Podcasts about Picador

Rose Boyt tells Gyles about her unconventional childhood, and about her experiences of being parented by - and painted by - her father Lucian Freud, the celebrated modern artist. This is an extraordinary story: even Gyles is bowled over by the twists and turns of Rose's childhood. Rose's parents were Lucian Freud and the artist Susie Boyt, with whom Freud had three other children. He also had many other children with other women - 14 children in all - and was never a conventional husband or father to any of them. But he was brilliant - dazzlingly entertaining, talented, intelligent and inspiring - and Rose experienced this at first hand when she was painted by him for a nude portrait which is the starting point for her book, Naked Portrait. Rose also spent a year living on a cargo ship in the Baltic, DJ'd with Neneh Cherry, and was briefly engaged to Andy Warhol. This is a fascinating interview about Rose, about Lucian Freud, about the artistic life, and about alternative ways of living and looking at the world.Rose Boyt's book, Naked Portrait is out in paperback, published by Picador. It is highly recommended.This episode was recorded at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Sarvas is the award-winning author of the novels @UGMAN (ITNA Press), MEMENTO PARK (FSG, Picador) and HARRY, REVISED (Bloomsbury). MEMENTO PARK is the winner of a 2019 American Book Award (Before Columbus Foundation), and the 2019 American Jewish Library Association Fiction Award. It was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and was shortlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize and longlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal. His debut novel, HARRY, REVISED, was published in more than a dozen countries around the world, earning raves from Le Monde to The Australian. A finalist for the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association's 2008 Fiction Award and a Denver Post 2008 Good Read, HARRY, REVISED has been called "A remarkable debut" by Booker Prize winner John Banville, and was compared to John Updike and Philip Roth by the Chicago Tribune. He was awarded a 2018 Santa Monica Arts Fellowship and is a 2021 Guild Hall Artist in Residence. Want to be a guest on Book 101 Review? Send Daniel Lucas a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/17372807971394464fea5bae3 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eileen Myles reads from their first collection of poetry since 2018's Evolution. The poems in a “Working Life” evoke the joy and unease in the quotidian, moving ‘with call and response between perception and thought', as Camille Roy writes in Brooklyn Rail magazine.Myles is in conversation with journalist and activist Amelia Abraham, whose Queer Intentions was published by Picador in 2020. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The much venerated charge of the light brigade at the battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War was one of the biggest military blunders of all time. The poor decisions made that day had much to do with the personalities of the British high command.Sources:Aldrete, Gregory S. History's Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach. The Great Courses, 2015.Figes, Orlando. Crimea. New York, Picador, 2012.

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the 108th edition of WLRN's monthly podcast! First up, hear aurora greet the listener before handing the mic to Mary O'Neill who delivers WLRN's world news featuring stories from Louisiana, Russia and Iran. After the world news, stay tuned for the song "Mother Rage" by Kathy Fire, an anarchist feminist songwriter who released this gem in 1978. Next, hear the interview Thistle did with Lierre Keith about the significance of the re-release of Andrea Dworkin's Right Wing Women by Picador in February of 2025. Lierre Keith (www.lierrekeith.com) is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of six books including, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She is also coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. She's been arrested six times for acts of political resistance. Finally, stay tuned 'til the very end for commentary from WLRN member aurora linnea in which she aptly compares Trump to Ronald Reagan and ties it all together for us regarding the force of right wing politics in the United States. She also, however, rightly points out, as did Ms. Dworkin, the misogyny and cruelty toward women on the left, and how women don't have a viable option for dignity and respect in general in American life. Thanks for tuning in to another WLRN monthly handcrafted podcast. We would love to hear from you so please listen, like, comment and share widely! #WLRN #AndreaDworkin #RightWingWomen #LierreKeith #auroralinnea

Sarah Jaffe joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about allowing ourselves to be known on the page, learning how to pivot from journalism to the very personal, processing experiences through writing, being upended by grief, taking care of ourselves when writing about violence and terror, witnessing and giving voice to other people's hardships with integrity and respect, becoming undone on the page, how we are haunted by the losses we live through, sculpting material down during revision, and her new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.   Also mentioned in this episode: -documenting activism and organizing -climate change -the cognitive dissonance of social media   Books mentioned in this episode: -Ghostly Matters by Avery Gordon -Love and Borders by Anna Lukas Miller -Who Cares by Emily Kenway   Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, which Jane McAlevey called “a multiplex in still life; a stunning critique of capitalism, a collective conversation on the meaning of life and work, and a definite contribution to the we-won't-settle-for-less demands of the future society everyone deserves,” and of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, both from Bold Type Books.   She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.   Sarah was formerly a staff writer at In These Times and the labor editor at AlterNet. She was a contributing editor on The 99%: How the Occupy Wall Street Movement is Changing America, from AlterNet books, as well as a contributor to the anthologies At the Tea Party and Tales of Two Cities, both from OR Books, and Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America, from Picador. She was also the web director at GRITtv with Laura Flanders.   She was one of the first reporters to cover Occupy and the Fight for $15, has appeared on numerous radio and television programs to discuss topics ranging from electoral politics to Superstorm Sandy, from punk rock to public-sector unions.   She has a master's degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia and a bachelor's degree in English from Loyola University New Orleans. Sarah was born and raised in Massachusetts and has also lived in South Carolina, Louisiana, Colorado, New York and Pennsylvania.   Connect with Sarah: Website: https://sarahljaffe.com/ X: https://x.com/sarahljaffe Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahljaffe/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarahjaffetrouble   – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social   Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers

Listen to journalist Erica Wagner in conversation with Mai Sennaar, writer of “They Dream in Gold”, her first novel published by Picador and SJP Lit in 2024 which explores the notion of identity and the sense of belonging through two protagonists from the African diaspora in the United States. As the conversation unfolds, the author evokes how music changed her life and the emancipatory power of language. The writer, playwright and filmmaker also reflects on the transformative experience of being published, read and understood as her first novel has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. As part of the Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon [Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon], the podcast "les Rencontres" highlights the birth of a writer in a series created by CHANEL and House ambassador and spokesperson Charlotte Casiraghi. (00:00) : Introduction (00:56) : Presentation of Mai Sennaar and her novel “They Dream in Gold” by Erica Wagner(04:21) : On the author's path to becoming a writer(06:34) : About cinema, theatre and literature(08:57) : The start of writing her novel(10:14) : On the influence of language on writing(12:07) : The publication process of her novel(14:27) : On Alfred Hitchcock's influence on the novel(16:17) : Reading an extract of “They Dream in Gold” by Mai Sennaar(17:51) : On the writing process of her novel(19:36) : The books which inspired her(22:24) : On the influence of music in the novel(24:49) : The research process behind the book(27:25) : On speaking about black identity(30:20) : On the reception of the book(33:20) : The ending questionnaire of “les Rencontres”They Dream In Gold © Mai Sennaar 2024. First published in the US in 2024 by SJP Lit, an imprint of Zando. First published in the UK in 2024 by Picador, an imprint of MacmillanJean Kwok, Book Review: 'They Dream in Gold,' by Mai Sennaar,From the New-York Times © 2024 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under licenseLucy Popescu, They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar review - love and identity on the 1960s music scene, 28 July 2024 © Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2025May Sennaar © Wax Lovers Playlist, 2017Diana Wharton Sennaar and May Sennaar © Carry On, 2024Arthur Laurents, West Side Story. All rights reservedDavid Dodge, To Catch a Thief, published 1952 by Alfred A. KnopfAlfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest, © Warner Bros., 1959. All rights reservedTheir Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright © 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston. Renewed © 1965 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

Listen to journalist Erica Wagner in conversation with Mai Sennaar, writer of “They Dream in Gold”, her first novel published by Picador and SJP Lit in 2024 which explores the notion of identity and the sense of belonging through two protagonists from the African diaspora in the United States. As the conversation unfolds, the author evokes how music changed her life and the emancipatory power of language. The writer, playwright and filmmaker also reflects on the transformative experience of being published, read and understood as her first novel has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. As part of the Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon [Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon], the podcast "les Rencontres" highlights the birth of a writer in a series created by CHANEL and House ambassador and spokesperson Charlotte Casiraghi. (00:00) : Introduction (00:56) : Presentation of Mai Sennaar and her novel “They Dream in Gold” by Erica Wagner(04:21) : On the author's path to becoming a writer(06:34) : About cinema, theatre and literature(08:57) : The start of writing her novel(10:14) : On the influence of language on writing(12:07) : The publication process of her novel(14:27) : On Alfred Hitchcock's influence on the novel(16:17) : Reading an extract of “They Dream in Gold” by Mai Sennaar(17:51) : On the writing process of her novel(19:36) : The books which inspired her(22:24) : On the influence of music in the novel(24:49) : The research process behind the book(27:25) : On speaking about black identity(30:20) : On the reception of the book(33:20) : The ending questionnaire of “les Rencontres”They Dream In Gold © Mai Sennaar 2024. First published in the US in 2024 by SJP Lit, an imprint of Zando. First published in the UK in 2024 by Picador, an imprint of MacmillanJean Kwok, Book Review: 'They Dream in Gold,' by Mai Sennaar,From the New-York Times © 2024 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under licenseLucy Popescu, They Dream in Gold by Mai Sennaar review - love and identity on the 1960s music scene, 28 July 2024 © Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2025Mai Sennaar © Wax Lovers Playlist, 2017Diana Wharton Sennaar and Mai Sennaar © Carry On, 2024Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story, 1957David Dodge, To Catch a Thief, published 1952 by Alfred A. KnopfAlfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest, © Warner Bros., 1959. All rights reservedTheir Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Copyright © 1937 by Zora Neale Hurston. Renewed © 1965 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

Mike chats with Olivia Laing, winner of a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, about the strange and confounding (and wonderful) pleasures of Charlotte Brontë's Villette. READING LIST: Villette by Charlotte Brontë • Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Olivia Laing is the author of several books of nonfiction and fiction including The Garden Against Time and the forthcoming The Silver Book. The Lonely City (2016) was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into 14 languages. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) was a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn PrizeLaing lives in Cambridge, England, and writes on art and culture for many publications, including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The New York Times. Her debut novel Crudo was published by Picador and W. W. Norton & Company in June 2018. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Music by Dani Lencioni, production by Drew Broussard, hosted by Michael Kelleher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ralph McAllister reviews three of his favourite books from last year: Our Evenings by Hollinghurst, published by Picador, Cocktails with George and Martha by Philip Gefter, published by Ithaka Press Limited, and Clete by James Lee Burke, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Rachel and Simon speak with the literary agent Clare Alexander. For the first portion of her career she worked in publishing, starting out in 1973 in the rights department at Penguin; after stints at Hamish Hamilton and Viking she became editor-in-chief of Macmillan and Picador. Clare published first novels by Helen Dunmore, Alex Garland, Amitav Ghosh, Haruki Murakami and Donna Tartt. In 1995, while at Viking, she was the editor of the winners of the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize (now the Women's Prize) and the Whitbread Award (the erstwhile Costa Book Awards) - the first editor ever to achieve this hat-trick. In 1998 Clare became a literary agent. Her client list includes Diana Evans, Helen Fielding, Armando Iannucci, Nicholas Shakespeare, Rory Stewart and Colin Thubron. We spoke to Clare about her early career as an editor, becoming an agent in the late 1990s, and working with authors including Pat Barker, Mark Haddon and Sebastian Faulks. A new edition of “Always Take Notes: Advice From Some Of The World's Greatest Writers” - a book drawing on our podcast interviews - is available now. The updated version now includes insights from over 100 past guests on the podcast, with new contributions from Harlan Coben, Victoria Hislop, Lee Child, Megan Nolan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Philippa Gregory, Jo Nesbø, Paul Theroux, Hisham Matar and Bettany Hughes. You can order it via ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Waterstones⁠⁠. You can find us online at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠alwaystakenotes.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, on Twitter @takenotesalways and on Instagram @alwaystakenotes. Our crowdfunding page is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/alwaystakenotes⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Always Take Notes is presented by Simon Akam and Rachel Lloyd, and produced by Artemis Irvine. Our music is by Jessica Dannheisser and our logo was designed by James Edgar.

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud's sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud's legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud's extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.  How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what's so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he's going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Melanie O'Loughlin of Lamplight Books in Auckland reviews Dusk by Robbie Arnott published by Picador

Due to various life events the Boiz have decided to postpone our next official episode, instead we're giving our beloved listeners a taste of our exclusive Patreon show, Telling Jerry Something! 251.9 million years ago our planet suffered the most catastrophic event life on Earth has ever known. Join us as Chris regales the gang about the dreaded Permian-Triassic Extinction Event!Sources:GEE, HENRY. A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters. PICADOR, 2022. Covert Affair Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Sarah Tarlow is on the podcast this week to talk about her memoir The Archaeology of Loss, this month's Church Times book club title. Susan Gray has written a reflection on the book in the 6 September edition of the Church Times: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/books-arts/book-club In her candid memoir, Sarah Tarlow excavates her memory to piece together the events and experiences leading up to her husband's suicide, and traces the complicated grief which followed. Using her archaeological insights, the author makes parallels between what she has encountered through her professional work, tracing the rituals of death and commemoration, with the reality of her own personal situation. Nothing prepared her for the grim reality of caring for someone whose personality had been so affected by illness, and for her own struggles facing up to the actuality of loss. Sarah Tarlow is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester. She is in conversation with Sarah Meyrick, whose latest novel is Joy and Felicity (Sacristy Press, 2021). The Archaeology of Loss is published by Picador at £10.99 (Church Times Bookshop £9.89). https://chbookshop.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781529099553/the-archaeology-of-loss?vc=CT106 The Church Times Book Club is run in association with the Festival of Faith and Literature. https://faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk Sign up to receive the free Book Club email once a month. Featuring discussion questions, podcasts and discounts on each book: churchtimes.co.uk/newsletter-signup Discuss this month's book at facebook.com/groups/churchtimesbookclub Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

Kiran Dass reviews The Garden Against Time: In Search of Common Paradise by Olivia Laing published by Picador

Crocodile-like men, fireflies, a soul hitching a ride on a bee, the coolness of Switzerland, anagrams, and a mysterious rhyming poem - all this and more from Ian McMillan's guests this week - as they explore the way a poetic image can change the way we see things,Arji Manuelpillai is a poet and creative facilitator. His poetry collection 'Improvised Explosive Device' (Penned in the Margins) emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families. He also presents a poetry podcast: 'Arji's Pickle Jar'.Mona Arshi is a poet, and was a human rights lawyer. Her poetry collections are 'Small Hands' and 'Dear Big Gods' (Pavilion), and she recently published her first novel 'Somebody Loves You'. Mona's third poetry collection will be published next year. John McAuliffe is a poet, and a director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. He has published six poetry collections - and his latest - 'National Theatre' (Gallery) will be out shortly. John unravels our 'neon' line this week ( a stand-out line in a classic poem) and explains why it works so well.Tom Chatfield is a novelist, writer and tech philosopher - and now author of 'Wise Animals: How technology has made us what we are' (Picador). He helps us pit human poets against AI or more precisely - against Large Language Models - to see what human poets can still do best.

Sarah Manguso has written the ultimate chump novel: Liars. Jane is a woman who endures marriage to, and divorce from, a textbook fuckwit. It dramatizes marital betrayal, narcissistic abuse, and coercive control in a way we all know deep in our bones.   Manguso says, "It's a novel, so of course it's all fiction—except for the parts that are true." During the pandemic, Manguso's cheating husband abandoned her and their son. It became fodder for Liars.  She the author of nine books, most recently the novel Very Cold People. Liars, is forthcoming on July 23 from Hogarth Books in the US and August 22 from Picador in the UK. Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay. Her work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and her writing has been translated into twelve languages. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles.

Ahren and Sara are live chatting about their favorite Time Travel novels!Welcome to "Reeding Between the Lines," your go-to podcast for all things books! Featuring Ahren, Sara, and Nicole Reed. A brother, sister, and mother with different tastes but the same passion for reading. Join us as we explore, review, and debate books from every genre. Ready to dive into your next great read? @reedingbetweenthelinespodBooks mentioned:1. The Miracles of the Namiya General Store, Keigo Higashino, September 24, 2019 published by Yen On2. Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel, May 5, 2022, by KnopfGoodreads Choice Award for Science Fiction (2022)3. Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi, September 19, 2019 by Picador publishing4. The Unexpected Gift of Joseph Bridgeman, by Nick Jones (self-published) 2015.5. The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas, 2018, Head of Zeus publisher6. Lightning by Dean Koontz, 1988, Penguin Random HouseSupport the Show.

Short story and literary novelist and former Hachette Editor, Niamh Mulvey on how to create memorable characters, finding her voice as a writer after years of failing, overcoming rejection and what she's learned from her years in the publishing industry. *ABOUT NIAMH MULVEYNiamh Mulvey is from Kilkenny, Ireland. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee and Southword and was shortlisted for the Seán O'Faoláin Prize for Short Fiction 2020. Her short story collection Hearts & Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth was published by Picador. The Amendments is her first novel.*RESOURCES & LINKS

This week Agnes Arnold-Forster jumps in to talk about the emotional roller coaster that is Pixar's Inside Out. We talk about how historians have conceptualized emotions, their role in the human experience, and Agnes' new book which charts the history of nostalgia. This is such a cool pod because we go places we rarely get to visit. I hope you dig it.About our guest:Agnes Arnold-Forster is a writer; researcher; and historian. She has written, researched, and presented on everything from women's health in today's Britain to the history of cancer; from the 1918 flu pandemic to the well-being of surgeons in twenty-first-century America. She is an expert in the history of Europe, the USA, and Canada, and my research spans the eighteenth century to the present day. She explores societies, cultures, medicine, science, technology, emotions, and the world of work. She is currently writing a book about the history of nostalgia, due to be published by Picador in April 2024.

Niamh Mulvey's first book, the short story collection Hearts and Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth was published by Picador in June 2022. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee and Southword and was shortlisted for the Seán O'Faoláin Prize for Short Fiction 2020. In this week's show she talks to Neil Denny about her first novel The Amendments. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sinéad Gleeson's essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life was published by Picador in 2019 and won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Michel Deon Prize. In today's show she talks to Neil Denny about her debut novel Hagstone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don't underestimate the power your voice has. This is the key message to come from Happy Place Book Club read, Killjoy, which tells the incredible true story of the No More Page 3 campaign, and the unlikely everyday women who made a generational change possible. Fearne chats to author Jo Cheetham about their early memories of Page 3, street harassment, and how cultural messages can affect the way we relate to our own bodies. They also talk about acknowledging anger and channelling that rage into something productive, and Jo shares how self-sabotage nearly stopped her writing this book in the first place. Join the Happy Place Book Club on Instagram @happyplacebookclub – DM your messages and voicenotes about April's read, The List Of Suspicious Things, to have your thoughts shared on the podcast! ...and don't worry, there are no Killjoy plot spoilers in this episode! This episode features extracts from the audiobook of Killjoy, narrated by Jo Cheetham, with thanks to Picador. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novel Biography of X, available in trade paperback from Picador. Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and of the short-story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago, Illinois. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram  TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this thirteenth edition of the Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon [Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon] that was held at the 7L library in Paris, CHANEL and Charlotte Casiraghi, ambassador and spokesperson for the House, invited novelist and essayist Rachel Cusk, along with model and friend of the House Naomi Campbell.Moderated by author and critic Erica Wagner, this encounter dedicated to the work of Rachel Cusk considers motherhood, how to explore personal stories through literature and the rework of the literary form it requires: “I think I always felt that my duty was to reality and how the novel could show that and contain it.”Extract from A Life's Work, Copyright © 2001, 2008, Rachel Cusk, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.Excerpt from A Life's Work: on Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2001 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Picador. All Rights Reserved.Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk © Rachel Cusk, 2019. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 1993 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Picador. All Rights Reserved.© Whitbread PLC.© Costa Book AwardsThe Country Life by Rachel Cusk © Rachel Cusk, 2019. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.The Country Life by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 1997 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Picador. All Rights Reserved.In the Fold © Rachel Cusk, 2005.Arlington Park © Rachel Cusk, 2006.Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2006 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Outline Copyright © 2014 Rachel Cusk, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.Outline by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Transit by Rachel Cusk © Rachel Cusk, 2018. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.Transit by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2016 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Kudos by Rachel Cusk © Rachel Cusk, 2019. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.Kudos by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Extract from Second Place by Rachel Cusk © Rachel Cusk, 2021 Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.Excerpt from Second Place by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2021 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted/Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Extract from Second Place Copyright © 2021 Rachel Cusk, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.© Association Prix Femina.Rachel Cusk, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, © Faber & Faber, 2019.Extract from Aftermath: on marriage and separation by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2012 by Rachel Cusk. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.Parade © Rachel Cusk, 2024.Parade by Rachel Cusk. Copyright © 2024 by Rachel Cusk. Forthcoming from Faber & Faber Ltd. and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2024. All Rights Reserved.From The New York Times Magazine. © 2016, The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under licenseMrs Dalloway © Virginia Woolf, 1925Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, Translated by Ann Goldstein, © Europa, 2008. First published 2006 by Edizioni e/o as La figlia oscura La figlia oscura by Elena Ferrante © 2006 by Edizioni E/O.

I welcome author Emma Flint to the show in this interview episode to discuss her second novel, 'Other Women'.Emma grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne and has been writing fiction since she knew what stories were. She graduated from the University of St. Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature, later completing a novel-writing course at the Faber Academy.Since childhood, she has been drawn to true crime stories, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases. She is equally fascinated by notorious historical figures and by unorthodox women – past, present and fictional.'Other Women' is a devastating story of fantasy, obsession and shame inspired by a murder that took place six years after the end of the Great War.The paperback edition was released by Picador on March 7, 2024, and is available to purchase here:Other Women by Emma Flint | PicadorYou can contact Emma at emmaflint.com***This interview was recorded on March 12, 2024.Join my Patreon community at patreon.com/britishmurders for exclusive perks, including early access to ad-free episodes, bonus content, exciting giveaways, and much more!Do you have a guest request? Please send it to contact@britishmurders.com or fill out a Contact Form at britishmurders.com/contactIntro music:⁣David John Brady - 'Throw Down the Gauntlet'⁣davidjohnbrady.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I welcome author Emma Flint to the show in this interview episode to discuss her second novel, 'Other Women'. Emma grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne and has been writing fiction since she knew what stories were. She graduated from the University of St. Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature, later completing a novel-writing course at the Faber Academy. Since childhood, she has been drawn to true crime stories, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases. She is equally fascinated by notorious historical figures and by unorthodox women – past, present and fictional. 'Other Women' is a devastating story of fantasy, obsession and shame inspired by a murder that took place six years after the end of the Great War. The paperback edition was released by Picador on March 7, 2024, and is available to purchase here: Other Women by Emma Flint | Picador You can contact Emma at emmaflint.com ***This interview was recorded on March 12, 2024. Join my Patreon community at patreon.com/britishmurders for exclusive perks, including early access to ad-free episodes, bonus content, exciting giveaways, and much more! Do you have a guest request? Please send it to contact@britishmurders.com or fill out a Contact Form at britishmurders.com/contact Intro music:⁣ David John Brady - 'Throw Down the Gauntlet'⁣ davidjohnbrady.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Notes and Links to Gina Chung's Work      For Episode 227, Pete welcomes Gina Chung, and the two discuss, among other topics, The Babysitters Club's lasting impact, her early relationship with words and bilingualism, finding great storytelling in her parents' example and in folktales and animal myths, her master touch with disparate stories and characters, and salient topics from the story collection like parental/child relationships and expectations, grief and memory, and one's connection with her forebears.    Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel SEA CHANGE (Vintage, March 28, 2023; Picador, April 13, 2023 in the Commonwealth and in the UK on August 10, 2023), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Adult Fiction Honor, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book, and the short story collection GREEN FROG (Vintage, March 12, 2024; out in the UK/Commonwealth from Picador on June 6, 2024). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School's Creative Writing Program and a BA in literary studies from Williams College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in One Story, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, and F(r)iction, among others.   Buy Green Frog     Gina's Website   Review of Green Frog-Kirkus At about 2:35, Gina shouts places to buy her book, Green Frog, and about her feelings a few weeks before the book's release At about 4:25, Gina recounts what she's heard from early readers of her collection At about 6:05, Gina responds to Pete's questions about storytellers in her life and her early language and reading life At about 10:10, Gina talks about her early reading delights At about 12:10, Babysitters Club love! At about 13:15, Gina talks about her writing journey and her confidence peaks and valleys At about 16:40, Gina shouts out “amazing” contemporary writers, such as Rebecca K. Riley and Jiaming Tang  At about 18:40-21:25, Gina talks about seeds for her collection and gives background on the title story and the “Green Frog” folktale At about 21:25-22:40, Gina talks about daily and informal observation that inspired “Mantis” and other stories in the collection At about 24:40, Gina speaks to her rationale and the background in picking the Emily Jungmin Yoon-inspired epigraph At about 26:25, Pete and Gina discuss “How to Eat Your Own Heart,” the collection's first story, including profound quotes (27:10-30:20) At about 31:00, Gina speaks to ideas of regeneration in the above story and gives some background on how the story came from a Zoom “Knife Skills” course At about 34:25, The two further discuss the title story of the collection  At about 36:20, Pete asks Gina about the meanings of “here” in the title story  At about 39:30, Themes of community in “The Fruits of Sin” are discussed  At about 40:35, Belief is discussed in conjunc At about 41:15, Grief and the importance of rabbits in Korean culture and beyond are discussed in connection to a moving story from the collection At about 43:40, Pete quotes an important and universal passage as he and Gina talk about memory's throughline in the collection; the two ruminate on connections to The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind At about 50:20, Gina reflects on a moving story that deals with memory and technology At about 54:00, The two talk about mother-daughter and parent-child relationships in the collection At about 57:40, Pete quotes a poignant and skillfully crafted passage At about 59:15, Gina gives a ballpark for how long of a range the stories were written in and throughlines that she has identified in her collection  At about 1:03:00, Gina talks change in characters and its external and internal characteristics       You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch this and other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.    I am very excited that starting in February with Episode 220 with Neef Ekpoudom and this episode, I will have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. A big thanks to Rachel León and Michael Welch at Chicago Review-I'm looking forward to the partnership!    Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl     Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!       This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 228 with Jazmina Barrera Velásquez, who is a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters. Her book of essays, Cuerpo extraño, was awarded the Latin American Voices prize from Literal Publishing in 2013, and she is the editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope, and author of, most recently, Cross-Stitch.     The episode will air on March 19.   10+ actions to help bring about Ceasefire in Gaza    

Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake and several other books. Her new memoir is Grief Is for People. “You take a little sliver of yourself and you offer it up to be spun around in perpetuity in the public imagination. That is the sacrifice you make. And it makes everything just a little bit worse. So it's the opposite of catharsis, but it's worth it. It's worth it for what you get in return: a book.” Show notes: sloanecrosley.com @askanyone Longform Podcast #343: Sloane Crosley 01:00 Grief Is for People (MCD • 2024) 14:00 Heartburn (Nora Ephron • Vintage • 1996) 25:00 "Patchett: In Bad Relationships, 'There Comes A Day When You Gotta Go.'" (Fresh Air with Terry Gross • WHYY • Jan 2014) 25:00 Joan Didion on Fresh Air with Terry Gross 25:00 "Long COVID, Chronic Illness & Searching For Answers" (Fresh Air with Terry Gross • WHYY • Feb 2022) 32:00 "Obituary: Russell Perreault, V-P at Vintage Anchor, 52" (Rachel Deahl • Publishers Weekly • Jul 2019) 37:00 The Clasp (Picador • 2016) 49:00 How Did You Get This Number (Riverhead Books • 2011) 51:00 "Five O'Clock Somewhere" (Gary Indiana • Granta • Feb 2024) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For our first read of the February Bookstore Challenge Prompt (read a memoir written by a writer) Corinne chose Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. It's a memoir about being a poet and having your dad literally be a Catholic priest. And we're of divided opinions for once. Next time we will read My Garden (Book): by Jamaica Kincaid. This is out of print, but can be found at the library or used. Or if you're patient, a new edition will be available from Picador in July 2024. In March we will be reading I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Conde and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. Content Warnings: Sexual assault, religious trauma, infertility. Books mentioned: David Sedaris (general) No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair _________ If you want to read along with The Bookstore Challenge 2024, you can join us on The StoryGraph to see what others are reading for each month and get ideas for your TBR: The Bookstore Challenge 2024. Get two audiobook credits for the price of one at Libro.fm when you sign up using the code BOOKSTOREPOD. Website | Patreon

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world's view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert'. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network's Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world's view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert'. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network's Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world's view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert'. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network's Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world's view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert'. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network's Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

In Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny (Picador, 2023), Con Coughlin, veteran commentator on war in the Middle East and author of Saddam: The Secret Life, examines how a mild-mannered ophthalmic surgeon has transformed himself into the tyrannical ruler of a once flourishing country. Until the Arab Spring of 2011, the world's view of Bashar al-Assad was largely benign. He and his wife, a former British banker, were viewed as philanthropic individuals doing their best to keep their country at peace. So much so that a profile of Mrs Assad in American Vogue was headlined ‘The Rose in the Desert'. Shortly after it appeared, Syria descended into the horrific civil war that has seen its cities reduced tos rubble and thousands murdered and displaced, a civil war that was still raging over a decade later. In this vivid and authoritative account Con Coughlin draws together all the strands of Assad's remarkable story, revealing precisely how a young doctor ensured not only that he inherited the presidency from his father, but has held on to power by whatever means necessary, continuing to preside over one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network's Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Our guest today on Killer Women is Emily Schultz.Emily is the author of Sleeping With Friends and the forthcoming Brooklyn Kills Me, both from Thomas & Mercer. She is the co-founder of Joyland Magazine. Her last novel, Little Threats, was published by GP Putnam's Sons and was named an Apple Books Best of 2020 pick. Her novel, The Blondes, released in the U.S. with St. Martin's Press and Picador, in France with Editions Asphalte, and in Canada with Doubleday. It was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Kirkus. The Blondes was produced as a scripted podcast starring Madeline Zima (Twin Peaks), and created by Schultz and Brian J Davis. Translated into French, German, and Spanish it had over one million listeners worldwide. Her writing has appeared in Elle, Slate, Evergreen Review, Vice, Today's Parent, Hazlitt, The Hopkins Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Brooklyn where she is a producer with the indie media company Heroic Collective.Killer Women is copyrighted by Authors on the Air Global Radio Network#podcast #author #interview #authors #KillerWomen #KillerWomenPodcast #authorsontheair #podcast #podcaster #killerwomen #killerwomenpodcast #authors #authorsofig #authorsofinstagram #authorinterview #writingcommunity #authorsontheair #suspensebooks #authorssupportingauthors #thrillerbooks #suspense #wip #writers #writersinspiration #books #bookrecommendations #bookaddict #bookaddicted #bookaddiction #bibliophile #read #amreading #lovetoread #daniellegirard #daniellegirardbooks #emilyschultz #thomasandmercer #amazonpublishing

Congress is probably going to send approximately $50 billion more, most of that for weapons, to continue the war in Ukraine. In November, high ranking officials from the State Department testified about how the Biden administration intends to use our money and why. In this episode, hear the highlights of their testimony and decide for yourself if you think their goals are worth sacrificing more American money and Ukrainian lives. Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Contribute monthly or a lump sum via Support Congressional Dish via (donations per episode) Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank's online bill pay function to mail contributions to: Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Background Sources Recommended Congressional Dish Episodes WTF is the World Trade System? Naomi Klein. Picador: 2008. Nicole Narea. October 13, 2023. Vox. Offshore Technology. Ukraine: How We Got Here Branko Marcetic. February 7, 2022. Jacobin. Stanley Reed and Andrew E. Kramer. November 5, 2013. The New York Times. Marieke Ploegmakers. February 5, 2012. All About Feed. Arseniy Yatsenyuk Official Website. Retrieved on December 16, 2023. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. The Ukraine War, by the Map Defence Intelligence, UK Ministry of Defense. December 15, 2023. GlobalSecurity.org. Visual Journalism Team. November 16, 2023. BBC News. Josh Holder. September 28, 2023. The New York Times. @war_mapper. December 31, 2022. GlobalSecurity.org. U.S. Support for Ukraine Karoun Demirjian. December 6, 2023. The New York Times. The IMF in Ukraine Oleksandra Betliy. May 5, 2023. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. March 31, 2023. International Monetary Fund. Estelle Nilsson-Julien and Ilaria Federico. March 5, 2023. Euronews. December 21, 2022. International Monetary Fund. Diplomacy Connor Echols. December 1, 2023. Responsible Statecraft. Seymour Hersh. December 1, 2023. Seymour Hersh on Substack. Olena Roshchina. November 24, 2023. Ukrainska Pravda. The Toll of War Jonathan Landay. December 12, 2023. Reuters. John Mazerolle. December 8, 2023. CBC News. Inae Oh. November 8, 2023. Mother Jones. Oleg Sukhov. September 28, 2023. The Kyiv Independent. Israel-Palestine Ian Black. Narrated by Michael Page. Tantor Audio: 2018. Darryl Cooper. The Martyrmade Podcast. Audio Sources November 8, 2023 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Witnesses: , Assistant Secretary of State, European and Eurasian Affairs , Assistant Secretary of State, Energy Resources , Assistant Administrator, Europe and Eurasia, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Clips 1:55 Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD): The supplemental funding will strengthen governance and anti-corruption systems. It will improve the resilience of our economies and our energy supply. It will support efforts to come out of the other side of this. We're ready for Ukraine to join EU and also NATO. But this investment in Ukraine goes far beyond its borders. By degrading Russia's military capabilities, we're also degrading the capabilities of those who Russia works with, like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. 10:30 Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD): First Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O'Brien. Assistant Secretary O'Brien assumed his role just last month after serving as sanctions coordinator at the State Department. He is a former career employee of the department receiving numerous performance awards and serve to previous US administration's as Special Presidential Envoy for hostages and for the Balkans. 11:00 Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD): The next will be Assistant Secretary for Energy Resources, Jeffrey R. Pyatt. No stranger to this committee, career diplomat Assistant Secretary Pyatt has been in his current role since September 2022. He served as US Ambassador to Greece and Ukraine. He has held numerous leadership positions through out the department and has won numerous awards. 11:25 Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD): And our third witness is Assistant Administrator Erin McKee, who serves as the Assistant Administrator in the Bureau of Europe and Eurasia at USAID. Prior to this position, she was the US Ambassador to Papua New Guinea and to the Solomon Islands. Prior to her Ambassador appointments, as a member of the Senior Foreign Service she served in numerous leadership roles throughout USAID and the embassies abroad. Before her US government career she developed private sector experience including throughout the former Soviet Union. 14:40 James O'Brien: This is around the Black Sea and Crimea. Ukraine has, through its own ingenuity and with weapons that have been provided, loosened Russia's grip. Russia tried to blockade the ability of Ukraine to export, but now Ukraine is starting to export more grain, more metals. And this is enabling it to pay for more of its war itself. So just a few numbers as we go through this. Ukraine is hoping to get about 8 million tons of grain and metals out through the Black Sea over the course of the next year. If it does that, it will provide about $5-6 billion more for its tax base than it has now. That helps to make up the shortfall that our supplemental will cover for the meantime. But it also then provides the employment for millions of its citizens to work within Ukraine. Now, that is a path to victory where we help Ukraine by providing assistance to have its energy grid strengthened, air defense over its employment centers, and the export routed needs so that it is able to fight this fight over the long term and to hold Russia off thereafter. 15:50 James O'Brien: The military assistance in the supplemental is about $45 billion. That goes to acquire American equipment that Ukraine will then use to pay for American service people to support Ukraine and to pay other countries to acquire American equipment after they provide equipment to Ukraine. 16:05 James O'Brien: The direct budget support that we provide to Ukraine enables Ukraine to put all of its tax dollars to support the war. Ukraine pays for about 60% of the costs of this war right now. The direct budget support pays for hundreds of thousands of educators, first responders, firefighters, and health care professionals to work within Ukraine. 16:55 James O'Brien: The next question is, who's with us? We have more than 40 countries. They provide much more assistance to Ukraine than we do. It's about $91 billion to our $70 billion so far. They've hosted 4.5 million Ukrainian refugees at a cost of around $18 billion. They are proposing another $50 billion in assistance just from the European Union. 17:30 James O'Brien: Right now, Ukrainians are willing to do this job because it's in their territory. If we abandon them, then somebody else is going to have to do this job later and it's likely to be us. So I'd rather confront Russia and its destabilizing attitudes right here, right now, and we can finish the job with the supplemental that we've proposed for your consideration. 18:45 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: For Ukraine, this coming winter promises to be even more challenging than the last. Ukraine's generation capacity has degraded about 50% since the start of the war. Ukrainian energy workers have labored day and night, often under fire, to repair, restore, and harden grid and generation facilities, often by cannibalizing parts from elsewhere. But most spare parts by now have been consumed, and Russia has recently resumed its bombardment of power plants and refineries, including just this morning in eastern Ukraine. 20:50 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: The World Bank has estimated that after last winter, Ukraine needed at least $411 billion to rebuild its infrastructure. That was eight months ago. Every day that number grows. Electricity grid damage alone amounted to $10 billion in 2022. Ukraine's economic future depends on investment by the private sector, and energy is key to unlocking that industrial recovery. 21:25 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: American energy companies like Halliburton, GE, and EQT have been active partners in this effort, providing vital equipment to Ukraine and actively exploring future commercial opportunities. We're working together to build a better future for and with Ukraine -- modern, cleaner, and with a more decentralized power sector that is fully integrated with Europe, even serving as a power exporter to the rest of the European Union. 22:10 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: After the full scale invasion, US LNG producers stepped up to surge supplies to Europe, as our allies turned away from Russia as an energy source. Since 2022, US exporters have supplied the EU with approximately 90 million tons of LNG -- three times as much as the next largest supplier. Last year, 70% of US LNG exports went to Europe. Europe's shift away from Russian energy has happened much faster than predicted, and marks a permanent shift in the International Energy map. 25:30 Erin McKee: In response to the immediate crisis, USAID has provided nearly $2 billion in humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since February of 2022. The generosity of the American people has supplied emergency health care, agriculture and energy support to Ukraine's most vulnerable populations. And thanks to the Congressional appropriations, USAID disbursed reliable, sustained direct budget support to the Ukrainian government, along with unprecedented levels of oversight. This enabled first responders, health care workers, teachers and others to continue their vital work and sustain Ukraine's economy and institutions while they defend their country's freedom and sovereignty. 26:10 Erin McKee: To respond to Russia's weaponization of hunger, USAID launched the Agriculture Resilience Initiative to keep farmers afloat. USAID also works very closely with the private sector to improve Ukraine's energy security and transform Ukraine's energy sector into a modern engine of growth. Side by side with our agriculture and energy efforts is USAID's support to small and medium enterprises, helping Ukraine increase jobs and generate revenue. 26:45 Erin McKee: At this time, there is no funding left for direct budget support. Without further appropriations, the government of Ukraine would need to use emergency measures such as printing money or not paying critical salaries, which could lead to hyperinflation and severely damage the war effort. USAID has also exhausted all of its supplemental humanitarian assistance funds. Additional funding is critical in the face of what remains an enormous need. If Congress does not approve supplemental funding, our partner organizations in Ukraine would have to either reduce the number of people getting this humanitarian assistance by up to 75% or suspend our humanitarian programs entirely. 27:30 Erin McKee: USAID also looks to the future to building resilient infrastructure and institutions that will support Ukraine's path towards European Union integration. For decades, USAID has buttressed Ukraine's progress towards transparent, inclusive and accountable governance. The United States continues to help Ukraine carry out judicial reform, institutionalized transparent financial systems, and respond to the people of Ukraine's zero tolerance for corruption. 33:15 Erin McKee: They have not skipped a beat in advancing the reform agenda. The EU report just came out this morning and both Ukraine and Moldova, and a variety of other countries, received support for continuing and opening chapters of recession talks. That's because our support to strengthening and deepening the institutions fighting corruption in Ukraine have received the top priority from the President. They had to pass and meet conditionality that we put on our direct budget support and did so without blinking. So while they're fighting a war and fighting for their survival, they are 100% dedicated to ensuring that the political economy model that they inherited during the Soviet Union is dismantled, which reflects the will of the Ukrainian people. 34:35 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: And one of the real success stories amid the tragedy of this war is that Europe has turned decisively away from its dependence, up until 2022, on Russian gas in particular. I see that as a permanent change in the landscape. It's reflected in the billions of dollars that European countries have invested in regasification facilities. It's reflected in the contracts that are being signed with American LNG producers. And it's also reflected in Europe's renewed and doubled commitment to accelerating the pace of its energy transition. So ironically, Putin's weaponization of his energy resource has induced Europe to break its vulnerability there and I think that is a permanent change in the landscape. That is also a positive benefit for American energy producers in our leadership on the energy transition. 35:55 Sen. James Risch (R-ID): I want to talk about the nuclear reactors we have in the United States, of which there are 95, give or take a few. Would you tell the committee, please, where does the fuel come from to operate these nuclear facilities? Geoffrey R. Pyatt: So, Ranking Member, about 20% of the fuel that operates our nuclear fleet here in the United States still comes from Russia. The President has included in his latest supplemental request for about $2.2 billion to help rebuild the nuclear enrichment capacity that we need here in the United States to end that dependency. And the administration has also stated its support for a ban on the import of Russian nuclear fuel. 43:30 Erin McKee: Right now Ukraine is able to spend all of their national budget in the fight. They are paying their soldiers salaries, they are dedicated to defeating Putin on the front lines. That means they don't have any resources to take care of their people and govern, which is as vital to keep up the unity of purpose and the resilience that we've seen from the Ukrainian people, because they're all in, both on the civilian and the military side. So the types of services that would be suspended are first responders who rush into the building and save lives, medical care to make sure that inoculations stay up so that the Ukrainian population stays healthy, particularly children's routine immunizations. We heard reports of polio outbreaks and some other concerns during the early days of the mass emigration of folks fleeing the conflict. We also are supporting teachers and continuing education so that they don't lose a generation as a result of Putin's attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure so that the kids can stay in school, and that those families — Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE): Am I correct that the direct budget support requested gradually goes down over the next year, as the economy becomes more vibrant and we assess Ukraine is able to generate more revenue? Erin McKee: Correct. The direct budget support and their fiscal stability is also vital for the IMF program and other donors stepping in. Our leadership in this space -- and yes, we were first -- unlocked the other support that we've seen mobilized from the EU and other donors, as well as boosting the confidence in the multilaterals to be able to contribute to Ukraine's economic stability, which is as vital as winning the war. If their economy collapses, Putin will have won. 47:55 Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): As Harvard's Graham Allison points out, if Putin is forced to choose between humiliating defeat on the one hand and escalating the level of destruction, there's every reason to believe he chooses the latter. There's a great deal of evidence that the war in Ukraine has come to a stalemate. Even Ukraine's Commander in Chief of the armed services has admitted as much. In Graham Allison's view, the Ukraine war has escalated far enough to see how bad things would become if we end up in a world where nuclear weapons are used. Allison believes that where we are now, both for Putin's Russia and for the Biden-led US and the Western alliance, it's time to search for an off ramp for all the parties. What is being done at the State Department to search for an off ramp. James O'Brien: Thank you, Senator. A few points. I mean, I can speak to the foreign policy implications. My belief is if we don't stand with Ukraine now, we'll be spending much more on defense in the future. Much of this supplemental goes to reinvest in the United States, so far from rot and ruin, we're actually shoring up the foundations in our energy sector as Assistant Secretary Pyatt — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): So your argument is that war and funding war around the world is good for our armaments industry. James O'Brien: I'm saying this supplemental is good for our economy — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): For the armaments industry. So really, it's a justification of war. To me, that's sort of reprehensible -- and this is coming from my side as well -- the idea that "Oh, glory be, the war's really not that bad. Broken windows are not that bad, because we pay people to fix them. Broken countries are not so bad, because hey, look, the armaments industry is gonna get billions of dollars out of this." I think that's a terrible argument. I wish y'all would go back to your freedom arguments or something. But the idea that you're going to enrich the armaments manufacturers, I think is reprehensible. James O'Brien: Well, Senator, I'm not making the argument war is good. I'm making the argument, in this case, war is necessary. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): And that we can make a little profit on the side. It's not so bad since the armaments guys who make a lot of profit on this, right. James O'Brien: Senator, I think you're proposing a kind of false choice that Ieither have to say that or say nothing. What I'm saying is that our economy rests on a foundation of innovation. And in the supplemental, we're investing in our energy sector — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): But the money is borrowed. We're borrowing the money. We don't have it. We don't have a pot of money. So what you're arguing is, in essence, that we borrow the money from China, we send it to Ukraine, Ukraine, sends it back to buy arms from us, and that's a win-win. How do we win when we're borrowing money to pay people. See this is this false sort of argument that "oh, look, we'll create five jobs for every dollar we spend," but we're borrowing the money. It doesn't make any sense. It's coming from somewhere where it would be a productive use, into the use of basically fomenting a war and continuing on a war. James O'Brien: No, that's not the choice in front of us, Senator. And I'm sorry that you feel that that's the way you want to frame it. The choice in front of us is do we invest in the capacities that allow this war to be won? Those include capacities in energy, in defense, in IT, and they include — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): Let's get away from funding the armaments people. You know, I'm not for that. But the original question is, what are you doing to develop an off ramp? You know, when I listen to your presentations, it sounds like the Department of War, I don't hear the Department of diplomacy in front of me. Where are the diplomats? Is anybody talking about negotiation? Do you really believe that Ukraine is gonna push Russia out of out of Ukraine, they're gonna push them out of Crimea, push them out of the East, and that Zelenskyy's is position, "we will not negotiate till they're gone from Ukraine," is viable? And that there's not going to have to be some negotiation beforehand? If you believe that, though, the meat grinder continues and Ukraine will be in utter destruction and tens of thousands more people will die if there is no negotiation. You would think that as a superpower, we would be involved somewhat with encouraging negotiation. But I've heard nothing from you, and nothing from anyone in your administration, frankly, that talks about negotiating. James O'Brien: Well, Senator, then I hope you would sit down and talk with me about what we're doing in this regard. Here, I'll give you a little sense of it. All wars end with a negotiation. We've made clear we'll do that with Ukraine, not over Ukraine's head. It takes two parties to negotiate the end of a war. President Putin is not serious about negotiating the end of the war. He has said he wants to wait and see what happens in November 2024. We're preparing for that eventuality so we can have a negotiation that will actually stick as opposed to the track record of broken agreements that President Putin has made with a whole range of his neighbors up until now. So that's successful diplomacy, not mere diplomacy. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): There are actually some who say we're back to about where we started as far as negotiating and tens of thousands of people have died on both sides, and we haven't been successful. But I still hear only war and I don't hear diplomacy. James O'Brien: No but I think what we're looking at is successful diplomacy. I just spent last weekend with 66 countries talking about the basis of a successful peace in Ukraine. Russia didn't show up. That, again, is the problem. You don't have a willing partner on the other side, so simply saying that there must be talks is -- you're asking for a monologue, not diplomacy. 55:00 Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR): You know, I'm really struck by the parallel to the journey of Chamberlain to Munich to say, "Okay, Hitler, you can take a third of Czechoslovakia" and then he declared peace in our time, under the assumption that somehow this would not whet Hitler's appetite. Did Chamberlain's strategy work? James O'Brien: No. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR): Will this strategy now, of us bailing on Ukraine to appease Putin, work? James O'Brien: No, it'll invite more aggression. 1:01:40 Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE): Do you think we should condition US aid to prevent US tax dollars from supporting PRC-owned or controlled entities from providing the reconstruction? James O'Brien: Senator, we do. That's why it's so important to have the supplemental so that we remain in the game and can set the conditions that make it impossible for opaque, illegitimate contractors like the Chinese to enter. And I know my colleagues can speak at some length about how in energy, telecomms, and other sectors we do exactly that. But if we're not there, then we can't we can't provide the guarantees you want. 1:05:35 James O'Brien: There are about $2.2 billion to go to both the energy supply and to the economic activity that's needed for Ukraine to begin to repair its access to the outside world. That's also important to us. When Russia invaded Ukraine, grain prices went up six times in many places around the world, because Ukraine is an incredibly important part of the global grain trade. The work that AID does to help Ukrainian farmers get their products to market, in the supplemental, the $100 million that is for demining will help farmers get their product to market. All of that directly benefits the markets in which our consumers are a part. So if we do all that, if we can get them to about pre-war export levels, that's an extra $6 billion a year in tax revenue just from the exports, as well as what the industries pay and what happens around the society. Now, Secretary Pritzker, and she should come and testify this herself, she's doing an outstanding job at building a strategy that lets us focus our efforts in key places, so that Ukraine's economy will begin to work and contribute to the global economy, even while this war is going on. All of that works together to make sure that Ukraine can succeed and has the leverage needed when we get to a negotiation, as Senator Paul wants. 1:13:55 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: So I would point out that the greatest threat to the energy grid today are the Shahed drones, which Russia is now beginning to industrialize the production of those. We can talk about that in a classified setting, but there is a direct Iran-Russia nexus in the attacks on Ukraine's energy system. 1:24:10 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: We are working as hard as we can to accelerate that trend. We do that through two mechanisms. One is by accelerating our energy transition, both here in the United States, but also globally, as the Biden administration has done through the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels. But the other aspect of this is what we are doing systematically to reduce Russia's future energy revenue. Just last week, for instance, we leveled new sanctions against a project in the in the Arctic, Arctic LNG 2, which is Novatek's flagship LNG project, which Novatek set in motion with the aspiration of developing Russia as the largest LNG exporter in the world. Our objective is to kill that project, and we're doing that through our sanctions, working with our partners in the G7 and beyond. 1:26:00 James O'Brien: Russia is losing its lucrative markets. That's what got it rich enough to afford this war. It's losing out in the sectors of innovation that are going to drive economic development in the future. So we look at this and say, "Does it put pressure on Putin to get to the table?" Well, yes, it does. It's going to take a little time. He started the war with 640 billion in a rainy day fund. By the start of this year, despite record profits last year, he was down around 580, we immobilized 300 of that, and he spent down further from there. So that gives them a year, two years maybe, of run room on that rainy day fund that all came from selling oil and gas. So that's gone. The second thing is that we don't see Russia able to play in the sectors that are going to drive innovation and economic growth in the future. The areas of quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, the energy transition, including the new nuclear technologies that are coming on board, and Senator Risch, your work on this I really appreciate, because Russia entangled countries in these long term networks of corruption, with generation-long Rosatom contracts. We're now competing for those again, and taking those sectors away from Russia. That changes the long term prospect from what it was. The result of all this is we anticipate that Russia's GDP is going to be at least 20% smaller by 2030 than it would be if Putin had not started this war. So it's a long term strategic loss for him, and it creates a great opportunity for us in a number of important sectors. 1:35:30 Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL): I understand, and this is not critical. I agree that we can't allow borders to be changed unilaterally and we have to stand with our allies. I'm not diminishing any of those things. But those arguments are too vague. They make sense here, but I'm just telling you they're too vague. This notion that we need to do whatever it takes for however long it takes, is also misguided. Not because that's not necessarily what we need to do, but because that's not going to be enough for people who are asking these questions. I would just say if you had an opportunity, any of you three, or all you three to talk to someone, say someone that came up to me a week ago and said, "Why are we still putting all this money in Ukraine. I hate Putin, I hate what he's done, but we've got all these other things domestically and in other parts of the world that are more important, including China, and now what's happening in the Middle East. How are we going to be spending $60 billion every six months? For how long? Given the debt that we already have?" What would you say to them? And how would you explain to them that this fits into their national interest in that perspective I've just outlined? James O'Brien: That's really well framed, Senator, so I'll do my best here. I think the first thing I'd say is you got to shore up your own base. If we're going to confront China over the next decades, it's 1.4 billion people, that's looking to write the rules that the world economy will run on. We go at them with a coalition of 50-odd countries, Europe is about 600-700 million of that, we're 350 million. With that already, we're set to compete really effectively. Ukraine, though, is a challenge by Putin trying to fray that foundation. So we have to shore that up if we're going to have the heft to compete with China over time. The battle over Ukraine also allows us to reinvigorate our own industrial base, we're creating new energy technologies and putting them in place around the world. We're building new defense technologies, the work that's being done in IT, all of that's included in this supplemental, and that's going to make us better able to defend Taiwan, to work in the South China Sea, than we have otherwise. The final point I'd make is, this is the wrong time to walk away because Ukraine's winning. It's already taken back half the territory Putin seized since February 2022. It opened up the Black Sea grain lanes that Putin tried to shut down in July, did that mostly with its own creativity around a whole set of interesting drones and other technologies that are going to contribute to our security as Ukraine gets closer to NATO. So those are all reasons you don't walk away when you're partway through the job. 1:41:10 Geoffrey R. Pyatt: Ukraine is not a charity case. In economic and development terms, it's an opportunity. Developing that opportunity depends on restoring a level of peace. But as we look to the future, you're going to have a Europe which has decoupled from Russian energy supplies, which means that there's a hole of about 130 BCM per year in energy supply that Europe is going to have to fill. Over the short term, some of that is American LNG, but that's a very expensive option. Ukraine has fantastic resources on wind, on solar, on biomass. It has Europe's second largest civil nuclear industry. It has developed and has demonstrated an extraordinary technological acuity. Just look at how clever Ukrainian soldiers have been in the application of drone technology. These are all the skill sets that Ukraine will need to prosper as a member of the European Union. My colleague, Assistant Administrator McKee, referred to the statement which European President Vanderlaan delivered today welcoming the significant progress that Ukraine has made on its reforms, and her and the Commission's determination to move ahead with Ukraine's accession to the European Union. And I would say as somebody who served as an American ambassador in the EU for six years, what Ukraine represents is a demographically young population, a population which is fantastically committed to the values of the European Union. Ukraine is the only place in the world where people have fought and died under the flag of the EU for the values that are represented in the European constitutions. So I think these are the investments in the leadership that Secretary Pritzker is providing to help our companies and companies around the world begin to make plans for the day after and to work with Ukrainians to keep pushing forward the reforms, which are fundamental to creating the environment where American energy companies, renewable energy companies can come into Ukraine, where we can use Ukraine to help to fill the huge challenges that our global supply chain faces. In the Soviet Union, Ukraine was the center of Soviet metallurgy, the center of Soviet petrochemicals industries, all of those latent skills are still there. You talked about nuclear, Ukraine has a company in Kharkiv, Turboatom, which is one of the few facilities in all of Europe that has the industrial capacity to produce the large steel enclosures that are part of building modern nuclear reactors. So I applaud your focus on this and I know I speak for all three of us and how systematically we're focused on trying to lay the foundation for that better future that the Ukrainian people so richly deserve. 1:53:55 James O'Brien: Ukraine has won back 50% of the territory Russia took since February of 2022. The second piece that's important: Putin is playing a waiting game, like many Muscovite rulers before him. So it's difficult to get a decisive battle. So what we need is what's in the supplemental that has the ability to fight this fight over some time, and we do see real success. So in the Black Sea, Russia attempted to stop Ukraine from exporting. In July, exports were down 2-2.5 million tons; they're already more than doubled, and expect to see them go up substantially more. That's because of what Ukraine has done with its technology and its new weapons systems, more of which would be provided by the supplemental. February 4, 2014 On Demand News on YouTube Speakers: Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, 2013-2017 Geoffrey Pyatt, United States Ambassador to Ukraine, 2013-2016 Clips Victoria Nuland: Good. So I don't think Klitsch [Vitali Klitschko] should go into the government. I don't think it's necessary, I don't think it's a good idea. Geoffrey Pyatt: Yeah, I mean I guess, in terms of him not going into the government, just sort of letting him stay out and do his political homework and stuff. I'm just thinking in terms of, sort of, the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate Democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok and his guys and I'm sure that's part of what Yanukovych is calculating on all this. Victoria Nuland: I think Yatz [Arseniy Yatsenyuk] is the guy with the economic experience, the governing experience. He's the guy. What he needs is Klitsch [Vitali Klitschko] And Tyahnybok On the outside, he needs to be talking to them four times a week. You know, I just think Klitsch [Vitali Klitschko] Going in he's going to be at that level working for Yatsenyuk it's just not gonna work. Geoffrey Pyatt: We want to get someone out here with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing. And then the other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych. We'll probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things fall into place. Victoria Nuland: So on that piece, Jeff, I wrote the note, Sullivan's come back to me saying “you need Biden,” and I said probably tomorrow for an attaboy and get the deets to stick, Biden's willing. Geoffrey Pyatt: Great. December 19, 2013 The Atlantic Council Speaker: John McCain, U.S. Senator from Arizona, 1987-2018 Clips 16:45 Sen. John McCain: If Ukraine's political crisis persists or deepens, which is a real possibility, we must support creative Ukrainian efforts to resolve it. Senator Murphy and I heard a few such ideas last weekend—from holding early elections, as the opposition is now demanding, to the institution of a technocratic government with a mandate to make the difficult reforms required for Ukraine's long-term economic health and sustainable development. Decisions such as these are for Ukrainians to make—no one else—and if they request our assistance, we should provide it where possible. Finally, we must encourage the European Union and the IMF to keep their doors open to Ukraine. Ultimately, the support of both institutions is indispensable for Ukraine's future. And eventually, a Ukrainian President, either this one or a future one, will be prepared to accept the fundamental choice facing the country, which is this: While there are real short-term costs to the political and economic reforms required for IMF assistance and EU integration, and while President Putin will likely add to these costs by retaliating against Ukraine's economy, the long-term benefits for Ukraine in taking these tough steps are far greater and almost limitless. This decision cannot be borne by one person alone in Ukraine. Nor should it be. It must be shared—both the risks and the rewards—by all Ukrainians, especially the opposition and business elite. It must also be shared by the EU, the IMF and the United States. All of us in the West should be prepared to help Ukraine, financially and otherwise, to overcome the short-term pain that reforms will require and Russia may inflict. April 20, 1994 Southern Center for International Studies Speaker: Arthur Dunkel, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, 1980-1993 Clips 26:55 Arthur Dunkel: If I look back at the last 25 years, what did we have? We had two worlds: The so-called Market Economy world and the centrally planned world; the centrally planned world disappeared. One of the main challenges of the Uruguay round has been to create a world wide system. I think we have to think of that. Secondly, why a world wide system? Because, basically, I consider that if governments cooperate in trade policy field, you reduce the risks of tension – political tension and even worse than that." Music by Editing Production Assistance

In his essay, Paradoxopolis, Ian Duhig is inspired by a painting by 'Leeds's Lost Modernist', the reclusive Joash Woodrow, and the former local synagogue, now the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, both sited on the road north out of Leeds, built by Blind Jack Metcalf, iconic Leeds roadmaker of the Victorian era. Ian says: "When I first moved here about 50 years ago, Leeds was still advertising itself as The Motorway City of the Seventies and as much as its natural resources of clay and coal, its central location between London and Scotland. and England's east and west coasts, was a major influence on its development. Immigrants, itinerant labour and roadmakers have built this city and its economy, something I propose to show by inviting you all to join me now on a virtual poetic journey through it on one road, Blind Jack Metcalf's due north where we will come to understand something of that extraordinary civil engineer and what Virginia Woolf meant when she once wrote in a TLS review: “Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more”.The essay touches on the many different populations that have lived and still live in Leeds - Jewish, Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese and their rich cultural manifestations. Ian Duhig became a full-time writer after working with homeless people for fifteen years. He has published eight collections of poetry, held several fellowships including at Trinity College Dublin, won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted four times for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His New and Selected Poems was awarded the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature. He is currently finishing his next book of poetry, ‘An Arbitrary Light Bulb', due from Picador in 2024.Writer/reader, Ian Duhig Sound designer, Alisdair McGregor Producer, Polly ThomasLooking at Leeds is a co-commission between BBC Radio 3 and The Space with funding from Arts Council England. A Thomas Carter Project for BBC Radio 3.

This week is a special roundtable episode. An exciting, challenging and very very thought-provoking tour of contemporary Black horror, in the company of three writers at the bleeding edge.  Nnedi Okorafor, Maurice Broaddus and Lesley Nneka Arimah are just three of the contributors to Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. It's curated by Jordan Peele, who knows a thing or two about that particular landscape, and these three authors present a fantastic cross-section of how versatile Black horror is right now. We talk about their stories, about the anthology as a whole and the broader topic of Black horror. What does that even mean? What is the role of history? Of trauma? And of the future? At times, these guests turn the interview around on me, asking me to reflect on my own presumptions and the baggage I bring to these stories. Like I said, challenging and exciting. Hope you enjoy it. Out There Screaming was published on October 3rd by Picador and Random House Books mentioned: Dark Dreams: A Collection of Horror and Suspense by Black Writers 92004), ed. Brandon MasseyKing Maker (2010), by Maurice BroaddusHow High We Go in the Dark (2022), by Sequoia NagamatsuDemon Copperhead (2022), by Barbara KingsolverThe Changeling (2017), by Victor LaValleNo Gods, No Monsters (2021), by Cadwell TurnbullThe Nesting (2020), by C.J. CookeLeech (2022), by Hiron Ennes“Africanfuturism Defined.” (2019), by Nnedi OkoraforSupport Talking Scared on Patreon Come talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com Support the show

This spectacular keynote address was given by Dr. David Knott at the “Mattox” Trauma Conference in 2023. Mattox Vegas TCCACS: https://www.trauma-criticalcare.com/ War Doctor: https://www.amazon.com/War-Doctor-Surgery-Front-Line/dp/1419744240/ref=asc_df_1419744240/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=508953752346&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15602939439351749599&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9009673&hvtargid=pla-906115140419&psc=1 The David Nott Foundation: https://davidnottfoundation.com/ Dr. Nott on BTK July 1, 2020: https://behindtheknife.org/podcast/war-doctor-david-nott-on-surgery-in-war-zones/ David gained his medical degree from Manchester University and in 1992 gained his FRCS from the Royal College of Surgeons of England to become a Consultant Surgeon. He is a Consultant Surgeon at St Mary's Hospital where he specialises in vascular and trauma surgery and also performs cancer surgery at the Royal Marsden Hospital. David is an authority in laparoscopic surgery and was the first surgeon to combine laparoscopic and vascular surgery. For the past 30 years David has taken unpaid leave to work for the aid agencies Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Syria Relief. He has provided surgical treatment to patients in conflict and catastrophe zones in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Darfur, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Central African Republic, Palestine, Nepal and Ukraine As well as treating patients affected by conflict and catastrophe and raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for charitable causes, David teaches advanced surgical skills to local medics and surgeons when he is abroad. In Britain, he set up and led the teaching of the Surgical Training for the Austere Environment (STAE) course at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 2015 David established the David Nott Foundation with his wife Elly. The Foundation supports surgeons in developing their operating skills for war zones and austere environments and has now trained over 900 doctors through their bespoke Hostile Environment Surgical Training (HEST) course. In 2019, Picador published David's bestselling memoir, War Doctor. Please visit https://behindtheknife.org to access other high-yield surgical education podcasts, videos and more.   If you liked this episode, check out our recent episode list here: https://behindtheknife.org/listen/

In the latest "Craftwork" episode, a deep-dive conversation about the horror genre with author and story expert John Truby. His latest book, The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works, is available from Picador. Truby is the founder and director of Truby's Writers Studio. Over the past thirty years, he has taught more than fifty thousand students worldwide, including novelists, screenwriters, and TV writers. Together, these writers have generated more than fifteen billion dollars at the box office.  Truby has an ongoing program where he works with students who are actively creating shows, movies, and novel series. He regularly applies his genre techniques in story consulting work with major studios including Disney, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, the BBC, Canal Plus, Globo, and AMC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Leslie, and their two cats, Tink and Peanut. For story software and courses, please visit Truby.com. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram  YouTube TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices