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?
'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.'
'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.'
'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".'
'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.'
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.
‘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.’
‘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.’
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?
‘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.’
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.
‘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.”’
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.
Saiba que você pode ser aliado da Agência Pública e colaborar com esse trabalho. Saiba mais em apoie.apublica.orgou faça um pix de qualquer valor para contato@apublica.org. Contamos com seu apoio!
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.
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
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
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.
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
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?
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.
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.’
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.
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.
Saiba que você pode ser aliado da Agência Pública e colaborar com esse trabalho. Saiba mais em apoie.apublica.orgou faça um pix de qualquer valor para contato@apublica.org. Contamos com seu apoio!
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
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
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.
O Pauta de hoje fala sobre o poço sem fundo do crime ambiental no Brasil. Desta vez, as vítimas são milhares de moradores de Maceió, uma cidade que afunda diante dos nossos olhos, resultado das atividades de mineração da gigante Braskem, ao longo de 40 anos.
Em 2018 o solo da cidade começou a tremer causando rachaduras e fissuras em casas e estabelecimentos comerciais e afundando o chão onde uma das minas da Braskem começou a se deteriorar.
Em 2019, um laudo do Serviço Geológico Brasileiro foi conclusivo: foram as atividades de mineração as causadoras dos tremores. De lá pra cá, milhares de moradores tiveram que deixar suas casas, os bairros onde cresceram e criaram suas memórias e começaram uma ingrata jornada em busca de reparação.
Agora, em 2023, o caso, que é o maior desastre ambiental em curso numa zona urbana no país, finalmente ganhou repercussão nacional, a partir de novos tremores e o afundamento cada vez mais acelerado do solo da cidade, indicando o possível iminente colapso de pelo menos uma das 35 minas de extração da Braskem.
Para traçar um panorama da situação até agora o Pauta recebe novamente a repórteres Alice Maciel e Mariama Correia, em uma conversa que também reflete sobre as recorrências desse tipo de crime que, no Brasil, parece sempre compensar.
=== O episódio 102 encerra também a temporada 2023 do Pauta Pública, que retorna com episódios inéditos em janeiro de 202. Até lá, episódios especiais com um compilado de momentos marcantes serão publicados no feed toda sexta-feira de manhã. ===
====PARCERIA RÁDIO GUARDA CHUVA A dica de hoje é escutar a série investigativa “O Pastor” do podcast Rádio Escafandro, produzida por Thomas Chiaverini.
Ao todo "O Pastor" terá sete episódios narrativos, com frequência semanal, dos quais 5 já estão no ar, falando sobre a atuação potencialmente criminosa de um pastor na cidade de Itacoatiara (AM). A reportagem exclusiva conta como o pastor evangélico Arison Farias de Aguiar, responsável pelo projeto Resgatando Cativos, tem exposto dependentes químicos para enriquecer. A instituição que ele coordena tem o suposto objetivo de resgatar e recuperar usuários de drogas, mas não oferece tratamento especializado. Apesar disso, tanto os resgates quanto o cotidiano nas casas de alojamento são transmitidos ao vivo pelo Facebook, no estilo de reality show. Além da exposição de pessoas fragilizadas, as lives revelam abusos, como supostos tratamentos em que o pastor pendura drogas no pescoço de dependentes químicos.Ao longo da série, o podcast trará relatos de usuários que dizem ter sido submetidos a trabalho análogo ao escravo, ter sofrido ameaças, e que tiveram a vida fora do projeto manipulada pelo pastor, com o provável objetivo de aumentar a visualização dos vídeos e a arrecadação de dinheiro.
==== Quem faz o Pauta: ● Apresentação: Andrea Dip e Clarissa Levy|| ● Produção: Ricardo Terto || ● Pauta e Entrevista: Andrea Dip e Clarissa Levy || ● Roteiro, Edição e Mixagem Final: Ricardo Terto || ● Identidade visual: Cíntia Funchal || ● Artes: Tayná Gonçalves || ● Coordenação de Redes Sociais: Ravi Spreizner || ● Chamadas e teasers: Breno Andreata || ● Trilha original composta por Pedro Vituri contato: podcasts@apublica.org
Saiba que você pode ser aliado da Agência Pública e colaborar com esse trabalho. Saiba mais em apoie.apublica.orgou faça um pix de qualquer valor para contato@apublica.org. Contamos com seu apoio!
This week, Lauren Elkin takes an artistic stroll in the footsteps of Gertrude Stein; and Maria Margaronis goes in search of Willa Cather deep in the Midwest.
'Gertrude Stein et Pablo Picasso: L'invention du langage', at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, until 28 January 2024
'Chasing Bright Medusas: A life of Willa Cather', by Benjamin Taylor
As we wrap up our History of Ideas series David discusses what makes a great essay and whether the best contemporary writing is as good as what went before. The answer is yes, as shown by Jiayang Fan’s brilliant 2020 essay ‘How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda’. David explores why this is such a remarkable example of what can be done with the form and why the art of the essay is alive and well.
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