The manosphere, Emily Witt writes in a recent piece for the LRB, is the ‘online network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels’ whose popularity has exploded in the last fifteen years. Perceiving themselves as an underclass disenfranchised by feminism, men are increasingly turning to misogynistic content to gain a sense of control over their lives.

Beyond the internet, the rhetoric of the manosphere has reached the highest levels of the US government, as well as sparking a series of violent misogynistic crimes. Emily Witt joins Malin Hay to discuss what makes the manosphere appealing to young men, and what can be done about it.

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

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When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Following the publication of a new collection of Graeber’s essays, Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey his thought, ranging from the theories of power Graeber developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) challenging the orthodox view of how egalitarian and hierarchical societies developed over the past thirty thousand years.

 Richard Seymour is a writer and theorist whose books include Disaster Nationalism and The Twittering Machine.

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Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and times of Enzo Ferrari. In this episode, they discuss the ways F1 has changed over the years (not least how it’s become safer), what it’s like to drive a ‘regular’ Ferrari, the extreme demands of handling an F1 vehicle, and why the personalities of the people behind the cars —the people who drive them, manufacture them, live for them and, in some cases, die in them — matter so much.

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'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland.

In this extended extract from Novel Approaches, a Close Readings series from the LRB, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make Our Mutual Friend one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels.

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As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently in the LRB: ‘obsessive focus, epic self-belief’. Edmund – whose son is a rising star on the London under-nine circuit – joins Tom to discuss four recent books about the so-called golden generation of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray, what it took for them to get to the summit of the game, and what happens to players who never manage to break into the top hundred. They also talk about the more recent rivalry between Sinner and Alcaraz, and why Djokovic thinks a slice of bread is like kryptonite.

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With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. When Donald Trump was spotted cheating recently on a course in Scotland, it was recognised by enthusiasts and sportswriters as a major violation in a game traditionally based on self-policing and high principles.

David Trotter joins Tom, a non-golfer, to explain why golf is the favoured sport of US presidents, the role that fantasy plays on the fairway, and why Wodehouse believed that ‘to find a man’s character, play golf with him’.

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Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year

In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book.

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The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled environment for more than a year, and found evidence for the same anxieties sparked by their urban cousins: overpopulation and an ensuing ‘behavioural sink’.

Jon Day joins Tom to discuss lab rats, street rats and the ‘rat in the head’. They explore the reasons many found Calhoun’s rat utopias compelling, and why his conclusions do both rats and humans a grave disservice.

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Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany. When General Pinochet was himself arrested in London in 1998 under an international warrant issued by a Spanish judge, the British government returned him to Chile on medical grounds.

In this episode, Andy Beckett, the author of Pinochet in Piccadilly, joins Tom to talk about these two cases of impunity, the subjects of a recent book by Philippe Sands. They also consider why the democratic government of Salvador Allende that Pinochet overthrew in 1973 has been a touchstone for the international left in the decades since, and whether something similar to Pinochet's coup could have happened in the UK.

Find Andy’s article and further reading on the episode page:

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Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently over, Adam Shatz talks to Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Malley, a former lead negotiator for the US in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, about why the war came about and what it means for the region. With Bajoghli, Adam looks at the way the war has been seen by the regime’s supporters and detractors, and the effects on the Iranian population of Israel’s widespread infiltration of the country. With Malley, he considers the events that paved the way for Israel’s attack and why America’s bombing of the nuclear facility at Fordow will probably not spur Iran to accelerate its nuclear programme.

Further reading in the LRB:

Tom Stevenson: Trump's Midnight Hammer

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Tareq Baconi: Gaza under Siege

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