The Intellectual

In this episode, we discuss the aesthetic philosophy of the so-called “Dean of the Harlem Renaissance”, Alain Locke. Locke thought art had a central role to play in the social emancipation of Black Americans. It is through art that the social consciousness of society can mature into becoming genuinely pluralist. However, not just any art will do.  We focus on why he insists there must be a strict separation between art and propaganda, how he thought poetry and drama could develop the cultural group life of black people, and why he centered the folk, or everyday people, as genuine sources of beauty and truth. Along the way we ask whether Locke’s search for a black modern aesthetic is still possible in a world where the aesthetic values around race reduce everything to moralism or didacticism. But it’s not all doom and gloom: Drake gets a positive shout out! So anything is possible.

leftofphilosophy.com

References: 

Alain Locke, The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings, edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart (New York: Penguin, 2022).

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016).

Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018).

Justin Phillip Reed, The Malevolent Volume (Coffee House Press, 2020).

Donika Kelly, The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name.

Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod

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Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin argued that organisms do not adapt to their environments, but rather that organisms and environments co-evolve and construct one another. Two new books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series take up this decree in bold, imaginative ways: The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI by Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek; and Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by Jonathan Basile. Here, series editor Cary Wolfe brings all three authors together into a vastly fascinating conversation about experimental biology and theoretical biology; construction and deconstruction; language and interpretation; life sciences and living systems; technoscience and philosophy; and their real-world entanglements.

Cary Wolfe is founding director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory and Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor Emeritus of English at Rice University and fellow at the Berggruen Institute. He is editor of the Posthumanities series at University of Minnesota Press and author of several books, including Jagged Ontologies; Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations; and What Is Posthumanism?

Jonathan Basile is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto. He is author of Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution; Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality and Virality Vitality.

Giuseppe Longo is Research Director Emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in France and the author or coauthor of five books and more than one hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Adam Nocek is associate professor of the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies at Arizona State University. He is coauthor of The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI, coeditor of The Lure of Whitehead, and author of Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Richard Levins

Richard Lewontin

Jean Lassègue

Jacques Derrida

Charles Darwin

Alan Turing

Erwin Schrödinger

Conrad Hal Waddington

James Watson and Francis Crick

Evelyn Fox Keller

Kurt Gödel 

François Jacob

William C. Wimsatt

Mary Jane West-Eberhard

Henri Poincaré

Jennifer Doudna

Charles Darwin

Watson and Crick

Galileo Galilei

Friedrich Nietzsche

Carlos Sonnenschein
Ana Soto

Alfred North Whitenead

Ernst Cassirer

Melinda E. Cooper / Life as Surplus

Philip Mirowski

J. Craig Venter

Stuart Kauffman

Natural Lection and The Organism Is a Theory are available in the Posthumanities series from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Naza, a film by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features interviews with 24 members of elite intelligence units in the Israeli military describing the mechanics of carrying out remote, indiscriminate mass killing in Gaza. Since news spread of a 25-minute standing ovation for the film at the Venice Film Festival, it has provoked intense debate, with some Palestinians expressing criticism of the way that Israelis’ confessions have made the genocide more “real” in the West than Palestinians’ own testimony. Meanwhile, in Israel, the film has elicited disturbing incitement against the filmmakers (who currently remain abroad), and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship.

What is the unique function of cinema focused on the perpetrators of genocide? How do we understand the concept of “evil” in listening to the voices of the murderers? And can these testimonies provoke a reckoning within global Jewry? To discuss these questions, Arielle Angel speaks with two filmmakers: Rami Younis, Palestinian journalist and co-director of the film Lyd, about the city in historic Palestine, now in the south of Israel; and Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, about the Indonesian genocide.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Links and Further Reading

Naza, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous

Lyd, directed by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland

“Gaza before and after: New Google Maps imagery shows destruction of the Strip,” José A. Álvarez and Anna Navarro, El País

Mosab Abu Toha’s post on X

“‘NAZA’ is forcing Israelis to reflect. But we Palestinians are not your mirror,” Ayat Abou Shmeiss, +972 Magazine

“The moment a human life becomes ‘collateral damage,’” Mahmoud Mushtaha, +972 Magazine

Mairav Zonszein post on X

“Palestinian Suffering Must Pass Through an Israeli Voice to Be Heard,” Hanin Majadli, Haaretz

Rami Younis’s interview with Hany Abu Assad at Palestine Cinema

“Watching 'NAZA' Shocked Me. So Did What Its Creators Left Out,” Raviv Drucker, Haaretz

Raviv Drucker interviewing Yuval Abraham

“'It hurts me' - Guardiola vows to speak up on conflicts,” Shamoon Hafez, BBC

“‘Violent and baseless raid’: Human rights group demands probe of police over Umm el-Fahm wedding,” Yoav Etiel, The Jerusalem Post

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Transcript forthcoming.

A conversation with Peter Verovsek about his recent book "Juergen Habermas: Public Intellectual and Engaged Critical Theorist" (Columbia UP).

As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’.

Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod

From the LRB

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

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From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026)illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

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Babylon has a PR problem, and it's 2,600 years in the making.

The Bible remembers it as the ultimate city of sin, the place that crushed Jerusalem and dragged the Jewish people into exile. But if you look beyond this chapter, you find history's first true megacity. An ancient metropolis so influential that even the empires that conquered it couldn't resist becoming Babylonian themselves.

Dan sits down with historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, author of 'Babylon: The Mother of All Cities', to hear all about this ancient superpower.

Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson.

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This week we're sharing a conversation with Clare Follman, a writer, activist and gardener with a masters in environmental science about her 2026 AK Press book, Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong. The conversation covers questions of ecological balance, belonging, linguistic clarity and the stories we tell about our relationship to the rest of nature.

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• TFSR by The Willows Whisper