The LRB Podcast

Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers operated or grew up in America’s Pacific Northwest. Caroline Fraser’s book Murderland, reviewed in the LRB by James Lasdun, argues that a significant contributing factor may have been the spew of lead fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region during those decades. On this episode, James joins Tom to discuss the evidence, and what the juxtaposition of industrial lead poisoning and serial murder may tell us about different kinds of violence in modern America, even if a direct causal link remains unproved.

Andy Burnham recently said that the government is ‘in hock to the bond markets’, and the political turbulence of the past few years, not least the downfall of Liz Truss following her ‘mini-budget’, would seem to back this up. James is joined by Andy Haldane and Daniela Gabor to consider why governments are so afraid of ‘bond vigilantes’ and the increasing influence of central banks on policy since the financial crisis of 2008.

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’. Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways ideas about extinction are warped by our timescales and politics. They discuss how the language of natural selection was used to excuse violence and ecocide, and the continued influence of ‘empirical’ myths on approaches to conservation and human culture today.

James is joined by political theorist Alan Finlayson to try to understand the rise of Reform UK and the ways in which different styles of online rhetoric, on both the left and right, are shaping our political discourse.

Adam is joined by Robert Malley to discuss the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the long history of the peace process, in which Malley has been involved on behalf of several US administrations.

It's nearly eighteen years since Amanda Knox was arrested on suspicion of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and more than ten since she was finally exonerated of the crime. Jessica Olin joins Tom to talk about the murder case, the media frenzy surrounding it – which portrayed Knox as either a sex-crazed psychopath or an angelic innocent abroad – and the efforts Knox has since made to speak for herself and on behalf of others who have been wrongly convicted.

James Butler is joined by Anthony Seldon and Henry Hill to consider what or who is to blame for the Conservative Party’s dire situation and whether it will still be around to celebrate its bicentennial in 2034.

J. Robert Lennon joins Tom to discuss Elmore Leonard’s rules for writers and the ways in which great crime novels will always defy the prescriptions of the genre.

In this first episode of a new strand in the LRB Podcast, host James Butler talks to former Labour MP and minister Chris Mullin, columnist Andy Beckett and journalist Morgan Jones about whether Labour can recover from critical mistakes over tax, why they’re failing to communicate their achievements, and who they should really be trying to represent.

The manosphere, Emily Witt writes in a recent piece for the LRB, is the ‘online network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels’ whose popularity has exploded in the last fifteen years. The rhetoric of the manosphere has reached the highest levels of the US government, as well as sparking a series of violent misogynistic crimes. Emily Witt joins Malin Hay to discuss what makes the manosphere appealing to young men, and what can be done about it.

Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey David Graeber's work, from the theories of power he developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow).

Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and times of Enzo Ferrari. In this episode, they discuss the ways F1 has changed over the years (not least how it’s become safer), what it’s like to drive a ‘regular’ Ferrari, the extreme demands of handling an F1 vehicle, and why the personalities of the people behind the cars —the people who drive them, manufacture them, live for them and, in some cases, die in them — matter so much.

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland.

As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently in the LRB: ‘obsessive focus, epic self-belief’. Edmund – whose son is a rising star on the London under-nine circuit – joins Tom to discuss four recent books about the so-called golden generation of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray, what it took for them to get to the summit of the game, and what happens to players who never manage to break into the top hundred. They also talk about the more recent rivalry between Sinner and Alcaraz, and why Djokovic thinks a slice of bread is like kryptonite.

With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. When Donald Trump was spotted cheating recently on a course in Scotland, it was recognised by enthusiasts and sportswriters as a major violation in a game traditionally based on self-policing and high principles. David Trotter joins Tom, a non-golfer, to explain why golf is the favoured sport of US presidents, the role that fantasy plays on the fairway, and why Wodehouse believed that ‘to find a man’s character, play golf with him’.