The Critic and Her Publics
The Critic and Her Publics is a podcast hosted by Merve Emre. In its fourth season, subtitled The Art of the Interview, Emre speaks with professional interviewers about how they elicit the answers they seek, what makes a good question, how to listen for what is left unsaid, and how far to push someone to say something new. The season is a co-production between the New York Review of Books and Lit Hub. It features editing by Michele Moses, music by Dani Lencioni, and art by Leanne Shapton.
Episodes
Anna Silman
We try to end each season of The Critic and Her Publics with a little twist on our theme, something different and often risky or uncomfortable. A few years ago, our final guest Anna Silman interviewed and profiled me for Business Insider. Back then, when Twitter was still called Twitter, it was possible for a profile of someone in a niche industry to go viral, as Anna's profile of me did.
Isaac Chotiner
"I don't understand why people talk to Isaac Chotiner when his reputation precedes him. He's the best interview-assassin at work today, maybe the best ever. I suspect that each guest thinks they'll be the one to finally best Isaac—and Isaac makes good work of that hubris. He calmly and respectfully dismantles arguments that people make about everything from the wars in Ukraine and the Mid
Agnes Callard
"The philosopher Agnes Callard is one of the most genuinely curious thinkers I have ever met. Whether she’s writing about unrequited love, parenting, politics in the classroom, or the moral failures of people who like to travel, I get a thrill hearing her examine ordinary life from unexpected angles. And I love to disagree with her, which I often do.Callard teaches at the University of Ch
Rachel Syme
"Rachel Syme has interviewed all the grand dames of New York and Los Angeles: she's had Cosmos with Carol Burnett, she's accompanied Sarah Jessica Parker to the ballet, she's shopped with Parker Posey at Rachel Comey, she's Skyped with Patti LuPone and gabbed with Barbra Streisand on her landline. At a time when the glossy profile feels hopelessly compromised, Rachel uses her deep knowled
Orna Guralnik
"Couples therapy. The words alone are enough to send many people running for the hills, but Orna Guralnik—star of Showtime's documentary series Couples Therapy—has people running to her office. Orna, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, has become a household name: she's a watchful guide for couples as they navigate intimate and sometimes agonizing discussions, and for viewers, as t
Sarah Stillman
"Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most decorated investigative reporters of her generation. She's won several National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant. Her articles draw attention to the men and women forced to do the bidding of the American security state; the third-country nationals tricked into working on military bas
Sheila Heti
"In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Shelia Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chatbots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and George, and they had wild, undisciplined opinions about art, selfhood, and God. Talking to them seemed to come naturally to Sheila: for several years, she had been the interviews editors at The Believer and her novels Motherhood and Pure
Chana Joffe-Walt
The new season of The Critic and Her Publics—The Art of the Interview—begins!"Chana Joffe-Walt is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and a producer at This American Life. Her series on school segregation, Nice White Parents, examined how progressive Brooklyn families undermined racial integration. She regularly takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on race, labor, and educati
Money
In this final episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione series for 2025, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and publishers, who usually meet over contract negotiations, open up their books and compare bottom lines, to see who feels like they’re being short-changed, and why. Is there—or could there be—a pay structure that wor
Judgement
How do we decide which translations are better than others?
In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Adam Levy of Transit Books reveal how they evaluate books for acquisition. And, because so many of the guests on this show have served on prize juries, we compare our experiences making judgments that can seem at once arbitrary and
Practical Translation: 1,001 Nights
In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage, to see how translators make their choices.
But the text we’ll be examining, 1001 Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike with the Proust that we discussed in the first episode, there is not one fixed source text to work with. Th
English
In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, we discuss the problem of English. What happens when you bring a nation’s literature into its colonizer’s language? Is it inevitably a kind of violence? Here, we look to the field of translation studies, which provides some answers—not all of them satisfying. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice
Shame
In this episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, the translators discuss the fraught emotional condition of their work: the sense that not only is their work shameful and grotesque but that they are too, for daring to attempt it.
Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with a binary of either making the
First Sentences
In this second episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we explore beginnings. Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence of a text. First sentences are so often the most famous lines. They are a place for a translator to make their mark. They dictate the voice in which the book unfolds. But has t
Practical Translation: Proust
In the first episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we start with an exercise in practical translation: a discussion of seven different English interpretations of one, highly complicated sentence from Volume One of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Maureen Freely will speak first, followed by Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewiss, Jeremy Tiang, and finally Tiffany Tsao. It sounds l
Leo Carey: "What's Not There"
Leo Carey is a senior editor at The New Yorker. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Yahdon Israel: "Faustian Bargains"
Yahdon Israel is a senior editor at Simon Schuster and
founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature
and fashion to make books accessible. He brings an entrepreneurial
spirit to these pursuits as the founder of a popular book club,
host of a literary podcast, creative writing teacher, event producer,
as well as his work in support of several prestigious lite
Ben Calhoun: "Close Listening"
Ben Calhoun is the executive producer of "The Daily" (The New York Times). Previously, he was an editor and producer for This American Life and Serial , and VP of programming at WBEZ in Chicago. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Sasha Weiss: "Mischief in the Pages"
Sasha Weiss is a writer and the deputy culture editor at The New York Times Magazine. Previously she was the literary editor at The New Yorker and an editor at The New York Review of Books.
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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf
The Critic a
Radhika Jones: "Past the Illusion"
Radhika Jones is the fifth editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. She previously held senior editorial roles at The New York Times, Time, and The Paris Review. She also was the managing editor at Grand Street, an editor at Artforum, and the arts editor of The Moscow Times, where she began her career. Jones holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature fr
Zakiya Dalilah Harris: "Satire and Sensitivity"
Zakiya Dalila Harris received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her debut novel, The Other Black Girl, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is now a critically acclaimed Hulu Original Series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband._________________
Fergus McIntosh: "One Wonders"
Fergus McIntosh is the head research editor at The New Yorker and runs the magazine's fact-checking department._________________________________The Critic and Her PublicsHosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art byLeanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. KnopfThe Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing an
Jackson Howard: "Risk It All"
Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn.He’s Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprints MCD and AUWA (headed by Questlove), where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Catherine Lacey, Bryan Washington, Laura van den Berg, Sarah Schulman, Jonatha
Meghan O'Rourke: "The Glitzy Bits"
Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poe
Kaitlyn Greenidge: "Making Artifacts"
Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman, one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour,the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation,
Emily Greenhouse: "Your Whole Self"
Emily Greenhouse is the editor of the New York Review of Books. She is the former managing editor of The New Yorker.For the full episode transcript, visit the NYRBRecorded September 17, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan UniversityEdited by Michele MosesMusic by Dani LencioniArt by Leanne ShaptonSponsored by Alfred A. KnopfThe Critic and Her Publics is a production of the Shapiro Cent
The Lit Hub Podcast: Nov 29, 2024
We've got some exciting news regarding the future of The Critic and Her Publics—and here to bring it to you is the latest episode of Literary Hub's The Lit Hub Podcast. If you don't know The Lit Hub Podcast, it's the in-house show at Lit Hub, hosted by podcasts editor Drew Broussard. This week features Merve Emre talking about what's next for TCAHP as well as Lit Hub's editor-in-chief Jon
Christine Smallwood: "Why Do You Do It This Way?"
Christine Smallwood is the author of La Captive (Fireflies Press, 2024) and the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have been published in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. Sh
Carina del Valle Schorske: "The Tuning Fork in the Ear"
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer, translator, and wannabe backup dancer. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. It was recently awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. She writes about Caribbean culture, literary politics, diasporic dramas, and the songs she can’t stop singing to herself. Her essays have been published many places incl
Maggie Doherty: "The Problem of Other Minds"
Maggie Doherty is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (2020), which won the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Nation, among other publications. Recorded Apr
Doreen St. Félix: "Documents of Mundanity"
Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork. St. Félix was named on the Forbes “30 Under 30” media list in 2016. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in
Lauren Michele Jackson: "Why Not Memes?"
Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book, with Amistad Press. She is part of New America’s 2022 class of National Fellows.Recorded March 5, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan UniversityEdited by Mic
Jo Livingstone: "Into the Cave"
Jo Livingstone is a medieval literature scholar, a critic, and the 2020 National Book Critics Circle recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. After receiving a BA in English literature from the University of Oxford and a PhD in medieval literature from New York University, Livingstone went on to write cultural criticism for The New Republic and currently manage
Moira Donegan: "A Gender Emergency"
Moira Donegan is writer in residence for the Clayman Institute, where she participates in the intellectual life of the Institute, hosts its artist salon series, teaches a class in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and mentors students, while continuing her own projects and writing. Her criticism, essays, and commentary, which cover the intersection of gender, politics, and the law,
Anahid Nersessian: "The Channeler"
Anahid Nersessian is a literary critic and Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015, and her second, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Her latest, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse was released in 2
Hannah Goldfield: "I Am the Cabbage Writer"
Hannah Goldfield is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering restaurants and food culture. Previously, she was a fact checker at The New Yorker and an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine and the Times, among other publications.Recorded November 7, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan UniversityEdited by Michele MosesMusic by Da
Sophie Pinkham: "Wordlessness in Labor"
Sophie Pinkham is a writer, journalist, and critic specializing in Russian and Ukrainian literature, culture, and politics. She is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2016) and the forthcoming The Spirit in the Trees, for which she has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar grant. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, P
Andrea Long Chu: "I Want a Critic"
Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females, an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas, was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of
Coming Soon
Introducing The Critic and Her Publics, a new podcast series from The New York Review of Books and Lit Hub. Hosted by Merve Emre.New episodes every other week beginning Tuesday January 30th.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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