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Ian McMillan and poets Vona Groake, Jardel Rodrigues, Mira Rosenthal and Malgorzata Lebda bring poetry that helps us navigate storms, rivers and seas - real and metaphorical, and sound artist and musician SHHE (Su Shaw) immerses us in surprising sounds of the sea.

Vona Groake’s latest collection Infinity Pool was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize this year. She’s writer in residence at St John’s College Cambridge and the Ireland Professor of Poetry at Trinity College in Dublin. Vona chooses a 'neon line' to explore and reads her own work.

Su Shaw, who works as SHHE, is a sound artist and composer, whose music has been shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year. Su is based in Dundee – and has always been intimate with that city’s river - the River Tay. Her new album ‘THALASSA’ was produced sustainably, in keeping with her ecologically minded projects - and is is a six-part ambient work giving voice to the Mediterranean Sea.

Jardel Rodrigues is from Old Trafford in Manchester – he’s won the BBC Words First Spoken Word Poetry Competition, and he’s a titan of Manchester’s shining spoken word institution 'Young Identity'. He brings us a new commission on the theme 'How to get through'.

We hear the voice and the work of Malgorzata Lebda, a Polish poet who writes poems that reveal what flows between people and landscape. Malgorzata ran the length of the longest river in Poland, the Vischula – driven by her sense of how threatened our rivers are, a kind of poetry activism.

Produced by Faith Lawrence

In Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo) Brian Dillon explores what learning meant to its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life. Dillon was in conversation with writer Olivia Laing, author of The Silver Book.

You can buy a copy of Ambivalence ⁠from the London Review Bookshop⁠.

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On "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2008). Strawson argues that physicalism should not just be taken as matter in motion. Instead, the physical is a broader category that includes not just chairs and molecules, but also "my experience of red." Yet he's not trying to say that experiences are just brain states; they clearly include qualia (what it's like to experience red). And he's also not just trying to solve the problem by redefining "physical" to include "mental" (though he is doing that).

Instead, he's claiming that we have no warrant to claim that the properties of the physical are exhausted by what third-person science can investigate, and that we can't solve the mind-body problem unless we posit that (at least some) physical objects have a mental aspect. Sounds like Spinoza to us!

Subscribe to Closereads (and get a link to this text to read along) at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy; follow us there via the free tier to part two and many other episodes like this one ad free, or pay us to get parts 2-5 and everything else we've recorded. (Alternatively, support both PEL and Closereads at patreon.com/partiallyexaminedlife for a nice combo deal.)

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was an essayist, novelist, activist, film-maker, philosopher and teacher. On March 16, 2000, while on tour for what would be her final novel, “In America,” she was interviewed by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff in San Francisco.

From Wikipedia: “Among her best known works are  On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover, and In America.”

From Wikipedia: “Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Although her essays and speeches sometimes drew controversy, she has been described as “one of the most influential critics of her generation.”

In her final four years after this interview, Susan Sontag published a long essay, Regarding the Pain of Others in 2003, concerning the visual representation of war and violence. Following her death, a collection of essays and speeches was published in 2007, and her journals and notebooks were published in two volumes, in 2008 and 2012. She died of leukemia on December 28, 2004 at the age of 71. Her illness and death were chronicled in the book Swimming in a Sea of Death by her son David Rieff. Am award-winning 2014 documentary on her life, Regarding Susan Sontag, is now available on Kanopy, the streaming app available free through your local library.

This interview and was digitized and re-edited in 2006 by Richard Wolinsky and has not been aired in thirteen years. This podcast was originally posted on July 19, 2019.

The post From the Archive: Susan Sontag (1933-2004) appeared first on KPFA.

Sheila Heti reads her story “Earthly Delights,” from the August 3, 2026, issue of the magazine. Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novel “Pure Colour,” which won the Governor General’s Award in 2022, and “Alphabetical Diaries,” which was published in 2024.

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This week, the State Department published a report accusing Cuba of being the “capital of 21st-century communism,” and of plotting an anti-American revolution. On this week’s On the Media, why the Trump administration can’t stop invoking Cuba as its “communist” bogeyman. Plus, hear from a former flight attendant turned independent journalist, who is doggedly covering ICE’s removal flights.

[01:00]  Brooke Gladstone looks at how President Trump and his allies are using dehumanizing language and the specter of communism — seemingly inspired by far right provocateur Jack Posobiec — to try to discredit all Democrats leading up to the midterm elections. Gil Duran, journalist and author of The Nerd Reich, explains the connection. 

[08:47] The State Department released a report this week about the threat that Cuba poses to the United States, listing everyone from Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, journalist Amy Goodman, to a co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s as agents of Cuban influence. Brooke sits down with Michael J. Bustamante, associate professor of Cuban and Cuban-American history at the University of Miami, to talk about the cherry-picked historical scholarship in the report, and the role that the Cuba bogeyman plays in American politics today.

[31:25] Micah Loewinger speaks with Gillian Brockell, independent journalist and former flight attendant who is covering ICE flights and third-country removals. Brockell explains why all ICE flights, domestic and international, are unsafe, and how the Trump administration is trying to skirt around judges’ orders by sending asylum seekers to countries, often far-flung, that they didn’t come from.    

Further reading / watching:

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GWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single self-explanatory idea. Whether or not he succeeded is an interesting question (spoiler: he didn't), but more interesting is the question of why philosophy has become so much less ambitious since then, and what we can learn from Hegel today.

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

Scott Dikkers is the former editor-in-chief of The Onion, the site that brought news satire to the internet.

Before the episode, I went up to Scott and said, “I have one goal for this: I want to start writing funny. You know how to do it. Can you teach me everything you've learned?"

He’s been doing this for decades, so he was able to take me by the hand and show me what he learned, very concretely.

You're obviously not going to framework your way to becoming the next George Carlin, but there are universal principles of comedy that work in any kind of writing, whether it's for a group chat or when you are talking with friends on a Saturday night at the bar. And Scott is about to teach us how to do it.

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Joanna Preston joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about her poetry and writing life. An Australian-born, New Zealand-based poet, editor, and creative writing tutor, Joanna is the author of The Summer King (winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award and Mary Gilmore Award) and Tumble (winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry). She appears in the Invented Forms section of our Summer 2026 issue, sharing her "decima."

Journalists Chloe Hadjimatheou and Sarah Dadouch join Faisal Al Yafai on the podcast to discuss what the story of former Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad reveals about power and the people who wield it, and their new podcast series “We Call Her Emma.”

Produced by Finbar Anderson