Host Meg Wolitzer presents two stories by the extraordinary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami that demonstrate the breadth of his emotional imagination over a career of 35 years.  In an early story, “The Window,” a professional letter-writer recalls an intimate encounter with a woman, and a hamburger steak.  The reader is Mike Doyle.  In the later story, “Kahu,” read by Jennifer Ikeda, a woman goes on a blind date, only to be blindsided. Both stories were recorded at the Japan Society in New York City, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Selected Shorts.

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Robert Mac is on the show today to teach us what he's learned from great comics like Jerry Seinfeld and Mitch Hedberg. Robert has been doing stand up for more than a decade, and I wanted to know what he's learned about how to be funny, how to tell a good story.

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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.

Former NSW Premier and former Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Bob Carr and his wife Helena were almost inseparable. When she suddenly died, while they were in Vienna on an opera and galleries tour of Europe, Bob was bereft. 

Back in Sydney, he took to walking the streets late at night.

His memoir 'Bring back yesterday' pays tribute to Helena, born to Chinese and Tamil parents in Taiping. Bob Carr reflects on their life together, and on the work and politics that they both, and separately, have been involved in.

• Guest: Bob Carr
• Producers: David Marr/Ann Arnold

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the countless venues across the Roman Empire which for over five hundred years drew the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the Emperors. The shows there delighted the masses who knew, no matter how low their place in society, they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts to be slaughtered. Some of the Roman elites were disgusted, seeing this popular entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Moral degradation was a less immediate concern though than the overspill of violence. There was a constant threat of gladiators being used as a private army and while those of the elite wealthy enough to stage the shows hoped to win great prestige, they risked disappointing a crowd which could quickly become a mob and turn on them.

With

Kathleen Coleman

John Pearce

And

Matthew Nicholls

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993)

Roger Dunkle, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Pearson, 2008)

Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 1997)

A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2006)

Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (Profile, 2005)

Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003)

Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000)

Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998)

F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport (Souvenir, 2004)

Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)

K. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre from its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (Routledge, 1992)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time follows the development of a self. The narrator grows up in Combray, in the seaside town of Balbec, in Paris, and resolves to become a writer. But that narrative also encompasses so much else, from historical crises to philosophical riffs to self-doubts.

Proust scholar Joshua Landy points out that Proust is “absolutely laying traps for the reader. He's tempting the reader into thinking it's a memoir at times. And he's tempting the reader to think that it's a treatise, that all the things that this narrator says can be taken at face value—you can take them to the bank, it's the gospel truth, this is what Proust believes. In fact, that's not the case.”

As Hannah Freed-Thall, a scholar of Proust at NYU, says: “I try to approach this text with a certain humility . . . I will never make an argument that is true for the entirety of this novel. It’s just too self-contradictory.” In this episode, we talk about how multitudinous richness buzzes throughout the novel’s story of self-discovery. Along the way, you'll hear a reading from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.

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To what extent is drug addiction voluntary? In episode 162 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with philosopher Hanna Pickard about her book, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. They discuss how the “broken brain model” of addiction emerged to combat the moral model of addiction and explore the consequences of both of these models. What drives some people into addiction? What does it mean to say that addiction is a brain disease? How should responsibility and blame fit into our understanding of this condition? And how do we identify when somebody’s patterns of drug use have crossed the threshold into addiction? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about the temporality of addiction and what it means to hold an “addict identity.”

Works Discussed:

Alan Leshner, “Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters”

Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Hanna Pickard, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction

Enjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3v

Join our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/

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A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era — where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I.

It isn’t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it is close to plateauing. So what might this new era mean for our economy, our labor market and our kids?

Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude and Claude Code. His newsletter, Import AI, has been one of my go-to reads to track the capabilities of different models over the years. In this conversation, I ask him to share how he sees this moment — how the technology is changing, whether it is leading to meaningful changes in how we work and think, and how policy needs to or can change in response to any job displacement on the horizon.

Mentioned:

“Import AI” by Jack Clark

“2026: This is AGI” by Pat Grady and Sonya Huang

“Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development” by Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark

“Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’", Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Book Recommendations:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

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 Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio 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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Matthew Parris invites a fellow Radio 4 presenter into the studio to nominate a Great Life. Dr Sian Williams, who as well as a broadcaster is a counselling psychologist chooses Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund and considered by many to be the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.

Anna Freud was born in Vienna in 1895, the youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She was brought up in a city alive with pioneering culture and with a father at the forefront of new work in psychoanalysis. Although the youngest of the family, Anna had a close relationship with her father, sitting in on his psychoanalysis meetings from a young age before the conservative limitations of the time lead her into teaching. After the trauma of the 1st World War she started a nursery in VIenna that sought to help the young children of the poorest members of society. With the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 she was arrested by the Gestapo but freed. It was enough to persuade her father, who was dying of cancer, to take the family out of the country. They settled in London but Sigmund died soon after.

With the onset of war, and in a completely new environment, Anna rekindled her work with the launch of the Hampstead Nurseries. Again the aim was to provide support and help for very young children who's parents had either been killed or were away in the armed forces. The nurseries pioneered a supportive, observational system, giving children the space to express themselves in play and without the threat of punishment.

Matthew and Sian are joined by Nick Midgley, Professor of Psychological Therapies for Children and Young People in the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology at University College London as well as working at Anna Freud.

Producer; Tom Alban

I learned something surprising in law school: To a great extent, we can’t be forced to follow the law; we must decide to follow the law.

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