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 subject of a profile rarely gets to confront its writer and ask "what were you thinking?" or "why did you do that?" but in this episode, Anna and I finally have an opportunity to compare memories of our conversation, confess what each of us thought the other was after, and debate whether a profile of a woman can ever avoid reproducing the misogyny it aims to critique. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

"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 to gerrymandering, genocide denial, and deportation. But he also has an obvious appreciation for deep knowledge, and for each 'gotcha' interview he conducts, there's an expert interview, one where he lets someone who knows their trade inside and out explain it to his large and growing leadership." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

"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 and is the author of several books, including, most recently Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life , which came out last year. She joined me to talk about perhaps the oldest form of the interview, the Socratic dialogue, and what we might learn about asking questions and seeking the truth from Socrates and other gadflies. " — Merve Emre See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

"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 musicals, fashion, and old Hollywood to put meat on the bones of fame and fortune—and Rachel loves a good yarn. Our conversation was full of behind-the-scenes stories, showing how an interview can transform a mere celebrity into an icon." — Merve Emre See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

"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 watch these couples bare their souls or refuse to do so. With her beloved dog Nico on her lap, Orna explained to me how she practices listening for the unconscious, the limits and possibilities of televised therapy, and whether the psychoanalytic interview can teach even the most adversarial pairs (like warring nations) how to make peace." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

"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 Iraq; the addicts coerced into serving as informants; the victims of civil asset forfeiture. Our conversation touched on every stage of Sarah's career, from her days as a student journalist to her current directorship of Yale's investigative reporting lab. As a teacher, she helps students cultivate the relentlessness and the compassion that makes her a uniquely effective reporter." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

"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 featured narrators who ask difficult questions of non-human entities like the I Ching or a leaf on a tree. A few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT-5, Sheila and I spoke about the role of the interview at a time when human thought and feeling are impinged by artificial intelligence and whether machines can help us to unlock the mysteries of consciousness." — Merve Emre See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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. But it was her series of conversations with men, women, and children in Gaza that made me want to begin the season with her, to explore how the interview can preserve the dignity and complexity of ordinary people in a time of genocide." — Merve Emre See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 everyone? And how should the translator be compensated, when their role is still so unresolved? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 consequential. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 many retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, which were then written down as many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. You’ll hear Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, talk about her vexed relationship with Orhan Pamuk and Tiffany Tsao, American-born, but of Indonesian heritage, confess the shame she felt when translating Budi Darma. All of the translators in this group, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in all cases of masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 importance of the first sentence been overly inflated? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 lot to keep track of, but in the course of these conversations, you will get to know all of their voices very well. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

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 Columbia, where she has also taught courses in writing and literature. Born in New York City, she grew up in Cincinnati and Ridgefield, Connecticut. _________________________________ 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 Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .