Episode 8 in our history of the great essays is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump.

Sontag in the LRB:

Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship 

‘At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.’

James Wolcott on Sontag and polemics

‘The upside of Sontag’s downside was that her ire was generated by the same power supply that electrified her battle for principles that others only espoused.’

Mark Grief on Sontag and identity

‘One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior.’

Joanna Biggs on Sontag and Paris

‘Paris let her say no to an academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafes, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries.’

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Experts think 2023 was a record year for digital attacks

Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide?

More on Baldwin from the LRB:

Michael Wood on Baldwin and power 

‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’

Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin

‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’

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Com uma das taxas de natalidade mais baixas da União Europeia, Portugal pode acabar 2023 com um ligeiro aumento no número de nascimentos, em comparação com o ano anterior. Leia mais (12/30/2023 - 16h33)

Episode 6 in our series on the great essays is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising.

Read ‘Human Personality’ here

For more on Weil from the LRB archive:

Toril Moi on living like Weil 

‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’

Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil

‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’ 

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Episódio de férias traz compilação de reflexões sobre o Brasil e sua complexidadeEnquanto o Pauta Pública prepara sua nova temporada, estamos publicando episódios especiais com alguns dos momentos mais marcantes do podcast em 2023.

Neste episódio, você vai ouvir as vozes de (em ordem de aparição): Marcos Nobre, Sidarta Ribeiro, Ludmila Abílio, Bruno Santana, Eugênia Gonzaga, Bruno Paes Manso e Luiz Antônio Simas.

O Pauta volta com episódios inéditos em 19 de janeiro de 2024.Não esqueça de seguir e curtir o Pauta Pública nas plataformas de áudio.Disponível em Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Deezer, Google Podcasts, Spotify ou no seu tocador favorito.

Saiba que você pode ser aliado da Agência Pública e colaborar com esse trabalho. Saiba mais em apoie.apublica.org ou faça um pix de qualquer valor para contato@apublica.org.
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Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism. David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.

For more on Orwell from the LRB:

Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics

‘He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party.’

Julian Symons on Orwell and fame

‘If George Orwell had died in 1939 he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels.’

Terry Eagleton on Orwell and experience

‘Orwell detested those, mostly on the left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless.’

More from the History of Ideas:

Judith Shklar on Hypocrisy

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A special seasonal highlights show, with contributions from novelists Anne Enright and Samantha Harvey; and James Marcus on partygoers Susan Sontag and George Steiner.

'The Wren, The Wren', by Anne Enright

'Orbital', by Samantha Harvey

'Maestros and monsters: Days & nights with Susan Sontag & George

Steiner', by Robert Boyers

Produced by Charlotte Pardy

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Episode 4 in our series on the great essays is about Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.

Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness

‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’

Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality

‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’

Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity

‘Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put her duster down and went to drown herself.’

John Bayley on Woolf and writing

‘For Virginia Woolf wish-fulfilment was in words themselves, that protected her from herself and from society.’

Listen to David’s History of Ideas episode about Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’.

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Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?

Read Thoreau’s essay here

From the LRB:

Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiency

Jeremy Harding on XR and civil disobedience 

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In this episode, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflects on the recent 2023 State of the Word, which took place in Madrid, Spain, and some of the highlights of the work across the WordPress open source project.

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Episode two in our series on the great essays is about David Hume. How can eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt help make sense of American politics today? When does public borrowing become a recipe for national disaster? Who is really in charge of the public finances: the government or the bankers, Washington, D.C. or Wall Street? And what has all this got to do with Hume’s arguments for the morality of suicide?

Read Hume’s original essay ‘Of Public Credit’ here.

For more on Hume from the archive of the LRB:

Jonathan Rée on Hume’s voracious appetites: ‘“The Corpulence of his whole person was better fitted to communicate the Idea of the Turtle-Eating Alderman than of a refined Philosopher,” as a friend put it.’

Fara Dabhoiwala on Hume and mockery: ‘David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth.’

John Dunn on Hume and us: ‘Hume is in some ways so very modern . . . But just because he is in some ways so close to us, it is easy to lose the sense that in many others his beliefs and experiences stand at some little distance from our own.’

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Episode one in our series on the great essays is about Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read. From the fear of death to the joys of life, from the perils of atheism to the pitfalls of faith, from sex to religion and back again, Montaigne wrote the book of himself, which was also a guide to what it means to be human. Elephants, civil war, gout, cosmology, torture, tennis balls, disease, diets, and politics too: all life is here.

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Aqui dentro não tem ho ho ho. Não tem luz de natal. Leia mais (12/22/2023 - 09h26)

Enquanto o Pauta Pública prepara sua nova temporada, estamos publicando episódios especiais com alguns dos momentos mais marcantes do podcast em 2023.

Neste episódio, você vai ouvir as vozes de (em ordem de aparição): Semayat Oliveira, Juliana Borges, Vera Lúcia Araújo, Tiago Rogero e Lia Vainer.
O Pauta volta com episódios inéditos em 19 de janeiro de 2024.

Não esqueça de seguir e curtir o Pauta Pública nas plataformas de áudio.Disponível em Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Deezer, Google Podcasts, Spotify ou no seu tocador favorito.

Saiba que você pode ser aliado da Agência Pública e colaborar com esse trabalho. Saiba mais em apoie.apublica.org ou faça um pix de qualquer valor para contato@apublica.org.
Contamos com seu apoio!

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Para encerrar 2023, o podcast da revista dos livros reprisa a entrevista histórica que foi publicada em julho deste ano: "A voz e o silêncio de Clarice Lispector", na qual você ouve a voz da autora de uma forma que nunca se tinha ouvido antes. O episódio reúne as duas partes da entrevista realizada em 1976 pelos escritores Marina Colasanti, Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna e João Salgueiro para o MIS, o Museu da Imagem e do Som do Rio de Janeiro. Em tom descontraído, a conversa mostra uma escritora com humor e inteligência afiados e traz uma camada suplementar sobre quem foi Clarice. Apoie o 451 MHz: https://bit.ly/Assine451

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Em editorial, a inglesa The Economist anuncia seu "país do ano", a Grécia, que mostrou que "o centro pode se segurar", ao reeleger o governo de centro-direita. Outros dois, Brasil e Polônia, também "se destacam por voltar à moderação após caminhar no lado selvagem". Leia mais (12/21/2023 - 09h33)

This week, Toby Lichtig goes to see the latest Roald Dahl adaptations, junior critic in tow; and Dinah Birch celebrates the enduring power of Ebenezer Scrooge.

'The Witches', at the National Theatre, London, until 27 January 2024

'Wonka', on general release

'A Christmas Carol', by Charles Dickens

Produced by Charlotte Pardy

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For our last episode before Christmas David answers some of your questions about the History of Ideas series – What would Dickens have made of Trump? How would reparations work? Which essays are missing from the list? 

Coming up: the whole series on the great essays, one a day, every day, starting on Christmas Day.

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