“What we often forget in the daily drumbeat of abuses by the dominant tech companies is our complicity in these abuses, and in the fundamental and unsettling ways the internet has changed every one of us.”
As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enters its seventieth anniversary, Dave Eggers, in the 2018 PEN H. G. Wells lecture, argues that urgent amendments are needed to mitigate the corrosive effects of technology on the societal and the personal. You can read an edited extract from the lecture on the TLS website.
This is a recording of an event that took place on December 16, 2018, at the Bridge Theatre, London.
Phil Baker guides us through the morbid, wistful and yet immensely charming world of the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey; Frances Wilson weighs the pleasures and pains of letter and email writing; Ian Sansom on the struggle to be funny
Books
Born To Be Posthumous: The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark Dery
What a Hazard a Letter Is: The strange destiny of the unsent letter, by Caroline Atkins
Written In History: Letters that changed the world, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
In Their Own Words: Volume 2: More letters from history
Wit's End: What wit is, how it works, and why we need it, by James Geary
Messing About In Quotes: A little Oxford dictionary of humorous quotations, compiled by Gyles Brandreth
Na segunda parte do episódio sobre armas de fogo, especialistas falam sobre a falta de controle e de fiscalização, que, na prática, tem feito muita gente sair armado nas ruas impunemente. Também fomos a campo tentar sentir na pele o fascínio por pólvora e metal na esperança de responder por que, afinal, tanta gente ama as armas de fogo?
David Coward celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Cyrano de Bergerac, whose radical thought has long been obscured by his protuberant nose; Muriel Zagha on Molière, France’s most famous playwright, and a bold new adaptation of Tartuffe; finally, a poem by Stephen Knight: “Rail Replacement Bus Service” (sigh)
Molière’s ‘Tartuffe’, a new version by John Donnelly, at the National Theatre, London
O Brasil é o país com a maior quantidade de homicídios, em números absolutos. Em 2016, foram 62.517 mortes violentas. Mais de 70% desses assassinatos foram cometidos com armas de fogo.
Apesar disso, numa das primeiras medidas como presidente, Jair Bolsonaro assinou um decreto que ampliou o acesso dos brasileiros às armas de fogo. Para especialistas, a tendência é que a medida deixe o país ainda mais violento.
Diante disso, o segundo episódio de Escafandro, que será publicado em duas partes, se propõe a responder: “Por que amamos as armas de fogo?”
Toby Lichtig comes in to talk the wide scope of Jewish culture, the “lachrymose” theory of history and why it is Arthur Miller time once more. Roz Dineen deals with porn, pile-ons and goop podcasts. And we call Thea when she is “working from home” to check in on her new dog.
The writer and comedian Charlie Higson, half of the team behind The Fast Show, on the curious history of comedy written and performed by pairs; the novelist Margaret Drabble considers the dizzying new releases from the estate of Anthony Burgess, the man Philip Larkin once called “the Batman of contemporary letters”
Texts
Stan & Ollie, directed by Jon S. Baird
Morecambe & Wise: 50 years of sunshine, by Gary Morecambe
The Double Act: A history of British comedy duos, by Andrew Roberts
Soupy Twists!: The full, official story of the sophisticated silliness of Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie, by Jem Roberts
Beard’s Roman Women by Anthony Burgess, edited by Graham Foster
Puma by Anthony Burgess, edited by Paul Wake
The Black Prince by Adam Roberts
Obscenity and the Arts, a talk by Anthony Burgess, edited by Johnny Walsh
A conversation between the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith and the journalist Carolina, recorded at Hay Festival Cartagena in Colombia earlier this month. The full Hay Festival archive can be accessed by subscribing to Hay Player online at hayfestival.org
Este episódio traz uma investigação sobre os efeitos da crise no mercado editorial na vida do escritor brasileiro.
Em outubro do ano passado, com uma dívida de R$ 285 milhões, a livraria Cultura entrou com um pedido de recuperação judicial. Em novembro, com uma uma dívida ainda maior, de R$ 675 milhões, a Saraiva também quebrou.
Essas duas falências têm causado um efeito dominó no mercado editorial, principalmente porque boa parte desse valor é devido para as editoras, que se vêem obrigadas a adiar ou cancelar lançamentos. Pra piorar, na esteira da crise econômica, as feiras literárias, festas e afins também estão perdendo o vigor.
Por outro lado, a impressão que se tem é de que nunca se vendeu tanto livro no Brasil e de que o escritor nunca teve tantas formas de chegar ao leitor, com as redes sociais, os booktubers, e as plataformas de auto-publicação.
Nesse primeiro episódio, o podcast Escafandro foi ouvir cinco escritores, dos mais diversos estilos e com públicos variados, para saber: afinal, é possível viver de literatura no Brasil?
A recording of the inaugural Gabriel García Marquez lecture given this February by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, at Hay Festival Cartagena in Colombia. The full Hay Festival archive can be accessed by subscribing to Hay Player online at hayfestival.org
As the MeToo movement continues to focus our attentions on questions around abuse, consent and justice, Rebecca Watson joins us to discuss the various and prolonged impacts of sexual assault, and the warping effect of trauma on narrative; the TLS’s French editor Adrian Tahourdin considers the inexorable rise of “le globish” (by which English words supplant, or pervert, French ones), and presents the diverse and challenging books in contention for this year’s Society of Author’s Translation Prizes
Books
Not That Bad: Dispatches from rape culture, edited by Roxane Gay
A False Report: A true story by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong
On Rape by Germaine Greer
The President’s Gardens by Muhsin al-Ramli, translated by Luke Leafgren
Seeing Red by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell
Eighteen months after Emmanuel Macron rode a wave of optimism to the Élysée Palace, the French are rioting and the President's approval ratings are desperately low – Sudhir Hazareesingh tells us what went wrong; James O'Brien reflects on another week of Brexit bafflement; Laura Freeman introduces the "Hungry Novel", a sub-genre of the post-war British novel in which writers, subsisting on meagre rations of stodge and tinned goods, channelled their appetites into their prose
Catherine Taylor on bookish goings on in the north of England, from her family’s bookshop in Sheffield to the Northern Fiction Alliance of small presses; Diarmaid Ferriter considers the fraught matter of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland; Fríða Ísberg on the spectre of war in Icelandic film and fiction
Books
The Border: The legacy of a century of Anglo-Irish politics by Diarmaid Ferriter
Hotel Silence (Ör) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Woman at War, directed by Benedikt Erlingsson
Section 6 of “American Standard”, a new poem by Paul Muldoon published in this week’s TLS; read by Lisa Dwan (full recording available as a separate podcast episode)
Imogen Russell Williams on children's books that tackle grief and war, “offering distressed adults the calming certainty of a script, and baffled children the reassurance of straightforward answers”; Carl Miller discusses the creation, and squabbling continuation, of Reddit, one of the most popular websites in the world; A. N. Wilson considers the Travellers Club in London, now in its 200th year, where Britain's prime ministers "got stuff done"
Books
White Feather by Catherine and David MacPhail
The Skylarks’ War by Hilary McKay
An Anty-War Story by Tony Ross
Only One of Me by Lisa Wells and Michelle Robinson (illustrated by Tim Budgen and Catalina Echeverri)
The Afterwards by A. F. Harrold and Emily Gravett
We Are the Nerds: The birth and tumultuous life of Reddit, the internet's culture laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
The Travellers Club: A bicentennial history (1819–2019) by John Martin Robinson
Boyd Tonkin states the case – never overstated – for literature in translation, and reviews a commendable recent effort "to grasp, and to survey, the entire planet of words"; Andrew Scull considers the travails of social psychology and the egos and experiments that professed to tell us something essential about human nature by setting fire to forests or electrocuting dogs...
Books
Found in Translation: 100 of the finest short stories ever translated, edited by Frank Wynne
The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment by Gina Perry
The Hope Circuit: A psychologist’s journey from helplessness to optimism by Martin Seligman
Tom Stevenson offers a recent history of political assassination, from a CIA manual of 1953 to the Jamal Khashoggi affair; The literary achievements of Nancy Cunard have long been eclipsed by her image as the archetypal flapper-muse of the roaring 1920s – as Anna Girling reveals a previously unknown short story (published for the first time in this week's TLS), we reassess Cunard's legacy; Who killed Edwin Drood? In 1914, faced with Dickens's final, unfinished novel, prominent literary types gathered to stage the trial of Drood's alleged killer – Pete Orford tells us more...
Lara Pawson drops in to tell the tale of David Wojnarowicz, the New York artist whose time has come. Elaine Showalter examines a new biography of Germaine Greer. Kim Addonizio, winner of the Mick Imlah Prize for Poetry, reads her victorious poem. Plus, Lucy admits to having an allotment, and Stig learns he has been introducing the show all wrong.
An end-of-year edition, bringing together some of our favourite bits from the past twelve months: Kathryn Hughes on whether and where Charlotte Brontë meets Jane Eyre; Margaret Drabble reviews the life and work of Muriel Spark, whose centenary we marked this year; David Baddiel discusses whether Jewishness is inherently funny; Clare Pettitt revisits the history of the Peterloo massacre of 1819. A refresher for regular listeners and a sampler for newcomers – with thanks to all.
Who is Odysseus? Why can't he get home? And will the gods help or hinder his journey? In this special episode, the TLS's Classics editor Mary Beard chairs a panel featuring the author and academic Simon Goldhill, the memoirist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn, the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf and the novelist Madeline Miller. This is a recording of a live event, staged in collaboration with the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival in October 2018.
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