The LRB Podcast

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1. On Politics: Can the UK economy ever change?

   4 november 2026 · 1 uur 20 min

   Afspelen
   Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What lies behind this inertia, and the apparent resistance of the British state to any transformative policies? James Butler is joined by Aditya Chakrabortty, the Guardian’s senior economics commentator, and Daniela Gabor, a professor of economics at SOAS, to examine the systemic and political obstacles successive governments have faced in delivering the radical reform they keep promising. Lees meer

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

   From the LRB

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   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

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   Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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2. How Prediction Markets Work

   29 oktober 2026 · 1 uur

   Afspelen
   According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many losers’. On this episode, he joins Thomas Jones to discuss how prediction markets work, who profits from them, who regulates them (or doesn’t), why they’re often a very bad tool for predicting the future, and what they may tell us about the state of the world. Lees meer

   Read Geoff's piece: https://lrb.me/mannlrbpod

   From the LRB

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   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

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3. Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book

   24 oktober 2026 · 54 min

   Afspelen
   Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. Lees meer

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

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4. How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson

   22 oktober 2026 · 53 min

   Afspelen
   Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi wrote recently in the LRB, he was a great reader, too. Moi, who was recruited by Jameson to Duke University in the mid-1980s and remained his colleague there until his death in 2024, joins Thomas Jones on this episode to look back at Jameson’s earlier work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) to The Political Unconscious (1981), and to retrace the intellectual path he took to arrive at that milestone. Lees meer

   Read Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson:

   https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/toril-moi/fredric-jameson-as-reader

   From the LRB

   Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

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5. Who were the English?

   14 oktober 2026 · 33 min

   Afspelen
   For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name. Lees meer

   Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod

   From the LRB

   Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

   LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

   Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

   Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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6. On Politics: What is political writing?

   8 oktober 2026 · 57 min

   Afspelen
   In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance. Lees meer

   Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025)

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

   From the LRB

   Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

   LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

   Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

   Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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7. Fascism in a time of AI

   6 oktober 2026 · 54 min

   Afspelen
   Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes. Lees meer

   On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’.

   Further listening:

   Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism:

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

   Spotify: https://lrb.me/nicspotifylrbpod

   LRB wesbite: https://lrb.me/niclrbpod

   From the LRB

   Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

   LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

   Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

   Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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8. An Alternative History of the Microphone

   1 oktober 2026 · 47 min

   Afspelen
   The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting power. The history of the microphone often focuses on its function as a technology of transmission, but as David Trotter wrote recently in the LRB, microphones ‘both receive and transmit’, and there is another tradition more concerned with listening than transmitting. In this episode, David joins Tom at the mic to discuss these alternative histories, as well as the role of microphones in the history of eavesdropping, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation and the strange cry that Ted Hughes picked up on his RAF radio while doing his National Service. Lees meer

   Read David's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/trotterpod

   From the LRB

   Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

   LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

   Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

   Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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9. On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?

   23 september 2026 · 1 uur 7 min

   Afspelen
   William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought? Lees meer

   From the LRB

   Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

   Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

   LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

   Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

   Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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10. What’s the point of literary criticism?

    18 september 2026 · 37 min

    Afspelen
    As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’. Lees meer

    Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod

    From the LRB

    Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

    Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

    LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

    Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

    Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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