Public

(00:00) – Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Patrick Cotter discussion
(03:20) – Joyelle McSweeney interview
(54:50) – Southword poem, Another Beginning by Triin Paja

Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's recent book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.

This week's Southword poem is 'Another Beginning' by Triin Paja, which appears in issue 45. You can buy single issues, subscribe, or find out how to submit to Southword here.

As a senior in high school, Michael got a huge opportunity: the chance to star in a big-budget movie. Shooting wrapped; a premier date was set. And then he found out that his lucky break was all based on a lie.

Get ad-free episodes of Heavyweight by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. You'll also get an exclusive bonus episode where Jonathan, Stevie, and Kalila remember how the beloved Jackie calls came to be and share a never-before-aired opening that could have started the show in an alternate Heavyweight universe. Thanks for your support—and be sure to check out the other offerings available to Pushkin+ subscribers, including ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, and exclusive binges of other podcasts throughout the year.

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In the 1950s, secretary Bette Graham from Texas was struggling to cope with her new electric typewriter.

“My fingers would hang heavy on the sensitive keyboard and the first thing I'd know, I'd have a mistake with a deposit of carbon which I simply couldn't erase,” she said.

A budding artist, she wondered if there was a way she could paint over her typos.

At home, in her kitchen, the single mum cooked up the first correcting fluid. It was a hit with other secretaries and, by 1973, Bette had turned her creation into a multi-million dollar business.

Bette died in 1980 so Vicky Farncombe tells her story using archive from University of North Texas Special Collections.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.

(Photo: Correction fluid. Credit: Getty Images)

Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes have been picked apart in headlines, documentaries, and endless conspiracy theories. And yet there have continued to be shocking new revelations in the story this year, as President Trump’s base has pressured him to release the government’s files about Epstein. 

In this episode of Question Everything, host Brian Reed brings together the reporters who know the case best – along with one of their Trump-supporting producers – for drinks and a candid, no-holds-barred conversation. They compare notes, challenge each other’s assumptions, and reveal what it really takes to separate fact from rumor in a story that has tested the limits of journalism.

It’s one of the most provocative and confronting discussions Brian’s ever hosted about power, accountability and what’s at stake when the media goes up against billionaires and their networks.

Check out our Substack, by the way, where we get into juicy behind the scenes details and other good stuff from our episodes. 

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

Drinking and fact-checking don’t always go hand in hand, so clarifying and correcting a few statements from the conversation here – which honestly in themselves give a sense of just how many crannies of global power the tendrils of the Epstein story reach into. 

We reached out to Anouska De Georgiou to see if she wanted to comment, but we didn’t hear back. 

Leslie Wexner is not the founder of Victoria’s Secret – he bought the company in 1982, and he said Jeffrey Epstein had stolen $46 million from him, not $60 million. Meanwhile investor Leon Black paid Epstein $170 million for supposed tax advice – not $160 million. 

Virginia Giuffre sued Prince Andrew as an individual, not the Crown itself. Tara Palmeri’s reporting that Elon Musk dm’d Virgina Giuffre saying Trump would release the files is based on Virginia telling her this – Tara didn’t see the DM. 

At one point, Eric says that in 2015, Roger Stone called Epstein’s island a “democrat orgy island”. Really, Stone wrote a book excoriating the Clintons called The Clinton’s War on Women, and there’s a chapter in there called Orgy Island, which highlights Bill Clinton’s friendship with Epstein. So Roger Stone didn’t call Epstein’s island a democrat orgy island. Just “orgy island”. 

And last, but not least: the pope who was in a picture with Jeffrey Epstein, which was displayed on Epstein’s credenza, was John Paul II.

Mark Damazer is a former controller of Radio 4, Deputy Director of BBC News, BBC trustee, writer, commentator, and chair of the Booker Prizes. We spoke to him about the BBC’s plans for its international audio services, the challenges of monetising content overseas, the implications for the BBC’s global reach and influence, the value of its radio archive, the future of public service broadcasting, and the role of consultation and vision in shaping the BBC’s direction.

There's still quite a lot that's been lost, and you feel really quite strongly; they've been making it up as they go along, and they've had a lot of trouble communicating to these audiences outside the UK, interested in BBC audio, what it is that they're actually doing.

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Justin D. Garrison is a scholar of American literature and political thought who frequently applies René Girard's mimetic theory to his research, demonstrating its utility for understanding topics in American culture, literature, and politics. Garrison has published reviews and articles, including a review of Girard's All Desire is a Desire for Being, highlighting the value of Girard's ideas in analyzing contemporary societal issuesGarrison's paper: https://politicalsciencereviewer.com/index.php/psr/article/view/868---Become part of the Hermitix community:Hermitix Twitter - ⁠⁠ / hermitixpodcast⁠⁠ Hermitix Discord - ⁠⁠ / discord Support Hermitix:Hermitix Subscription - ⁠⁠https://hermitix.net/subscribe/⁠⁠ Patreon - ⁠⁠ www.patreon.com/hermitix⁠⁠ Donations: - ⁠⁠https://www.paypal.me/hermitixpod⁠⁠Hermitix Merchandise - ⁠⁠http://teespring.com/stores/hermitix-2⁠⁠Bitcoin Donation Address: 3LAGEKBXEuE2pgc4oubExGTWtrKPuXDDLKEthereum Donation Address: 0xfd2bbe86d6070004b9Cbf682aB2F25170046A996

In the 1990s, NGOs (non government organisations) delivered more official development assistance than the entire U.N. system. Now, increasing anti-NGO rhetoric on both the left and right, means these groups have less power and influence than ever before.

• GUEST: Suparna Chaudhry, Associate Professor of International Affairs at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, US 
• PRODUCER: Ali Benton

Steven Pinker returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But Tyler wonders: if most real-world coordination works fine without recursively looping (a glance at a traffic circle), if these models break down with the slightest change in assumptions, and if anonymous internet posters are making correct but uncomfortable truths common knowledge when society might function better with noble lies, is Pinker's theory really capturing how coordination works—and might we actually need less common knowledge, not more?

Tyler and Steven probe these dimensions of common knowledge—Schelling points, differential knowledge, benign hypocrisies like  a whisky bottle in a paper bag—before testing whether rational people can actually agree (spoiler: they can't converge on Hitchcock rankings despite Aumann's theorem), whether liberal enlightenment will reignite and why, what stirring liberal thinkers exist under the age 55, why only a quarter of Harvard students deserve A's, how large language models implicitly use linguistic insights while ignoring linguistic theory, his favorite track on Rubber Soul, what he’ll do next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded September 12th, 2025.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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A special episode to announce and celebrate the end of Where Are You Going? Catherine sits down with writer and critic Fiona Sturges, from The Financial Times, to talk about the show and where it fits in the story of podcasting and radio over the last decade. 

Thank you to Fiona for her time. You can stay up to date with her audio column here

You can follow the work that Loftus Media does here

And.. 

Stay in touch with Catherine here. 

Thank you! x

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Named 'Podcast of the Year' by Radio Times and picked as 'Best Podcasts of the Year 2023' by the Financial Times, Observer, Pod Bible and The Week. 

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The conversations that follow are always unpredictable: sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breaking, silly, romantic or occasionally downright ‘stop-you-in-your-tracks’ surprising. Catherine’s been travelling and recording since 2014.

Be transported to places around the world and into the lives of others: You just never know what story is coming next…

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Presented by Catherine Carr

Produced by the team at Loftus Media

Music by Edwin Pearson

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Elmore Leonard ‘did more with less than any crime writer I can think of’ J. Robert Lennon wrote in the latest issue of the LRB. Leonard was born in New Orleans in 1925 and by the time he died in 2013 had published over forty novels selling tens of millions of copies, many of which were made into films such as Jackie Brown and Get Shorty. (A few have recently been reissued as Penguin Modern Classics.) He also wrote ten rules for writers that serve as a manifesto for the minimalist, dialogue-heavy style he mastered. In this episode Lennon joins Tom to discuss the usefulness of Leonard’s rules and the ways in which great crime writing will always defy the prescriptions of its genre.

Read J. Robert Lennon on Leonard: https://lrb.me/leonardpod

From the LRB

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