The LRB Podcast

William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the new Labour government in tackling the UK's many economic challenges. They consider whether Rachel Reeves’s first budget, with its substantial tax rises, can do anything more than arrest the decline of the public finances, and what Keir Starmer hopes to achieve with his public overtures to the likes of Google and BlackRock. Will their technocratic style of government be able to survive the pressures of populist politics, or is their long-term thinking simply too long-term to bring election-winning improvements to people’s everyday lives?

Read William Davies's piece: https://lrb.me/davies4622pod

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James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine, where he spent time in Kharkiv and Kupiansk in the east of the country. In Kharkiv, he found a population living in fear not only of the Russian glide bombs falling daily on the city, but also of the increasingly ruthless activity of the Ukrainian military recruitment office, desperate to secure fresh troops to resist Russia's advances. James and Tom discuss the current state of the conflict, what a Trump presidency might mean for US policy and whether Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles could make any difference to the progress of the war.

Read James's latest report from Ukraine:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/james-meek/nobody-wants-to-hear-this

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More audio from the LRB:

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Adam Shatz is joined by Jamelle Bouie and Deborah Friedell to pick through the results and implications of Trump’s victory. The US has a booming economy of high wages and nearly full employment, yet economic discontent, particularly around inflation, has been one of the more popular explanations for the election result. As well as considering the importance of inflation, Jamelle and Deborah look at what went wrong with the Harris campaign’s big bet on abortion rights, why Republican-voting women say they feel safer under Trump and why the Democrats’ insistence that democracy was on the ballot failed to resonate with many voters.

Read Adam Tooze on the Democrats' defeat in the LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/adam-tooze/the-democrats-defeat

Read Deborah Friedell on J.D. Vance

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/deborah-friedell/short-cuts

Discover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio

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When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and genetic determinism that continues today. The battle lines were drawn in England in the late 19th century by William Bateson, who believed in fixed genetic inheritance, and W.F.R. Weldon, who argued that Mendel’s experiments revealed far more variation than Bateson and his supporters acknowledged. In this episode Lorraine Daston joins Tom to chart the development of these arguments, described in a new book by Gregory Radick, through scientific and cultural discourse over the past 150 years, and consider why the history of science has a tendency to track such controversies in antagonistic terms, often to the detriment of the science itself.

Read Lorraine's piece: https://lrb.me/dastonpod

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Close Readings

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On budget day, Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England, from the black and white squares of the ‘reckoning cloth’ to logarithmic calculating machines, as described in a new book by Jessica Marie Otis. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsmen to valuing maths as an educational discipline? Tom and Malin consider the importance of the move from Roman to Arabic numerals in this ‘quantitative transformation’ and the uses and abuses of statistics in the period.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/earlymodernmaths

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Discover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio

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In the latest issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding reviews How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainaina, one of postcolonial Africa’s great anglophone satirists. Jeremy joins Tom to talk about Wainaina’s life and work, including the title essay and his ambivalent response to its popularity (‘I went viral,’ he later said, ‘I became spam’); his reporting from South Sudan; the ‘lost chapter’ from his memoir in which he imagines coming out to his parents; and his account of travelling to Senegal to interview the musician Youssou N'Dour, a piece that Harding describes as both ‘beautifully done’ and ‘extremely funny’.

Find further reading and external links on the episode page: https://lrb.me/wainainapod

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See Hansel and Gretel at the Royal Opera House: https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/hansel-and-gretel-details

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In his third conversation looking at the crisis in the Middle East, Adam talks to Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon and the recent assassinations of Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah. They discuss the factors behind Israel’s unprecedented aggression and why, as in Gaza, it’s able to operate without restraint, not least from the Biden administration.

Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a professor of journalism at New York University.

Read Adam Shatz on the death of Nasrallah in the latest LRB.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/adam-shatz/after-nasrallah

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In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported, Yezid Sayigh talks to Adam Shatz about why he sees Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October as an inflection point both for the Palestinian movement and global history. Sayigh believes that the attacks reflected an erosion of Palestinian leadership, as well as a moral and strategic crisis. Only a new vision of Palestinian liberation, rooted in progressive ideals rather than in the ethno-religious project of Hamas, he argues, can lead to genuine Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.

Yezid Sayigh is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Read Adam Shatz on the death of Nasrallah in the latest LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/adam-shatz/after-nasrallah

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In the first of three episodes on the crisis in the Middle East, Adam Shatz is joined by Mairav Zonszein and Amjad Iraqi to discuss the experiences of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the Netanyahu government is opposed by many Israeli Jews, and increasing numbers have left the country, support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon remains high because few can imagine an alternative. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have long suffered restrictions on their democratic rights, the escalating crisis has intensified that discrimination, while stirring a deep sense of fear regarding their future. Mairav and Amjad talk to Adam about the tensions in Israeli society, not least between the government and military, and why Netanyahu has shown so little interest in the lives of the hostages still held by Hamas.

Mairav Zonszein is a journalist and Senior Israel Analyst with Crisis Group.

Amjad Iraqi is an editor at +972 Magazine and an associate fellow with Chatham House's MENA programme.

Read Adam Shatz on the death of Nasrallah:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/adam-shatz/after-nasrallah

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‘The department store is dying,’ Rosemary Hill wrote recently in the LRB, reviewing an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris on the origins of the grands magasins. She joins Tom to talk about their 19th and 20th-century heyday as cathedrals of consumerism as well as places where women could spend time away from home, and away from men, safely and respectably. She also recalls the Christmas she worked in the toy department at Selfridges, demonstrating wind-up bath toys.

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See Maddaddam at the Royal Opera House: https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/maddaddam-details

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