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One of Britain's best-loved and most talented actors for you today: Simon Callow. In this gem of a conversation, Gyles hears about Simon's childhood in Streatham, where he was dazzled by his theatrical grandmother but had a more complicated relationship with his "odd" mother. His father left when he was small. Gyles hears about formative teachers, an early love of theatre and literature, and music. Simon also talks about university in Belfast, Michael Mac Liammoir, drama school and how writing to Laurence Olivier landed him a job at the National Theatre.

This is a fabulous episode, one of the best. We know you'll enjoy it - and our deep gratitude to Simon Callow for taking the time and trouble to record with us.

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We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in his vast portrait of a broken country as a sort of bad marriage. He’s written a novel called The Breakup. Is the USA beyond repair? he’s asking us. Could a national divorce be better than the country we’ve got, on its 250th birthday, no less?

Kurt Andersen.

We’re taking up his book, a novel about a married couple in trouble inside a nation in trouble. But we have to note the moment we’re in, mid-September, when the titans of our technology have given us, in effect, apocalypse week in the news, warning us that artificial intelligence—the way they’re building it—runs a measurable risk of killing the human species, all of us, forever, in the next 10 years. Kurt Andersen is a one of a kind, tireless noticer, a serious funny man, too, founder of Spy magazine in another lifetime, also Studio 360 on public radio, and he’s an old hand inside the dark side of AI.

The post The Breakup appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Meg Wolitzer presents two stories that combine different sorts of unknowables:  unidentified—or hard to identify—flying objects, and romantic love.  In “The Duck,” by Ben Loory, a heartsick mallard has chosen a really unattainable object of affection.  The reader, at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, was Sonia Manzano.  And an early Haruki Murakami story, “U.F.O. in Kushiro,” sends a jilted husband on a journey of self-discovery.  The reader, at The Japan Society, was Javier Munoz.

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Dave Eggers joins us to discuss his 14th novel, Contrapposto, a six-decade love story between childhood friends Cricket and Olympia, illustrated with his own drawings. Eggers traces the book's twenty-year gestation, the moment Olympia's character unlocked its structure, and why he gave Cricket his own boyhood fantasy of being "apprenticed" as a young artist. The conversation ranges widely: the decline of art-school access and the pier-side art collective he's launched in San Francisco; his literacy nonprofit 826 Valencia and its typewriter-obsessed students; and a candid, sometimes fiery take on AI's effect on writing, translation, and education, including an anecdote from his visit to OpenAI's offices. 

Buy Contrapposto: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/contrapposto-3

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Dave Eggers is the author of many books for adults and kids. He’s the founder of McSweeney's and the co-founder of 826 Valencia, and the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centers. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he was recently awarded the Newbery Medal for his all-ages book, The Eyes & the Impossible.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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This is a catch-up version of James O'Brien's Mystery Hour. To join the game, call 0345 60 60 973, Thursdays at 12pm.

Learn more about Alpha School at ⁠https://go.alpha.school/howiwrite

But how do you actually do that? This interview provides an answer.

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In today’s episode about the intersection between twentieth century philosophy and biography David talks to the historian and literary critic Lyndsey Stonebridge about the life and thought of Hannah Arendt. How did Arendt, who was Jewish, make sense of her passionate relationship with Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi? How did she experience her double exile, first to France and then to the United States? What made sense of her own identity? What explained the terrible turbulence and traumas of the twentieth century? And what did it all mean for the human condition?

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience is available wherever you get your books https://bit.ly/4hgyGLH

You can find out everything you need to know about this podcast – who we are, what we do, plus upcoming events and full lists of all episodes including PPF+ bonus episodes on our website https://www.ppfideas.com

Next time in the Lives of the Philosophers: Iris Murdoch

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Sex in novels is commonplace, but how do poets write about sex--and is it any good? Join Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar for a live recording of the LRB podcast Poetry and the Turning World, with special guests Sophie Robinson (Prairie Oyster) and Oluwaseun Olayiwola (Strange Beach). Poetry and the Turning World is a special short series on the LRB Podcast, looking at the ways in which contemporary poetry deals with our everyday challenges and the wider changes we face globally. Sandeep and Sarah take different themes and explore when and where poetry can be a guiding force for understanding individual and collective experiences. The subjects covered in the series were work, technology, divorce, sex, weather, food and money.

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This week’s news in three separate files - the Good, the Bad and the Befuddling. Which involves …

… have Oasis created their own economy?

… are stadium gigs now like historical re-enactment?

… “people listen to music more intently in Manchester as they’re inside while it rains”

… ‘includes All Things Must Pass miniature garden gnomes!’ The mad money-draining joy of the luxury box-set

… when bands don’t change but audiences do

…Sun = Happiness, Rain = Sorrow: lyrics as an emotional weather forecast

… the pianist who wouldn’t play minor chords

… Nicky Hopkins on records by the Kinks, Beatles, Who and Stones (“She’s A Rainbow was like a music-box Mozart”): has any session player made a more vital contribution?

… “Lose two teeth in German nightclub brawl, go back to Burnage”: real and fictitious rock band Monopoly sets!

… Blue Nile, Ann Peebles, Beautiful South, Paul Simon? What’s the best song about rain?

Plus J Blackfoot, Paul Simon’s Kathy from Brentwood and birthday guest Matthew North.

Help us to keep The Longest Continuous Conversation In Rock'n'Roll going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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After losing her best friend, Ann Patchett poured all that love into her new novel, Whistler. Bringing platonic love to the fore, alongside the unearthing of the past and a reckoning with our own mortality; we sat down to speak with her about what it means to love and to lose, what she's learned as a bookseller about reading and why the most important thing for any writer is getting your posture right.