The LRB Podcast

What a thrill to listen to a long and thoughtful conversation with Sheila Fitzpatrick! Some ten years ago I wrote my masters thesis on Lunacharsky and the Soviet Theater. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book on the Commissariat of Enlightenment, as well as her other books on the early days of the USSR were an inspiration and guide for me. Thank you.

It’s rare that an independent media organisation better known for something other than podcasts/radio manages to produce a wide range of different, interesting audio material, but it’s unusual to find that said organisation does an utter botch job on its main “flagship” podcast, leaving the truly excellent material (sometimes paywalled, but much not) on the sidebars that most subscribers won’t even be aware of. Everyone should immediately subscribe to the LRB *bookshop* podcast (the one with the green background), a magnificent archive which offers brilliant conversations with a wide range of authors and is, to my mind, the best book podcast ever. True, while the book events are recorded live, they are not explicitly designed as podcasts (a good comparison would be Film at Lincoln Center’s podcast, although their Q&As are much more abbreviated than the sometimes long conversations at LRB bookshop), but LRB has also proven it can do decent work on more “produced” podcasts, with The Belgrano Diary being a worthwhile series digging into a now forgotten murderous scandal of the Thatcher era. Its paywalled “close readings” series, from the samples I’ve heard, can also be impressive, and even worthy of a subscription. The problem with this main LRB podcast, though, seems to come down to its different editorial team. Adam Shatz, LRB’s current editor, seems to be in charge here. Shatz is a pretty good jazz critic (ironically, this side of him is only seen in his other gig at New York Review of Books), but has been stretching himself thin in recent years as he takes on challenges he’s ill equipped for, such as a controversial and tendentious biography of Frantz Fanon (while a bestseller, Shatz’s pedantry and ill-timed reactionary tone have met with a poor reception from scholars). Shatz is also an American who happens to be resident of New York. He has, seemingly, no connection to London or the UK, and it is unclear why he is even editing the LRB in the first place, but regardless of his limitations or strengths in the text edition (which is not what it used to be, but at least maintains a superficial aura of professionalism), he has been a disgracefully uninspired podcast editor/ host. If you want bland, tedious and surface level (at best) or (at worst) bowdlerized and cut off discussions of books everyone was supposed to read in school, plus a dash of dull centrist politics that make The Guardian look like, well, Frantz Fanon, you’ve come to the right place. This is not to say that some of the other hosts don’t make attempts to compensate for the desultory limits of what Shatz is capable of. If you consider it a good use of time in 2026 (it isn’t.) to hear a feature-film-length, evenhanded debate between Tories and Labour on various political issues, you couldn’t find a more tolerable person to host such a thing than James Butler (who deserves to be handed much better assignments). And Tom (forget his last name) is affable enough on the cliff-notes podcasts where they invite one of the LRB writers on to hash out the basics of a piece they already wrote, for those who prefer half-listening to reading. But these are rarely incisive, exciting discussions (certainly not compared to what goes on at the Bookshop), and as time goes on, you can see a shrinking in the caliber of writers making an appearance on the pod. Years ago, one could hear vibrant dialogues with Jacqueline Rose and Tariq Ali. Now, it’s just pound shop pundits manufacturing consent for racist colonial wars.

Too many voices with different audio quality. The discussion was rambling without much focus. I don’t think I’ll listen to subsequent episodes. Reading one good opinion at a time is more useful.

I throughly enjoyed the interview with Neal Asherson. What a life! What wonderful insights! He brought me back to periods of my youth and the world events that shaped me as a political person in the 80s and 90s. My thanks to the Neal and the LRB for all you do. I recently renewed my subscription to the LRB and am grateful to continue my support of your fine work.