The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history – culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology – in an attempt to broaden the arg ... Show More
Oct 29
How Prediction Markets Work
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many loser ... Show More
1 h
Oct 24
Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ... Show More
53m 35s
Oct 22
How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson al ... Show More
53m 25s
Nov 2014
Creative Britain - Sexology
Creative Britain: Laurie Taylor explores its rise and fall with the British historian, Robert Hewison, who provides an assessment of the cultural policies of New Labour and the Coalition. Why has culture failed to escape class? Also, a new Sexology exhibition prompts an analysis ... Show More
27m 57s
Jul 2025
117: Max Horkheimer & Theodore Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment, Part 1
Foundations of Critical Theory, and an exploration of the chapters, "The Concept of Enlightenment", "The Culture Industry". We analyze how myth and enlightenment both contain one another, and why enlightenment negates itself. We explore what this means in concrete terms by examin ... Show More
2h 3m
Oct 2024
Bonus episode: on culture
<p>What does culture mean to you? Is it the art we create, the traditions we carry, or the values we hold dear? In this mini episode of <em>Our World, Connected</em>, Christine Wilson, Director of Research and Insight at the British Council, delves deeper into the multifaceted na ... Show More
17m 25s