The LRB Podcast

It’s been more than three years since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, and Israel responded with a war of annihilation in Gaza that human rights organisations and experts widely describe as genocide. A ceasefire of sorts is in place, though it has allowed the killing and destruction to continue. The people of Gaza are confined to less than a third of their land, reduced to bare life, and under a blockade that cuts them off from the outside world.

In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Jaser Abu Mousa and Bashir Abu-Manneh to discuss life in Gaza and how Israel’s war of ‘politicide’ turned genocidal. They also consider the implications of the recent elections in Israel and the United States, and the history of Palestinian resistance, both armed and unarmed.

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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.

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

From the LRB

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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.

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

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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’.

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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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.

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

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