This week, Charles Foster explores how psychedelic drugs are changing lives; and Alan Jenkins on the lure of the open seas.
'Ten Trips: The new reality of psychedelics', by Andy Mitchell
'Psychedelics: The revolutionary drugs that could change your life – a
guide from the expert', by David Nutt
'I feel love: MDMA and the quest for connection in a fractured world',
by Rachel Nuwer
'Psychonauts: Drugs and the making of the modern mind', by Mike Jay
'Sailing Alone: A history', by Richard J King
Produced by Charlotte Pardy
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This week David talks to the political scientist Mike Kenny about the possible fate of the United Kingdom. What makes the UK such an unusual political arrangement? How has it managed to hold together through war, economic decline, Brexit, Covid? What still threatens to break it apart?
Mike Kenny’s new book is Fractured Union: Politics, Sovereignty and the Fight to Save the UK
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Episode 12 in our series on the great essays is about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’, published in the Atlantic in 2014. Black American life has been marked by injustice from the beginning: this essay explores what can – and what can’t – be done to remedy it, from slavery to the housing market, from Mississippi to Chicago. Plus, what has this story got to do with the origins of the state of Israel?
Read the original essay here.
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The acclaimed novelist and her musician daughter on the joys of reading in trees, childhood gardens and what it's like to have a David Austin rose named after you.
Produced by Charlotte Pardy
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Episode 11 in our series on the great essays explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power. It is an essay that connects digital technology, medieval mystery and Dan Brown. Plus David talks about the hidden meaning of Julian Assange.
More from the LRB:
Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange
‘I’d never been with a person who had such a good cause and such a poor ear.’
Frank Kermode on the Name of the Rose
‘This novel has so much in it that differs from any known kind of detective story that we must look to Eco’s pre-semiotic career for help.’
Jenny Diski on Eco and ugliness
‘The breadth of Eco’s search spreads out to include disgust, horror, fear, obscenity, misogyny, perversity, bigotry, social exclusiveness, repression, inexplicability, evil, deformation, degradation, heterogeneity.’
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Episode 10 in our series on the great essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy. Was he right? What did he miss? And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump?
More on David Foster Wallace from the LRB:
Jenny Turner on Wallace and his moment
‘The risk Wallace takes is to guess he is not the only "obscenely well-educated", curiously lost and empty white boy out there; that his sadness is also the experience of a whole historical moment.’
Patricia Lockwood on Wallace and his influence
‘It was the essayists who were left to cope with his almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own.’
Dale Peck’s notorious takedown of Infinite Jest
‘If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype machine can still work wonders.’
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Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?
More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:
Thomas Powers on Didion and California:
'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'
Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:
'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'
Martin Amis on Didion's style:
'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'
Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:
'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.'
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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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