There are very few critics that are able to effortlessly move between writing about novels, movies, TV shows, non-fiction, politics, culture, life, ethics and more. But today’s political climate and attention economy that seems to demand more and more from those who aim to catalogue the winds that drive our culture, requires just that: an ability to place different forms of media, fictional and not, in conversation with each other, to develop cohesive criticism of the present moment. Becca Rothfeld is one of those critics. As the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post, she has taken on everything from works of philosophy to political memoirs to postmodern novels to as recently as last week, The West Wing. 

Becca’s criticism brings a steady hand to analyzing often chaotic and multifarious narratives, and is grounded in her Philosophy background. Reading her, it’s immediately obvious that no piece of culture is off limits, and she’s willing to mine even the most banal texts to find some sort of value -- and that value for her comes in the form of a deeply nuanced critique of how we live.

Becca’s 2024 essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, published by Macmillan, is a celebration of excess. Her subjects range from Marie Kondo, to Sally Rooney, to David Cronenberg, to love. Through this diverse cast of characters, her thesis is clear, and as you’ll soon hear in the interview, the collection somehow brings together disparate ideas to create a sort of manifesto of liberal artmaking that often encourages you to introspect about not only your cultural consumption but also your habits, ethics, and politics… the hallmark of an effective essay collection. 

Becca and I sat down to primarily talk about and read from her book, and we touch on several of my favorite essays from the collection, as well as her writing on other platforms. We also speak about one of our shared obsessions, the novelist Norman Rush, as well as the writer whom everyone seems to have read these days, Sally Rooney. But there comes a point towards the end of the conversation where we turn to the present moment; and like all of my favorite episodes of cultural mixtapes, Becca starts to essentially perform criticism on the present moment, dissecting the ways in which political movements in the United States are influencing artmaking in various genres; and our conversation, albeit slightly dated, elucidated some prescient truths that are becoming more and more obvious as we continue to explore what this unique political and cultural moment has in store.

Throughout conversations on Cultural Mixtapes, Ryan’s work came up several times as I examined the zeitgeist of creative and cultural production with several writers. I first came across his work as he started publishing this hybrid piece of poetry, history, and literary historiography in sections, in various literary magazines around the world, and I’d hunt them down whenever they’d drop from the various corners of the internet. I was intrigued, and baffled at the fact that he was able to create robust arguments about the trends of poetic production, within a structure of blank verse iambic pentameter. 

Ryan is a very prolific literary critic who has published pieces on fiction, poetry, non fiction, and other genres of art in storied magazines around the world. He is also the author of the novel The Zero and the One, and the forthcoming book of essays Ringbahn, a psychogeographic exploration of his adopted home-city, Berlin. We touch on his other work, but this conversation centered upon his latest work, Context Collapse. 

The book’s argument teases out ideas that are commonly not regarded in the study of literature: He places poetic works in conversation with media theory to elucidate how the environments of capitalism, and technological evolution influenced the works, and in several instances, helped bring them into existence. 

It’s funny, the line of poetry that is always running through my mind is from W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” The various meanings and wit behind that line have been interrogated in english classes around the world, so I’m not going to do that here; but in a time when poetry and literature seem to be the last thing in everyone’s minds, I wanted to give it some time; and what came of this conversation were some pleasantly surprising arguments that reaffirm what literature can do; and cements its place an art form of the now, and constantly articulating the core ideas and sentiments of the present. 

Gary Indiana

Recommendations

The Political Unconscious - Frederic Jameson

The Dunciad - Alexander Pope

Sometimes I find myself in the throes of writing agony. I don’t like the term writers’ block because it implies a certain impermanence. But what is vernacularly referred to as writers’ block, is part and parcel of the creative act itself.  Anyone who’s tried to do something creative for an extended period of time can vouch for this. No one can exactly figure where creative impulse comes from,  just that you have to be ready to receive it when it does. I was in one of these meandering phases where I couldn’t write much of anything. I’d abandoned a long story that took a few months to write, because of its lack of pulse, and overt dogmatism, and I had resolved to just write academic papers for the time being. This was before I spoke to 2023 Booker Prize Winner Paul Lynch. 

I wanted to chat with Paul before he won the Prize. I’m a sucker for Irish fiction, and came across Prophet Song during a binge of Dublin-based novels. The novel fundamentally reimagines the city of Dublin in an ambiguous and ahistoric time-period where autocratic forces have come to power. These forces have clearly systematically disbanded the functioning democracy. The story is exceptionally contemporary, but there are no historical references as to why the situation is the way it is. Lynch’s writing has been stuck into the umbrella category of dystopian fiction, but it’s really not a dystopian novel. As you’ll see from the reading he gives at the beginning, he juxtaposes a beautiful and plaintive prose style with horrific events to find meaning in the spaces between them. Lynch chronicles the methodical unraveling of a world through the lens of his protagonist Eilish Stack, a mother and scientist whose husband has been taken by the police forces of the new regime. Through this personal conceit, Lynch interrogates ideas of grief, unity, longing, and the veiled ways power is accumulated and utilized in space. 

My conversation with Paul centered around the novel, but it turned into a poetic articulation of creativity. From the first question to the last his answers provide a picture of artmaking that quelled any writers-block induced self-loathing that I had, and led to tremendous creative inspiration that fueled a semester of writing prose and poetry. I’ve been lucky on this show to get many writers to speak candidly about their processes, and it’s clear Paul has thought deeply about the art he makes. We weave between the textual and the impalpable and create a vision for how art and fiction can function in contemporary times. 

Prophet Song

Recommendations

Louise Glück

Mary Oliver

Other References

Don DeLillo

Cormac McCarthy

Joseph Conrad

Louis MacNeice

I came across a novel that used food as tool for reflection into the life and mind of a few characters. Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye Vitamin, is about a woman who moves back home to care for her father, who has started to develop Alzheimer’s. And Khong meditates on this family by refocusing on their daily activities. From cooking to eating, to morning conversations, we see how mundane routines can change, bend and break under stress. 

Food was my entry point in the novel, but my discussion with Rachel starts to incorporate other ideas that she was interested in during her writing process. We’ve talked a lot about memory on this sh ow, and Rachel’s very interested in the simultaneous perfection and imperfection of memory. What happens when a character goes about their daily life on a faulty memory? And what happens when everyone else has to watch the memory of someone they love, dissipate..  We take a step back, and start to think about the memory of a writer, how does a profound mistrust of one’s memory change the way they perceive scenes and characters in a novel. 

We thread these ideas in with Rachel’s new novel Real Americans which is out April 30th from Knopf. Her new novel is entirely different in style and structure to the first one. It weaves between two timelines that show the intersection of two vastly different families, immigrants from China, and a pharmaceutical empire with generational wealth. We talk through her writing process for this novel, and how she sees part of it as a response to the world we’ve lived in, since 2016. The novel’s not overtly political, but you can start to see what Rachel’s project is with this new work, and we dive into how she spent the last few years writing it. 

Real Americans is out April 30th. 

Rachel's Website

Real Americans

Recommendations

Martyr - Kaveh Akbar

Monk

In August, West Virginia University announced that it would be dissolving its Department of World Languages, Literature and Linguistics. And a couple months after that, my school Middlebury College, chose to eliminate a faculty position in its creative writing department. As someone studying English Literature, and who cares deeply about the future of humanities education, I was curious to talk to someone who has been thinking about what the study of the humanities looks like in today's world. Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She was also a judge for The 2022 International Booker Prize. I’ve read her essays on various literary topics at The New Yorker, and other publications and it’s obvious that her criticism strives to innovate literary study for a changing world. I’ve been talking a lot about criticism on this show this year. I spoke to Christian Lorentzen over the summer about the future of literary criticism, an art that’s been required to reinvent and revitalize itself over the past few years. And my conversations with Jerome Lowenthal and Ethan Iverson focused on how classical music and jazz are received. I think studying the way we approach and talk about art and culture is crucial to the function of the humanities and this conversation gets to the heart of that. 

Merve and I start by talking about the school and the trends that literature departments are seeing, but then we progress to a larger discussion about access to the humanities. Merve is a strong advocate for treating aesthetic experience as a social good, and this takes us to the end of our conversation where we try to articulate how the academy and public media, and social media can simultaneously further the reach and scope of humanities education and dissemination in their own ways. This was another work of audio criticism. Regardless of whether you’re interested in literature or culture, the topics we discussed are ubiquitous in today’s society, and if there’s one throughline in all the episodes of Cultural Mixtapes, it’s the importance of art in our world.

New Yorker Page

Recommendations

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Inland - Gerald Murnane

R.P. Blackmur

F. O. Matthiessen

Elizabeth Hardwick

Renata Adler

Rebecca West

I read Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land when it first came out in November of 2020. That time was filled with rampant polarization, multiple quaratines, alternative realities, an insurrection, and politics that was so messy it was near impossible to find any hope and see America as this Promised Land that Obama wrote about. 

Thinking about the American Project is quite difficult in today’s contested landscape. Zooming out to find moments that define the beauties of American Democracy, amidst the onslaught of political punditry, and a seemingly catatonic congress, is a constant struggle. But sometimes the key is to look for moments of GRACE, within the chaos; little signs that reaffirm that America is indeed A Promised Land. 

Cody Keenan’s new book does just that. Cody was a Speechwriter in the Obama White House, and joined the campaign in 2007. He was later promoted to Director of Speechwriting, and held the position through the end of Obama’s second term. Cody is now working as a Partner at Fenway Strategies, a speechwriting and communications firm, and also teaches at Northwestern University. 

His book GRACE: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America, which is out in paperback today, details 10 days in 2015 that give us a vivid picture of America: the wonderful highs, the horrific lows, and all the beautiful strangeness in between. The ten days begin with a racist massacre on June 17th at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, which led to 9 dead, including the church’s pastor.  The central question in the book is whether or not Barack Obama should speak at the Pastor’s Funeral. 

However the ten days also included decisions from the Supreme Court, which decided the fates of Marriage Equality and the Affordable Care Act. Everything changed in the White House when a few days after the shooting, the families of the victims, decided to forgive the killer in open court, which was broadcast on live TV. These ten days tested the strength of the American Project, and Keenan’s book explores the ways in which they found grace amidst the chaos and the ways in which we can continue to find grace in politics. 

Our conversation started with Keenan’s beginnings in politics, working in the mailroom for Senator Ted Kennedy. But we jump between the past and the present, the events of the book and issues still plaguing us today such as gun control and climate change, in an attempt to find moments of Grace in our politics today and reaffirm America as The Promised Land that it can be. 

Cody's Website

Recommendations

Surrender by Bono

The Bear

The Diplomat

Last November, I had Alexander Chee on the show. And in preparation for his interview, I read The Best American Essays 2022. I came across an essay titled “Ghosts.” This essay stood out from the rest of the anthology because it seemed to have 9 iterations. When I read further, I was baffled at the idea that a writer had used Artificial Intelligence to produce prose. Even more intriguing was the fact that AI had helped this writer create a beautiful meditation on grief. After reading it a bit more closely, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the AI that was the driving factor of this piece, but rather that the author was pushing back against the response that the AI was giving her and using that as a catalyst for poetic reflection. After reading this, I knew I had to read everything she’d written. In addition to the essay Ghosts, Vauhini Vara is the author of the novel THE IMMORTAL KING RAO. This novel was recently listed as the finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, amongst many other accolades. 

Vauhini also has a book coming out on September 26th titled THIS IS SALVAGED. And in addition to her creative work, she has been a tech reporter, writing in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, NYT Magazine, and WIRED. 

I wanted to speak to Vauhini because while AI is all the rage right now, it seems that many of us don’t really know how to talk about it. AI’s ubiquity, brought on by the launch of CHAT GPT at the end of last year, has clear implications, economically, and culturally, but what are those implications? And how strongly will they influence the future.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO tells a generational story of a family coconut grove in India, and the subsequent founding of a multinational tech corporation that goes on to rule the world. As someone who’s covered almost two decades of technological development and also spent 13 years imagining a technocratic future and all its ramifications, Vauhini is the perfect person to give us a read about the intersection of art and technology. We sat down in Early August to speak about her novel, as well as recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, and finally her moving collection of stories.  From an artist attempting to bring the Bible to life, to telemarketers discovering intimacy, THIS IS SALVAGED truly packs a punch and is out today. 

Vauhini's Website

The Immortal King Rao

This is Salvaged

Recommendations

The Night Parade - Jami Nakamura Lin

About 6 months into my first year of college, I found myself soliloquizing to some friends about the beauties of suburban life. It struck me immediately that I was longing for a world that I found profoundly boring for 18 years, and had swore to never replicate. I was going to live my big life in cities. Yet the pleasures of driving around open roads amidst constant pockets of civilization and seeing the formation of an unspoken, and distant community that was fostered through nothing more than proximity, still appealed to me in a way my city-dwelling friends couldn’t understand. My suburban life in Ohio was quiet and comfortable, and for all it lacked, it also guaranteed a great deal. This has been a bit of an obsession of mine since I moved away from the suburbs. Through college in a cold rural town, to the Atlantic metropolis of London, England, something about suburban America still baffled me. 

I’d read my fair share of suburban writers, but when I came across a book that strived to understand the weird yet alluring quality that American suburbia presents, I knew I had to read it, with the hope that maybe this would scratch this never-ending itch. 

Jason Diamond is the author of the 2020 book THE SPRAWL as well a memoir from 2016 called SEARCHING FOR JOHN HUGHES. In addition to his books, he also writes for various publications including NEW YORK MAGAZINE, and GQ, and has a Substack called THE MELT. 

THE SPRAWL is a new kind of book because it attempts to detail a history of America with the suburb at the center. Diamond is of the suburbs. And his upbringing in a suburb of Chicago, is central to the book itself. THE SPRAWL combines personal anecdotes with heavily researched demographic and geographic data to try to answer the same question that was on my mind. What exactly is special about the American suburb? 

So this is where we start our conversation. Jason and I speak about his book, the exorbitant amount of driving he did to research it, as well as some of the cultural references that feature in its pages. This conversation about suburbia morphs into a larger one about America. And this is especially evident when we start talking about all the exclusion and racism that is a part of the suburban and American story.  

Diamond’s writing is special because he uses common structures and cultural objects that have made it into the vernacular, to ask questions about the culture he lives in. This is why later in the conversation, when I ask him about his critical process, I call him a chronicler of vibes.  So that’s what this conversation is. It starts with the suburbs, but then progresses into the two of us simply tryna gauge where the vibes are at.

The Melt Substack

THE SPRAWL

References

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

John Cheever

Bowling Alone - Robert D. Putnam

Recommendations

Grace Paley Short Stories

Sag Harbor - Colson Whitehead

Crook Manifesto - Colson Whitehead

The Righteous Gemstones

I Could Not Believe It - Sean DeLear

@tejassrin on Twitter

As part of this mini series on the past and future of the music industry, I wanted to speak to another person who’s been a force in the industry for years. I came across an article in The Nation that was called The End of the Music Business. This piece presented the history of a century in recorded music that began with pre-war 78-rpm gramophone records, and ended with the onset of streaming websites. The thesis of the piece was that the most notable development in these hundred years was the LP, which marked the apex of commercial music making and album sales. The piece was written by Jazz Pianist Ethan Iverson. Ethan has been in the industry for over 20 years, and is now a mainstay of jazz clubs in New York and all over the country. 

He was a founding member of the avant-garde jazz trio The Bad Plus in the year 2000 and he stayed with the group for 17 years. In addition to being a jazz pianist, Ethan also has written prolifically about music, and culture for years on his blog DO THE MATH, and now his Substack TRANSITIONAL TECHNOLOGY. 

Ethan and I began with this piece in The Nation. And he talked through his experience in the music industry, and his predictions for where things may go. But from there we started exploring his intricate career in Jazz. Ethan has traversed through the genre, from The Bad Plus, which served as a bridge between contemporary jazz and popular music, to his current compositions, such as a piano sonata, which strive to place Jazz in conversation with classical music. As you know, I’m fascinated by work that asks complicated questions about the genre it originates from. So this last idea is where we ended our conversation. and as someone who’s studied both styles and performed in both traditions, Ethan may be an apt person to think about the future of American music. This was a wonderful conversation that covered over a hundred years of American music, had a lovely Tony Bennett cameo, and forced me to think about pushing the boundaries and changing the terms we use to define genres of music.

Ethan’s Substack

Ethan's Blog (Archive)

Every Note is True - Blue Note Records

The End of the Music Business - The Nation

Recommendations

Barbie Movie

Henning Mankell’s Crime Fiction

Other Artists Mentioned

Tony Bennett

Billy Hart

Thelonious Monks

Ron Carter

Duke Ellington

Ornette Coleman

McCoy Tyner

Miles Davis

John Coltrane

Charlie Parker

Charles Ives

Conlan Nancarrow

In 2019, I went to New York City for 24 hours. I told my high school teachers I was sick, postponed two tests, and asked for an extension on a project; all because Jerome Lowenthal had agreed to give me a piano lesson at the Juilliard School. On a cold New York Winter Night, I went to his studio and he heard me play Bach and Beethoven. We went on for an hour as he corrected my interpretations and offered me ideas that wouldn’t have occurred in my wildest dreams. A little after 9:15 PM he admitted that he needed to go eat dinner and left me to explore the world of these two composers. 

Since that day, and from the beginning of Cultural Mixtapes, I knew I wanted to speak to Jerome Lowenthal. At 91, he is entering his 33rd year on the Piano Faculty at the renowned Juilliard School, and maintains a busy performance and touring schedule, as you’ll see from the interview. The premise of the interview was very simple: After listening to his recordings and performances online, as well as videos of him teaching students, I wanted to hear him speak at length about his artistic philosophies.

The question of interpretation, whether that’s novels, poetry, or music, has been central to this podcast. Classical music interpretation is a behemoth of art. And if you’re not too familiar, it’s simultaneously historical and ephemeral. An interpretation of a great composer’s music is built upon history and musical theory, but it’s also a semi-instinctual shaping of sound to match taste. Interpretations vary and can change over time, and because of the nuance with which one can speak about it, I think classical music provides a beautiful window to study art-making at its highest levels. 

And this conversation proved to be exactly that. We dive into Mr. Lowenthal’s musical upbringing, as well as instances that shaped his artistic opinions, but for the majority of the episode, you’ll hear him talk about the act of interpreting music and art and interpret specific questions from the classical repertoire in real time. He draws upon history and memory and decades of experience to service the composer but most importantly, service the music itself. 

This conversation is a bit esoteric if you’re not a musician. We mention many composers and pieces, as well specific intricacies of piano playing. But I encourage you to keep listening even if you’re lost amidst the names and terms. Because while Mr. Lowenthal is reflecting on his life in music, we start to see other ideas emerging, about the purpose of artmaking, and the meaning that can be derived from synthesizing different art forms. This interview is a love letter to music and a statement of artistic ideas that transcend time, genre and history.

A quick note: there were many instances when Mr. Lowenthal played the piano, but unfortunately due to zoom audio and internet issues, they were not audible. I have inserted a couple of recordings of his performances, in between the interview, but all the music that we discuss is listed in the show notes. 

Juilliard Faculty Bio

Selected Recitals

New York 2022 (Chopin)

90th Birthday Recital (Hammerklavier)

91st Birthday Recital

1968 Rachmaninov Rehearsal

Composers, Performers and Pieces Mentioned

Johann Sebastian Bach

- French Overture

Ludwig van Beethoven

- Hammerklavier Sonata Op. 106

Fryderyk Chopin

- Bb Minor Sonata Op. 35

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck

- 6 Variations on "Mein Junges Leben hat ein End"

Alexander Scriabin

- Sonata No. 6 Op. 62

Sergei Rachmaninov

Sergei Prokofiev

Béla Bartók

Camille Saint-Saëns

Olga Samaroff

William Kapell

Eduard Steuermann

Alfred Cortot

Ursula Oppens

Other Miscellaneous References

Howards End by E.M. Forster

Marcel Proust