In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in Latin America. Yet in this case, Trump’s justifications for the action made no mention of democracy, but cited, among other things, migration, narco-terrorism and oil. In this episode, James is joined by historian Greg Grandin to discuss what the intervention reveals about Trump’s intentions in the region and his wider foreign policy, and why, as in the past, such adventures will ultimately expose the limits of US power.

Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠

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‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’

On this episode of the podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies such as Nvidia and OpenAI, the reasons ‘artificial intelligence’ is a misnomer, the harms that large language models can cause and why you shouldn’t rely on them for advice in the kitchen.

From the LRB

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In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on. Tom and Tom discuss the machinery – narrative, theoretical, economic, psychological and literal (those windmills) – which underpins Cervantes’ masterpiece.

This is a bonus episode from the Close Readings series. To listen to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Karl Miller on ‘Don Quixote’:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n03/karl-miller/andante-capriccioso⁠

Michael Wood: Crazy Don

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n15/michael-wood/crazy-don⁠

Gabriel Josipovici on Cervantes’ life:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n05/gabriel-josipovici/the-hard-life-and-poor-best-of-cervantes⁠

Robin Chapman: Cervantics

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n16/robin-chapman/cervantics⁠

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control.

In this long extract from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

AUDIO GIFTS

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Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a second novel to follow ‘Wuthering Heights’, but if she was, it has been lost, and it has been suggested, though never proved, that her sister Charlotte might have destroyed it. But what could possibly be in that lost novel, Lockwood wondered, that was worse, more unacceptable, than what we find in ‘Wuthering Heights’?

To mark the anniversary, we’re releasing the full version of this episode from the Close Readings series ‘Novel Approaches’. David Trotter and Patricia Lockwood join Thomas Jones to discuss Brontë’s only surviving novel, one Trotter describes as ‘completely amoral’.

Readings by Alex Colley

Give a gift subscription to Close Readings for Christmas: https://lrb.me/audiogifts

From the LRB

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For a century, Judy Garland’s joyous and vulnerable singing voice has captivated audiences at the theatre, over the airwaves and in the cinema. Camille Paglia wrote of her that she ‘became an emblematic personality of her time, into whom the mass audience projected its hopes and disappointments’. Bee Wilson joins Malin Hay to discuss Garland’s years at MGM Studios, where she was mistreated and overworked by her employers but also made some of her best pictures, growing from a contract player into a star. They discuss whether Garland’s work at MGM was worth the pain it caused her, who her greatest collaborators were, and who now owns her story.

Listen to Bee read her pieces in the audiobook Complicated Women, which includes an introductory conversation between Bee and Malin: https://lrb.me/audiobookspod

From the LRB

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The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi Sunak’s government, the crossings of ‘small boats’ over the English Channel and the use of ‘asylum hotels’ have become a focal point for protest, violence and escalating rhetoric, leading most recently to significant changes in the migration system proposed by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. To assess these changes and explain how Britain’s asylum system works, James is joined by Colin Yeo, a barrister and author of Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System, and Nicola Kelly, a former Home Office civil servant and author of Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All.

Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠

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Fatma Hassona was a Palestinian photographer from Gaza City who was killed with her family by an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. A year earlier, the Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi began recording video conversations with Hassona about her life and work under Israeli bombardment, which became the film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. In this episode, Adam Shatz talks to Farsi about the process of making the film, the connection she formed with Hassona, and the practical and ethical challenges of documenting Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its people.

From the LRB

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We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year:

‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests

‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith

‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill and guests

Bonus Series: 'The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones

Episodes will appear on Monday every week, with a new episode from each series appearing every four weeks. Episodes from our bonus series, ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, will come out every couple of months, either as extra episodes or live events: look out for announcements!

If you're not already subscribed to Close Readings, sign up for just £4.99/month or £49.99/year to listen to these series plus all our past series in full:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/crintro2026apple⁠

Spotify and other podcast apps:  ⁠https://lrb.me/crintro2026sc⁠

Here are the works covered in each series:

‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests

Flaubert, ‘Madame Bovary’

Dostoevsky, ‘Notes from Underground’

Stories by Anton Chekhov

Tolstoy, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’

Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’

Woolf, ‘Mrs Dalloway’

Rhys, ‘Voyage in the Dark’

Bellow, ‘Seize The Day’

Nabokov, ‘Pnin’

Spark, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’

Sharma, ‘Family Life’

Stories by Lydia Davis

Riley, ‘My Phantoms’

‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith

Carson, ‘Silent Spring’

Schlanger, ‘The Light Eaters’

Czerski, ‘The Blue Machine’

Lovelock, ‘Gaia’

MacFarlane, ‘Is a River Alive?’

Kimmerer, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’

Raboteau, ‘Lessons for Survival’

Moore and Roberts, ‘The Rise of Ecofascism’

Riofrancos, ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’

And more TBD

‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’

Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’

Milton, Book 9 of ‘Paradise Lost’

Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’

Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’

Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ 

Byron, ‘Childe Roland’

Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’

Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’

H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’

Set, ‘The Golden Gate’

Carson, ‘Autobiography of Red and ‘Red Doc>’ 

‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill

Each episode will cover a period of London’s history and begin with a piece of writing. The first episode, on Roman London, will start with an extract from Dio Cassius’s account of the Roman conquest from his Roman History.

‘The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones

Cervantes, ‘Don Quixote’

Shelley, ‘Frankenstein’

Eliot, ‘Middlemarch’

Wells, ‘The Invisible Man’

Joyce, ‘Ulysses’

Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow’

The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its director general and drawn threats of a defamation lawsuit from the White House. Yet many at the corporation point to the dossier’s culture war slant as evidence of a right-wing plot against the BBC. Defensive and stolid, Britain’s main news and media organisation now flinches from any real conflict. Is the BBC capable of surviving in the digital era? Joining James is the former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall, now a prominent face of digital political journalism as part of the News Agents, and Dan Hind, publisher and author of The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform.

Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠

More from the LRB

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