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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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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Use the code ’LRB’ to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb

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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.

Sponsored links:

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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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The final report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry established that the fire on 14 June 2017, which killed 72 people, was the ‘culmination of decades of failure’. Every death was avoidable, and every death was the result of choices made by corporations, individuals and elected officials. James Butler, who writes about the report and its findings in the current issue of the LRB, joins Tom to discuss the causes and consequences of the fire and whether those responsible will be brought to justice.

Read James's piece: https://lrb.me/butlergrenfell

Sponsored links:

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To find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/

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

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In November 2022, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grave. On one of them were written nearly a hundred lines from two lost plays by Euripides. Robert Cioffi, who has been working with the same team on a new archaeological mission, joins Tom to discuss the find, the precarious transmission of ancient manuscripts, and the time he tried to make papyrus in his kitchen.

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

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Singing, acting, directing, writing: Barbra Streisand always insisted on doing it her way. Malin Hay, who recently reviewed Streisand’s 992-page autobiography, joins Tom to discuss her performances on stage and screen, her prodigious voice and why her best movie may be one where she doesn’t sing at all.

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

Malin’s Streisand playlist: https://lrb.me/barbraplaylist

Sponsored links:

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Jane Ellen Harrison was Britain’s first female career academic, a maverick public intellectual burdened with the label ‘the cleverest woman in England’. Her quips and quirks became legendary, but many of those anecdotes were promulgated by Harrison herself. Mary Beard joins Tom to discuss Harrison’s legacy, the challenges in writing her life and the careful cultivation of her voice.

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

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

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