The Critic and Her Publics

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. The sub...

"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 Middle east...

"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 Chicago an...

"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 knowledge of mus...

"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 they watc...

"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 bases in Ira...

"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 Colour fe...

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 education. B...

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 works for ev...

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 hugely co...

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. There were...

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 at https...

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 themselves i...

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 the import...

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 like a lo...

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 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 literary awards....

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 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 . _________________________________ 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 and Her P...

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 from Columb...

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 is the head research editor at The New Yorker and runs the magazine's fact-checking department. _________________________________ 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 and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Cr...

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, Jonathan Escoff...

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 Poetry...

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, the Nat...