"Couples therapy. The words alone are enough to send many people running for the hills, but Orna Guralnik—star of Showtime's documentary series Couples Therapy—has people running to her office. Orna, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, has become a household name: she's a watchful guide for couples as they navigate intimate and sometimes agonizing discussions, and for viewers, as they watch these couples bare their souls or refuse to do so. With her beloved dog Nico on her lap, Orna explained to me how she practices listening for the unconscious, the limits and possibilities of televised therapy, and whether the psychoanalytic interview can teach even the most adversarial pairs (like warring nations) how to make peace."

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

"Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most decorated investigative reporters of her generation. She's won several National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant. Her articles draw attention to the men and women forced to do the bidding of the American security state; the third-country nationals tricked into working on military bases in Iraq; the addicts coerced into serving as informants; the victims of civil asset forfeiture. Our conversation touched on every stage of Sarah's career, from her days as a student journalist to her current directorship of Yale's investigative reporting lab. As a teacher, she helps students cultivate the relentlessness and the compassion that makes her a uniquely effective reporter."

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

"In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Shelia Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chatbots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and George, and they had wild, undisciplined opinions about art, selfhood, and God. Talking to them seemed to come naturally to Sheila: for several years, she had been the interviews editors at The Believer and her novels Motherhood and Pure Colour featured narrators who ask difficult questions of non-human entities like the I Ching or a leaf on a tree. A few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT-5, Sheila and I spoke about the role of the interview at a time when human thought and feeling are impinged by artificial intelligence and whether machines can help us to unlock the mysteries of consciousness." — Merve Emre

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

The new season of The Critic and Her Publics—The Art of the Interview—begins!

"Chana Joffe-Walt is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and a producer at This American Life. Her series on school segregation, Nice White Parents, examined how progressive Brooklyn families undermined racial integration. She regularly takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on race, labor, and education. But it was her series of conversations with men, women, and children in Gaza that made me want to begin the season with her, to explore how the interview can preserve the dignity and complexity of ordinary people in a time of genocide." — Merve Emre

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

In this final episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione series for 2025, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and publishers, who usually meet over contract negotiations, open up their books and compare bottom lines, to see who feels like they’re being short-changed, and why. Is there—or could there be—a pay structure that works for everyone? And how should the translator be compensated, when their role is still so unresolved? 

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

How do we decide which translations are better than others? 

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Adam Levy of Transit Books reveal how they evaluate books for acquisition. And, because so many of the guests on this show have served on prize juries, we compare our experiences making judgments that can seem at once arbitrary and hugely consequential. 

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

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage, to see how translators make their choices. 

But the text we’ll be examining, 1001 Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike with the Proust that we discussed in the first episode, there is not one fixed source text to work with. There were many retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, which were then written down as many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”?

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

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, we discuss the problem of English. What happens when you bring a nation’s literature into its colonizer’s language? Is it inevitably a kind of violence? Here, we look to the field of translation studies, which provides some answers—not all of them satisfying. 

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

In this episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, the translators discuss the fraught emotional condition of their work: the sense that not only is their work shameful and grotesque but that they are too, for daring to attempt it. 

Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with a binary of either making themselves invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. You’ll hear Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, talk about her vexed relationship with Orhan Pamuk and Tiffany Tsao, American-born, but of Indonesian heritage, confess the shame she felt when translating Budi Darma. All of the translators in this group, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in all cases of masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too.

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

In this second episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we explore beginnings. Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence of a text. First sentences are so often the most famous lines.  They are a place for a translator to make their mark. They dictate the voice in which the book unfolds. But has the importance of the first sentence been overly inflated?

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