This episode in our history of the great essays and great essayists is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump.
Sontag ... Show More
Aug 2023
Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan
In the first of our summer readings, Terry Castle reads her 2005 piece about her “on-again, off-again, semi-friendship” with Susan Sontag. She remembers Sontag as a “great comic character”: a high-minded hobnobber, a moralist and a gossip, seductive and snobbish and a catalytic f ... Show More
50m 18s
Nov 2025
Truth in an age of doublethink
We use “Orwellian” to describe everything from campus dust-ups to authoritarian crackdowns. But what did George Orwell actually stand for, what did he get wrong, and what can we learn from him about our age of surveillance capitalism and distraction? Sean’s guest is Laura Beers, ... Show More
52m 16s
May 2023
10: Wild Analysis: Problematic Faves and the Anxiety of Influence Teaser
<p>The three of us talk problematic faves, guilty pleasures, comfort food (literal and metaphorical), and the dangers of nostalgia. We focus on thinkers who have been crucial to our own intellectual formation – and who have likewise been meaningful to so many people who have turn ... Show More
2m 12s
Mar 2023
Margaret Atwood on Good, Evil and Stupidity
Margaret Atwood, famed author, poet and “dystopia prophet,” joins Offline to talk about fighting tyranny and finding hope. Much like her latest book, Old Babes in the Wood, Atwood’s conversation with Jon sandwiches her thoughts and fears on the present between poignant chapters o ... Show More
45m 43s
Dec 2020
Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt on Pluralism
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Hannah Arendt's experience of the Eichmann trial in 1961 led her to reflect on the nature of politics, truth, and plurality. <a href= "https://www.samantharosehill.com">Samantha Rose Hill</a>, author of a biography of Arendt, discusses the contex ... Show More
20m 41s