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The celebrated writer Daniel Mendelsohn on his acclaimed translation of Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey.

Poet Lydia Unsworth on finding inspiration for her new collection, Stay Awhile, in ring roads, shopping centres, and cooling towers.

BBC New Generation Thinker, Joe Shute, on using poetry to reconnect communities to the waterway which powered Manchester's industrial revolution - the River Irk.

Khadijah Ibrahiim discusses her choice of Neon Line for The Verb's long-running feature which asks a guest to talk about a line from a poem that shines out to them.

Presenter Ian McMillan

The bestselling author of Hamnet returns with her tenth novel - Land - which is a soaring history set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Famine.

For her three influences Maggie chose: Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea from 2002; Marie Heaney’s Over Nine Waves from 1994, which is a retelling of many of the Irish myths; and the non-fiction book, Map Of A Nation, by Rachel Hewitt from 2010.

Producer: Dominic Howell

Ben Lerner reads his story “The Readers,” from the June 29, 2026, issue of the magazine. Lerner is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including the novels “10:04,” “The Topeka School,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and “Transcription,” which came out earlier this year. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015.

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Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe is the newest disruptor in right-wing politics but the path he has taken to get there is a familiar one.

Born in Oxford in 1957 Lowe attended an elite all boys boarding school before studying for a degree in Estate Management. After university he was a commodity broker in the City and went to Japan to work in securities but when British football clubs emerged as attractive financial assets in the 1990's he became chair of Southampton after a reverse takeover. Lowe resigned in 2006 after a decade in charge – having been blamed by many fans for relegation in 2005 after 27 years in the top flight. He made a return but resigned again in 2009 as the club’s holding company went into administration.

Next he decided to try his hand at politics. In 2019 Lowe became an MEP for the Brexit Party before switching to national politics after the UK left the EU in 2020, this time for Reform UK. In 2024 he became MP for Great Yarmouth but after falling out with Reform leader Nigel Farage he became an independent MP and launched his own party, Restore Britain.

Production:

Credits:

A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed, postliterate society where we’re constantly staring at screens and evaluating one another based on metrics, as the country around us feels like it’s falling apart: That sounds like the world we live in. It’s also the world Gary Shteyngart created in his 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story.”

I’ve been thinking about the book a lot recently, especially with the rise of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular and the longevity guru Bryan Johnson, and this feeling that people are upset and agitated but grabbing at the wrong things to fix it. It feels uncannily like the experience of living inside Shteyngart’s novel.

But Shteyngart isn’t just a dystopian prophet, he’s also an expert at living well amid the world’s darkness. His forthcoming book, “The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure,” is an essay collection about his efforts to do exactly that. So I wanted to have Shteyngart on the show to understand how he predicted so many of the grimmer aspects of our present, but also how we might delight in the world’s “endless buffet of pleasure” in spite of them.

This episode contains strong language.

Note: We’re recording an "Ask Me Anything" episode soon. If you have a question, please email [email protected] using the subject like "AMA." We'd love to hear from you.

Mentioned:

“The End Point Of Viral Content” by Ryan Broderick

“How Jokes Won the Election” by Emily Nussbaum

“A Visit to Seoul Brings Our Writer Face-to-Face With the Future of Robots” by Gary Shteyngart

The Intimate City by Michael Kimmelman

“Don’t Just Take the Slow Road; Design It,” Commencement address at Wesleyan’s 194th Commencement Ceremony, Chris Murphy

Book Recommendations:

Men Like Ours by Bindu Bansinath

A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee

Motherland by Julia Ioffe

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

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary-Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. 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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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.

‘Graceland’ was an almighty gamble for Paul Simon, a costly, high-risk departure from the music he’d been making and a complex international venture. And a game-changing, worldwide triumph. When Ashley Kahn taught a course about it at New York University, Simon turned up to contribute. His book ‘Days Of Miracle And Wonder’ tells the story of what inspired the album, the way it was recorded and the global reaction when it arrived in 1986. We talk to him here about …

… the bootleg cassette of township jive that inspired the Graceland project 

… fraying relations with Art Garfunkel and Carrie Fisher

... his habit of playing unfinished tracks to people – David Byrne, Philip Glass, Neil Diamond – while singing the vocal into their ear

… the extraordinary way he apologised for the failure of One Trick Pony

… how Bakithi Kumalo’s bass solo on You Can Call Me Al is a palindrome – “first half forwards, second half reversed!”

… the advice Quincy Jones gave him about South Africa’s cultural boycott

… the key role of Roy Halee, engineer and long-time creative collaborator

... the Johannesburg sessions that “started with rhythm and worked backwards”

… Kind Of Blue, A Love Supreme, other albums that merit a book to themselves

… the details you hear in the tracks’ last seconds

… and the Grammy telecast that cemented the album’s US success.

Order copies of ‘Days of Miracle And Wonder’ here: https://geni.us/DaysofMiracleandWonder

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

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This episode is presented by Wispr Flow, a tool that turns voice notes into clear writing. I use it every day and recommend it to every writer I know. Try it for free at ref.wisprflow.ai/howiwrite

Michael Pollan is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction writers. He has been writing about food, nature, and consciousness for decades. For him, the writing process begins with a question. He finds something he's interested in and embarks on an adventure. He experiences things, talks to people, learns, and then compiles it all into a book. His writing style feels as if he's putting an arm around you, simply reporting back what he's learned and experienced, all in a very friendly way.

The adventure we discussed most in this conversation was when he bought a cow and followed it from birth to slaughter, illustrating the industrial food system's impact on meat production. Michael has taught nonfiction writing at Harvard and UC Berkeley. At the end of the interview, he said: "I just gave you an entire semester's worth of content in one hour."

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Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth has been a shop favourite ever since we discovered Long Live the Post Horn, a powerful tale about loneliness and the struggle between capitalism and humanity told through the microcosm of the Norwegian postal service.

Hjorth is in conversation with Catherine Taylor to discuss Repetition (Verso), her sixth novel to be published in English, translated by her indefatigable champion Charlotte Barslund. As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to re-examine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.

Catherine Taylor is a writer and critic and the former deputy director of English PEN. Her first book, The Stirrings, won the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize for memoir and life-writing.

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Christopher Sykes, author of Hockney: The Biography, tells Harry Mount what the late, great painter was really like and why his pictures were quite so captivating.

This week's podcast is kindly sponsored by Baillie Gifford, Actual Investors, who take a long-term approach to investing in exceptional companies.