-australias-giant-steer-is-so-fascinating Lena Dunham comes to terms with herself: https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/lena-dunham-comes-to-terms-with-herself.html Melania's Christmas decorations: https://www.vox.com/2018/11/27/18113451/melania-trump-white-house-christmas-decorations-meme-2018 Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age: https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2018/11/net-loss My Brilliant Friend: https://www.hbo.com/my-brilliant-friend Email us: bangon.podcast@abc.net.au

On the November 26, 2018 episode of /Film Daily, /Film editor-in-chief Peter Sciretta is joined by /Film managing editor Jacob Hall, weekend editor Brad Oman, senior writer Ben Pearson, and writers Hoai-Tran Bui and Chris Evangelista to about what they've been up to at the Water Cooler.   You can subscribe to /Film Daily on iTunes, Google Play, Overcast, Spotify and all the popular podcast apps (here is the RSS URL if you need it).   Opening Banter: This is the first back to back watercooler episode in /Film Daily history.   At The Water Cooler: What we've been Doing:Peter bought Kitra a fancy Breville Barista Express espresso machine for her birthday and they spent a day trying to figure that out. Jacob did a whole bunch of driving for multiple Thanksgiving engagements and visited the terrific Madness Comics and Games outside of Dallas. Brad spent Thanksgiving away from his family for the first time ever and didn't have turkey for Thanksgiving, dog sat a French Bulldog, went Black Friday shopping, found a cool Snitch ornament at Walmart. Ben celebrated the first annual Vince Guaral-Day, took his sister to The Last Bookstore, and finally stepped into the future with Amazon Prime (and Amazon Fresh) Hoai-Tran was surrounded by babies and dogs at her family Thanksgiving, and helped host her cousin's baby shower. Also went to her cousin's NY restaurant Di An Di, which is currently leading the Eater NYC Restaurant of the Year poll. What we've been Watching:Peter saw Creed II and Widows, and can finally share his quick reaction to  Aquaman. Chris watched the Jim Carrey version of The Grinch, the entire expanded edition of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, started watching NYPD Blue on Hulu, and watched the Mac and Me episode of the new Mystery Science Theater 3000. Ben rewatched Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Brad saw Creed II, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, and Can You Ever Forgive Me?. Also watched an episode of The Final Table on Netflix. Jacob watched Thor: Ragnarok, the only movie in existence to appeal to an entire Thanksgiving gathering. He also sampled Netflix's The Final Table. Hoai-Tran saw At Eternity's Gate, the first episode of My Brilliant Friend, and watched The Princess Switch twice. What we've been Reading:Jacob dipped his toe back into Transmetropolitan. What we've been Eating:Peter ate a bunch of bad food while off his diet. At Friendsgiving he tried Ben and Amy's Shaqaroni and Cheese but fell in love with pumpkin pie dip and the very dangerous Caramel Apple Sangria. I also waited three hours in line for Howlin Rays. Jacob ate two Thanksgiving dinners and made peanut butter pie that he didn't get to eat. Brad was introduced to the majesty of the Tim Tam Slam, tried Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch, and had Indian food that he didn't hate. Hoai-Tran learned how to make pho in her new instant pot! What we've been Playing:Peter played some tabletop games on Friendsgiving and a game day, including Werewords, Hail Hydra, Detective, and Chameleon. Jacob played more Diablo III and Rogue Legacy. On the table, he played Hail Hydra, News@11, Azul, and Arboretum. He also tortured people with Twisted Sister's terrible Christmas album. Other articles mentioned: Shaq's Macaroni and Cheese Jenny Nicholson's 15 dumb things in Fantastic Beasts 2 All the other stuff you need to know: You can find more about all the stories we mentioned on today's show at slashfilm.com, and linked inside the show notes. /Film Daily is published every weekday, bringing you the most exciting news from the world of movies and television as well as deeper dives into the great features from slashfilm.com. You can subscribe to /Film Daily on iTunes, Google Play, Overcast, Spotify and all the popular podcast apps (RSS). Send your feedback, questions, comments and concerns to us at peter@slashfilm.com. Please leave your name and general geographic location in case we mention the e-mail on the air. Please rate and review the podcast on iTunes, tell your friends and spread the word! Thanks to Sam Hume for our logo.

We're looking at HBO's highly anticipated TV adaptation of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. Alena Lodkina's Strange Colours is one of the most acclaimed Australian debut features we've seen in a long time, and an interview with French director Philippe Le Guay about his new film Normandy Nude.

Karl catches King Kong in the Big Apple, and likes it more than some of New York's theatre reviewers. Suspiria is bewildering, and no amount of Andrew's ferreting around in libraries can change that. And Andrew thinks My Brilliant Friend just might be a book-to-screen adaptation he can get behind.    Links from this episode Kanopy JustWatch.com (just because it's so great!) Scribd King Kong collected by Karl Quinn NY Post had a bash at the big ape Suspriria on Wikipedia My Brilliant Friend HBO   Karl Quinn is on Twitter, Facebook and writes a lot for Fairfax Media. The Clappers is produced by Nearly, a podcast network.   Find a new podcast! The Debrief with Dave O'Neil - Dave gives a comedian a lift home from a gig. 10 Questions with Adam Zwar - The same 10 questions with answers that vary wildly. Scale Up - How does a company go from 5 laptops to 200 staff? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Idle Book Club is back! After a two-year hiatus, we're ready to start discussing books again each month, with one returning host and one new one. This episode, we announce our first book: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. Then, to get back in the swing of things, we share our thoughts on two other books we've recently read: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Join us!