How Prediction Markets Work
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just...
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The LRB Podcast
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Hosted by Thomas Jones, it also features regular contributions from US Editor Adam Shatz...
Episodes
20 of 487 episodes
Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obsce...
How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete...
Who were the English?
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bi...
On Politics: What is political writing?
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social rea...
Fascism in a time of AI
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such...
An Alternative History of the Microphone
The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were u...
On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leade...
What’s the point of literary criticism?
As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one aski...
On Politics: Germany's Far-Right Future?
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the h...
The Romantic History of the Bayeux Tapestry
The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Na...
Roman Scandinavia
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 imp...
Seamus Perry: Pluralism and the Modern Poet
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Is...
Adam Shatz: Visions of America
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘...
Travel with Close Readings: Byron’s ‘Don Juan’
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with...
Amia Srinivasan: The Impossible Patient
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and d...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Prelude’ (Books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contempo...
Adam Tooze: Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War
China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An ali...