Public

Writers beware of the TikTok publishing model, and we chat with Wendy Erskine about her exuberant, polyvocal novel, The Benefactors.

Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, give us a follow at:

X: Across the Pond, Galley Beggar Press, Interabang Books, Lori Feathers, Sam Jordison

Instagram: Across the Pond, Galley Beggar Press, Interabang Books, Lori Feathers, Sam Jordison

Facebook: Across the Pond, Galley Beggar Press, Interabang Books

Bluesky: @acrossthepondbooks.bsky.social

The Big Book Project https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject

Theme music by Carlos Guajardo-Molina

What enables writers to grow and flourish?

Writing is mostly a solitary pursuit that draws on individual reserves of talent and skill. But writers are also part of a national community that can help, or hinder, celebrate or ignore them. Ireland provides bountiful support to its writers and literary ecosystem, but Australia fails to adequately nurture its own. 

Listen to prominent writers Laureate for Irish Fiction Colm Tóibín (Brooklyn, Long Island) and Booker Prize–shortlisted author Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional, The Natural Way of Things) discuss how they became writers and the state of their nations’ literature. What can be done to wake Australia up to the need to support its writers? With host Michael Williams.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2025 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel.

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms. 

After more? Follow Sydney Writers’ Festival on social media:


Instagram: @sydwritersfest
Facebook: @SydWritersFest
TikTok: @sydwritersfest

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today I’m thrilled to launch a brand new series for the Princeton UP Ideas Podcast. 20 years ago, Princeton University Press published a short volume with an excellent title: On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2025). Written by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit was adapted from an essay that explored the meaning, uses, and consequences of bullshit.

At just 80 pages, On Bullshit became a favorite of readers, selling over 1 million copies and spending 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not often that a work of philosophy breaks through to the mainstream, but readers of On Bullshit quickly discover why. Harry’s meditation on the meaning of bullshit can be read in one sitting, but the ideas have staying power. After you read Harry’s book, you start to see bullshit everywhere and recognize it’s uniquely pernicious effects on whatever’s left of the public square. Harry wrote his book long before modern social media and AI-generated slop. He was unbelievably prescient, making On Bullshit required reading for today. Harry sadly passed in 2023 at 94 years old, but his ideas live on. In this series, we’ll speak with scholars whose lives and work have been influenced by Harry and his seminal book.

To kick things off, I’ll be speaking with Pamela Hieronymi, one of Harry’s former students. Pamela is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA and a leading scholar in the field of moral philosophy. Like Harry, her work has resonated outside the academy. She served as an advisor on the sitcom, The Good Place, which brought philosophical concepts like the trolley problem to a mainstream audience. For the first episode in the series, Pamela will introduce readers to both the book and the man who wrote it. In subsequent episodes, I’ll speak with other scholars who explore Harry’s notion of bullshit in politics, science, and more. If you haven’t read On Bullshit, you should preorder the anniversary edition, which is set to release on August 5th. Now, let’s have ourselves a bull session.

Pamela Hieronymi is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Watch her lecture on the blame game.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

New Yorker magazine covers capture something both true and elusive about the city, by distilling New York in single images, so that the place feels simultaneously familiar and out of reach.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Visit Gretchen's website to learn more about Gretchen's best-selling books, products from The Happiness Project Collection, and the Happier app.

Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Presented by James Crawford, Take Four Books, speaks to the award-winning short story writer Wendy Erskine about her first novel - The Benefactors - and explores its connections to three other literary works. The Benefactors is a polyphonic immersion into modern day Belfast and follows the events surrounding a teenage house party. Three mothers close ranks against the girl who is accusing their sons of sexual assault. For her three influencing texts Wendy chose: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (2008); Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich (1997); and This Is The Place To Be, by Lara Pawson (2016).

The supporting contributor for this episode was the journalist, writer, and author of Dance Your Way Home, Emma Warren.

Producer: Dom Howell

Victoria Moul has been reading and memorising poetry since she was nine. She recites it at the dentist (‘Aubade’, rather alarmingly) and she recited poems all through her labours when she gave birth. We talked about all sorts of poetry, from ancient to living poets. What I really admire about Victoria is how at ease she is with poems across many centuries and how she can read as a scholar and with great personal emotion. Her Substack Horace & friends is one of my favourites. For the last quarter of this interview, Victoria recited poems which we discussed very briefly, mostly from memory. She must know hundreds by heart.

We talked about

* Horace

* Shakespeare

* Ovid

* Claudian

* Prudentius

* Homer

* Pindar

* Sophocles

* George Herbert

* John Milton

* Ben Jonson

* Thomas Hardy

* W. H. Auden

* Keith Douglas

* A. E. Housman

* Basil Bunting

* Ezra Pound

* François de Malherbe

* Philip Gross

* Chris Childers (anthologist)

* Michael Schmidt (anthologist)

* Donald Davie

* Gillian Allnutt

* Marcel Proust

* Diana Wynne Jones

Han Ong reads his story “Happy Days,” from the June 30, 2025, issue of the magazine. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Prize, Ong is the author of more than a dozen plays and two novels, “Fixer Chao” and “The Disinherited.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Descartes’ “provisional” morality and his views on free will and virtue.

“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the city had given it to artists and designers and said, You can live there, don’t burn it down. And so they carved out these incredibly beautiful spaces for themselves. But this was before the tech revolution, when the Mission was still kind of wild and free, and it wasn’t all the glass cubes and people in tech. It was a great city to live in then. There was a kind of freedom there. Certainly compared to what I’d come from. My good fortune was that I wasn’t around a lot of hippies giving acid to two-year-olds. The book takes place during the Vietnam War. We went out and protested McNamara. My husband was the one who scaled the Pentagon, the walls of the Pentagon. We were very idealistic. Maybe unrealistically idealistic, but hey, I’ll take it.”

The good, the bad, and the beautiful

What is beauty? Why are we so drawn to it? And should we be - or is it a distraction?

The philosophy of aesthetics and beauty has a long and fascinating history. Over the millennia, while we mostly agree on the essential nature of this ephemeral thing, "beauty", we disagree on the reasons why it is important, on its very definition, and sometimes if we should value it at all. Join our four diverse speakers - Nietzschean philosopher Babette Babich, mathematician Paul Ernest, Professor of English and World Literatures Ankhi Mukherjee, and journalist and best-selling author Sarah Wilson - as they dive into the notion of beauty and, mostly, defend it from their different perspectives.

What do you think - how important is beauty? Email us at [email protected] with your thoughts or questions on the episode!

To witness such topics discussed live buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/

And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/

You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.