The LRB Podcast

In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance.

Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025)

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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 as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes.

On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’.

Further listening:

Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism:

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The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting power. The history of the microphone often focuses on its function as a technology of transmission, but as David Trotter wrote recently in the LRB, microphones ‘both receive and transmit’, and there is another tradition more concerned with listening than transmitting. In this episode, David joins Tom at the mic to discuss these alternative histories, as well as the role of microphones in the history of eavesdropping, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation and the strange cry that Ted Hughes picked up on his RAF radio while doing his National Service.

Read David's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/trotterpod

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William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought?

From the LRB

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As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’.

Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod

From the LRB

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