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Presenter James Crawford speaks to award‑winning American author Elizabeth Strout - winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a two‑time Booker Prize nominee - about her new book The Things We Never Say and its three key literary influences.

In Elizabeth's latest novel, we are taken to the New England coast, where we follow the life of history teacher Artie Dam, who is struggling to cope with the way the modern world is changing around him.

Elizabeth’s three influences are The Stories of William Trevor by William Trevor (1983), Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925), and Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872).

Producer: Rachael O’Neill

Bryan Washington reads his story “Gatekeeping,” from the July 20, 2026, issue of the magazine. Washington is the author of four works of fiction, including “Memorial,” “Family Meal,” and “Palaver,” which won the L.A. Times Book Prize in 2025.

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What Am I, A Deer?, Polly Barton’s debut novel, takes on the vagaries of translation – linguistic translation, self-translation, and reinvention – which she’s previously explored in the much-loved Fifty Sounds, also published by Fitzcarraldo. ‘The protagonist of What Am I, A Deer? finds herself both Schrödinger and his cat on entering the Frankfurt tram, the office, and the ‘black box’ of the karaoke booth; inside and outside simultaneously, trying to figure out whether she exists and in a state of tingling oscillation’, writes Jen Calleja. ‘Polly Barton is the maestra of controlled dissolution.’

You can buy a copy of What Am I, A Deer? from the London Review Bookshop.

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The FIFA president grew up in Switzerland as part of an Italian migrant family, and fell in love with football and its administration when he was just a teenager.

Having qualified as a football lawyer and making a name for himself at the European football federation UEFA, Infantino ended up perfectly positioned to take over the presidency of the world body FIFA after the organisation was mired in corruption charges. His promise to give the member associations double the money sealed his bid.

He’s now been president for over 10 years and has overseen FIFA’s expansion, with World Cups in Qatar, Russia and now North America; the growth of the women’s game; more competitions; more controversy - and of course more money.

This week, his love affair with Donald Trump has been thrust into the spotlight after US player Folarin Balogun’s red card was suspended following Trump's appeal to Infantino. Will this latest controversy prove his undoing, or is it just another chapter in a new brazen age?

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Already this summer, there have been huge wildfires in the Southwest and Great Plains and an extraordinary heat wave in Europe, as the world stares down the barrel of a powerful El Niño. Climate change is accelerating, and yet climate politics right now is in disarray.

But something else is happening, too. Advances in clean energy technology mean it is now possible to build a world of energy abundance that was the stuff of dreams just a few years ago. That means a new kind of climate politics is possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but also can present decarbonization as a path to somewhere better, where everyone has more, not less.

Bill McKibben is one of the best people at articulating that vision. He’s a founder of the climate action groups 350.org and Third Act, and he’s been at the vanguard of the climate movement for decades. His 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” is considered the first book on global warming written for a general audience. His latest book, published last year, is “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.”

Mentioned:

“Global Electricity Review 2026” by Ember

The End of Nature by Bill McKibben

“The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men,” The Ezra Klein Show with Helen Lewis

“We’re All Living in the ‘Mirror World’ Now,” The Ezra Klein Show with Naomi Klein

Book Recommendations:

The Glorians by Terry Tempest Williams

The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

The Carbon Wave by Leah C. Stokes

Brought to You By by Amy Westervelt

End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley and Marina King. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee, Dani Dillon and Julian Hackney. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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In 1916, Zurich was a beacon for refugees. Fleeing the death and destruction of World War I, artists and free-thinkers from all over Europe fled to the neutral Swiss city.

And it was here that the people who would start the art movement Dada came together. In a rare interview from 1959, held in the BBC archive, Richard Huelsenbeck describes how the group of young artists and pacifists shared a despair about the war and a disgust for bourgeois values.

At the Cabaret Voltaire, he and the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara, the French sculptor Jean Arp and Romanian-born artist Marcel Janco experimented. Performances were known for their spontaneity, chance and absurdity - a departure from the conventional which confronted audiences. It was the beginning of an aesthetic which would spread across Europe and to New York City, eventually influencing Surrealism and later punk. This episode is produced and presented by Josephine McDermott.

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

For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.

We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines’ life and Omar Sharif’s legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.

You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives’ ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.

This episode has been updated since its original broadcast to clarify the national origins of some artists.

(Photo: Scene from the Dadaist film Ballet Mécanique, 1924 from the Collection of Musée national d'art moderne, Paris. Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images.)

Our guest today is the writer, columnist and broadcaster Caitlin Moran. Caitlin talks to Gyles about her unusual childhood in Wolverhampton, homeschooled by a father who was a frustrated rock star and a mother who looked like Mick Jagger. She talks about her parents' sex life and her dreams of escaping the Midlands. Caitlin talks about winning her first journalism prize and writing her first novel at 16. She talks about starting smoking on her first day at Melody Maker and meeting her husband. She talks about having a miscarriage and motherhood. She talks about rewilding her garden and the power of nature to heal and delight.

This is a brilliant conversation, full of entertainment, laughter, candour and insight. Our heartfelt thanks to Caitlin for it.

Caitlin's new podcast is called Outsiding, and is out now. It's highly recommended.

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We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States on the road to a new civil war?

David Blight.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, has been our guest before—on his Pulitzer-winning biography of Frederick Douglass: The Prophet of Freedom. And now he’s our biographer of the American experiment, looking ahead by looking back. The experiment, he says, is in deep, maybe critical trouble.

And here’s more from David Blight on the U.S. in crisis—this is a recent talk at the American Academy in Berlin:

The post After the Fireworks appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

On this month’s episode Nicole is joined by Tom Morris to read from and discuss his story ‘Notes on Contributors’ published in Issue 54 Volume Two of The Stinging Fly magazine.

In their conversation, Nicole and Tom talk about how writers discuss their writing routine and about the benefit of maintaining mystery and ambiguity in writing. They also discuss writing in the realm of the body rather than the realm of the intellect, trying to bring readers toward a feeling, and the importance of learning to develop and trust your own sense of taste as a writer.

Thomas Morris is the author of We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, and Open Up. His work has been rejected by The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker. Originally from Caerphilly, South Wales, he lives in Dublin, where he worked for over a decade with The Stinging Fly.

Nicole Flattery⁠⁠ is a writer and critic. Her story collection ⁠⁠Show Them A Good Time⁠⁠, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

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Each month on The Stinging Fly Podcast,  we invite writers from the latest issue of the magazine to read and discuss their work. Previous episodes of the podcast ⁠⁠can be found here⁠⁠. The podcast’s theme music is ⁠⁠‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan⁠⁠. All of ⁠⁠The Stinging Fly’s archive⁠⁠ is available to ⁠⁠subscribers.⁠

M. John Harrison returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with Adam Biles about his new novel, The End of Everything, a disaster story set in a "wrong UK" where societal collapse coincides with the arrival of an alien presence, and the strange shape-shifting "artefacts" it leaves behind.

Harrison discusses writing an "epistemological" catastrophe rather than a physical one, the decades of discipline it took to trust readers without over-explaining, and how the book's permacrisis mirrors post-2008 Britain and Brexit. He talks character-building from "bits and pieces" of real people, why he refuses to fully reveal his monsters, and how AI anxieties seeped into a book largely conceived before ChatGPT. 

Buy The End of Everything: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/anabasis-2

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MICHAEL JOHN HARRISON is the author of, among others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light), the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing) and the Goldsmiths Prize (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again). He lives in Shropshire.

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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