Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the experiences of Gazans during Israel’s subsequent – and ongoing – devastation of the territory.

More in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: Israel's Descent

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent

Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

Also available to watch: https://youtu.be/_w3Pe00I_Ro

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As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career than for her highly publicised relationships with Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Scientology.

In a recent review of her posthumous memoir, Jessica Olin celebrates Lisa Marie’s resilience and charisma in the face of ruthless publicity. Jessica joins Tom to discuss Lisa Marie’s ambivalent relationship with fame, and how a new generation are encountering the Presley family saga through her daughter, Riley Keough.

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

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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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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

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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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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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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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