The LRB Podcast

In his introduction to our twelfth LRB Collection, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan, both younger sons in big families. Their conversation considers the examples of the brothers Mann, Yeats, James and Windsor, and why, as Czesław Miłosz observed, when there’s a writer in the family, that family is finished. 

Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient Greece have never been out of print. They discuss her eventful life, which took her from Edwardian East London to apartheid South Africa, and her meticulous classical reconstructions.

In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising to do to alleviate (or exacerbate) them.

Francis Gooding joins Tom to discuss Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber’s posthumously published study of 17th- and 18th-century piracy. Golden Age pirates maintained surprisingly egalitarian working practices, and legendary pirate republics may have been run on similar grounds.

With the future of TikTok increasingly uncertain in the US and other countries, Malin Hay talks to Tom about the app’s powerful reading-focused corner, BookTok: what it is, how it works, and the tropes which dominate its favourite genre, romance fiction.

Expanding on her recent Winter Lecture, Clair Wills talks to Tom about the stories people tell about abortions – stories conditioned by tradition, coerced by the courts, compelled by politics and shared in solidarity. 

Jade Sasser discusses how advocates for population control harness the language of social justice, her students’ highly personal responses to climate change, and the ways scholarship on climate anxiety has neglected questions of race.

William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at how reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere.

Alison Bashford discusses the history of efforts to control population size, how population is thought about in the Anthropocene, and how suspending critique of the past can give valuable insight into the present.

Bee Wilson speaks to Malin Hay about Paul Newman’s mystique – his passivity, his domesticity and his irresistible blue eyes.

In the second episode of a four-part series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to evolutionary biologist and feminist science scholar Banu Subramaniam.

Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks to Tom about Friedrich Hayek’s celebrity and infamy, and the ways close reading reveals surprising nuance in his work.

In the first episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist talks to activist and feminist scholar Loretta J. Ross.

In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely dismissed as a crank.
Deborah Friedell joins Tom to discuss Thompson’s enormous influence in interwar America, and her idiosyncratic mix of prescience and short-sightedness.

Laleh Khalili, a former management consultant, talks to Tom about how firms such as McKinsey, Accenture and Bain go about their business, the consequences of their relentless quest for ‘efficiency’, and the role these ‘class war mercenaries’ have played in supporting various governments all over the world.