The Independent Scholar

By Julia Murphy

A daily podcast covering the new Arts and Letters.... more

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FAQs about The Independent Scholar:

How many episodes does The Independent Scholar have?

The podcast currently has 15 episodes available.

The Independent Scholar episodes:

May 05, 2026The Independent Scholar - May 5, 2026
In this week's issue:
ARCs of R.F. Kuang's next novel trigger a backlash over two pages featuring an Israeli pianist — and a viral thread arguing the real problem is that readers no longer understand what fiction is for
A new Hebrew press in Berlin, named after Herzl's utopian novel, argues that the State of Israel doesn't own the Hebrew language — and is bringing that argument to American bookstores in September
~140 workers at the University of Chicago Press have formed the UCP Workers Guild
Leila Slimani at the Prado on the obsession with being right; Gustavo Gutiérrez on why poverty is, for theology, an act of love
Into it we go.
...more
17min
May 04, 2026The Independent Scholar - May 4, 2026
In this week's issue:
How the American right invented "Cultural Marxism" — and why a new book says the Frankfurt School had almost nothing to do with it
A publisher commissions a crisis report about children not reading, then sells them the cure
Argentina's most powerful literary agent telling the Buenos Aires Book Fair that publishers now print twice as many books as they can sell
Michael Wood's elegy for Julian Barnes — one of the LRB's finest critics writing about one of England's finest novelists
A linguist who spent 33 years preserving a dying American dialect is hanging up his tape recorder
Let's get into it.
...more
17min
May 03, 2026The Independent Scholar - May 3, 2026
In this week's issue:
Pre-publication Salinger letters surface at the New York antiquarian book fair — what he asked his editor to hide from reviewers
Siri Hustvedt's memoir of her 43-year marriage to Paul Auster, including 35 pages of his unfinished final writing
A London-based independent press, African-owned and Black and woman-led, lands on the Women's Prize shortlist for the first time in 30 years
Andrea Long Chu's Authority in paperback — and her charge that Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith are guilty of "complacent humanism"
An essay arguing that literate culture has become a threatened subculture in a world now dominated by video and audio
Worth your Sunday morning.
...more
18min
May 01, 2026The Independent Scholar - May 1, 2026
In this week's issue:
Josh Kline's essay on why NYC real estate has made non-commercial art structurally impossible — and why it went viral in October magazine
A third Elsevier editor quietly removed mid-term, and the citation-count J-curve that gave it away
Mrs Justice Lieven overturns a £585,000 fine and finds the regulator had "closed its mind" before the investigation began
Grand Central Publishing reprints the one Octavia Butler novel she spent her career suppressing
Three Tongan scholar-artists and a bamboo nose flute the world had nearly forgotten
Read on.
...more
18min
April 30, 2026The Independent Scholar - April 30, 2026
In this week's issue:
A 1943 novella that imagined the Holocaust before it fully happened — lost for decades, now translated into English for the first time
Clare Bucknell reviews a new cultural history of pedantry in the New York Review of Books, and the implications for intellectual life are weirder than you'd expect
A Georgetown philosopher on why the UN's landmark March 2026 resolution on the transatlantic slave trade finally matters — and what reparations actually require
UNT shuts down a Chicano artist's solo exhibition mid-run, and faculty and students push back
The Vatican weighs in on artificial intelligence, and it is more philosophically serious than you might think
On with it.
...more
17min
April 29, 2026The Independent Scholar - April 29, 2026
In this week's issue:
France's most storied independent bookshop chain — 16 stores, 140 years old, 500 employees — in court-supervised reorganization and betting its survival on used books
Justin Garson's new history of how NIMH psychiatrists used LSD and amphetamines to induce schizophrenia in human subjects, and what it did to American psychiatry
Deborah Lutz's first full Emily Brontë biography in over twenty years, drawing on previously inaccessible manuscripts to present a very different Brontë than the legend
A GWU Illiberalism Studies Program essay tracing how a little-known Argentine writer became the dominant intellectual of the transnational Spanish-speaking radical right
Here we go.
...more
16min
April 28, 2026The Independent Scholar - April 28, 2026
In this week's issue:
Luke Dunne's LARB tribute to Alexander Kluge pushes back against the somber-sage obituary and recovers the flamboyant, sentimental filmmaker-theorist who refused moral seriousness
Romila Thapar at 94 — the doyenne of Indian historiography, her career-long battle against Hindutva revisionism, and a Psyche portrait that opens with grief
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour asks why there is no redemption in the Arabic novel — and argues the question implicates far more than literary taste
Taylor Lorenz ran a pangram analysis across the top 25 Substack bestsellers in every category to find out how much of the platform is actually written by AI
Plenty here. Dig in.
...more
16min
April 27, 2026The Independent Scholar - April 27, 2026
In this week's issue:
42 Jewish authors and the institutional politics of the Jewish Book Council
Arna Bontemps and the forgotten infrastructure holding Black literary memory together
Whether "Certified Human" will become a meaningful literary category in the age of AI
A new literary magazine, a new city, and a fight over whether Toronto even has a literary identity
All worth your time. Let's get into it.
...more
16min
April 26, 2026The Independent Scholar - April 26, 2026
In this week's issue:
A university press pulps 5,000 copies of an Indigenous children's book — not because of anything in the book, but because of its illustrator's Substack
Peter J. Carroll, the man Robert Anton Wilson called the most important writer on Magick since Crowley, died unexpectedly at 73 — announced only via his publisher's social channels
Coco Fusco on why Wifredo Lam's synthesis of Afro-Cuban religion and Surrealism is one of the twentieth century's most underrated critical frameworks
Rohmer's entire filmography, reread as a map of philosophical problems — with Le Rayon Vert as the unlikely centerpiece
Here we go.
...more
18min
April 25, 2026The Independent Scholar - April 25, 2026
In this week's issue:
Wallace Stegner, a fellowship, and the bluntest career advice in American literary history
Martha Nussbaum's new OUP book staking democratic freedom on what opera does to the emotions
A North Carolina county that dissolved its entire library board rather than keep a children's book on the shelf
A French feminist philosopher's reckoning with the Pelicot trial, now reaching German readers
Read on.
...more
16min

FAQs about The Independent Scholar:

How many episodes does The Independent Scholar have?

The podcast currently has 15 episodes available.