New Yorker: Out Loud
A weekly conversation about what's new in The New Yorker.
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Psychedelics as Therapy
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, researchers explored the therapeutic effects ...
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, researchers explored the therapeutic effects of LSD on alcoholism, depression, and a number of other conditions. Then the counterculture came along, LSD became a recreational drug, and the research dried up. In this week's magazine, Michael Pollan writes about a new wave of researchers who are using hallucinogenic drugs to help terminally ill cancer patients cope with the fear of death. On Out Loud, Pollan joins host Amelia Lester, the executive editor of newyorker.com, to discuss the history of psychedelics research, the difference between a recreational psychedelic journey and a therapeutic one, and why he finds the effects of these drugs so intriguing. Whereas we don't typically trust the insights we have when we're drunk or dreaming, Pollan says, patients who take hallucinogens report having "a sturdy, authoritative experience." "It takes us into an interesting and difficult to navigate intellectual space," he says. "It's very exciting territory."
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The Gay Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Recently in the magazine, Alex Ross wrote about the little ...
Recently in the magazine, Alex Ross wrote about the little known history of gay rights in Germany in the late nineteen and early twentieth century. He joins Amelia Lester on this week’s Out Loud podcast to discuss how many of the ideas that we consider foundational to the modern gay-rights movement were first articulated in Germany more than a hundred years ago, and why this period is often overlooked. “German culture over the last couple centuries is so often seen through the lens of Hitler, of the Nazi period,” he says. “We tend to omit aspects of the story that don’t fit that narrative. And this astonishingly progressive movement around gay rights is an example of something that just doesn’t fit our stereotype.”
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The Controversial Satire of Michel Houellebecq
In this week’s magazine, Adam Gopnik writes about the controversial ...
In this week’s magazine, Adam Gopnik writes about the controversial French satirist Michel Houellebecq, whose work has been derided as racist and obscene but whose books sell well in France and have been translated into many languages. Houellebecq has been in the spotlight recently not only because of the release of his latest novel, “Submission,” which imagines French society under Sharia law, but because the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo featured a caricature of Houellebecq on its cover at the time the publication was attacked by radical Islamist gunmen earlier this month. On this week’s episode of Out Loud, Gopnik joins Michael Agger, the culture editor of newyorker.com, to discuss Houellebecq’s career and the common misunderstandings of his work. “It’s completely off the mark to imagine Houellebecq as a liberal critic of Islam,” Gopnik argues. “He is a reactionary critic of liberalism.”
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Play and Parenting at KidZania
In this week’s magazine, Rebecca Mead writes about KidZania, a ...
In this week’s magazine, Rebecca Mead writes about KidZania, a company that operates giant children’s play centers resembling miniature cities. Rather than escape into a fantasy world, at KidZania children take jobs, purchase items branded by corporate sponsors, pay taxes, and even run a legal system. On this week’s Out Loud, Mead joins Michael Agger, the culture editor of newyorker.com, along with the staff writer Nick Paumgarten, to discuss KidZania’s unusual approach to play. They discuss the parenting and educational philosophies behind various forms of kids’ entertainment, the challenge of finding safe play spaces for children that offer real freedom, and some of the disconcerting aspects of the KidZania model. Like a Vegas casino, Paumgarten says, “on the one hand, you’re impressed by the verisimilitude; on the other it’s spooky and cheesy.”
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Teju Cole’s Favorite Things
The writer and photographer Teju Cole recently wrote in the ...
The writer and photographer Teju Cole recently wrote in the magazine about his favorite movie, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Red.” On this week's Out Loud podcast, he joins Michael Agger, the culture editor of newyorker.com, to talk about the film and the music, poetry, and art that he revisits over and over again. “For me, the great ideal is a work that stands up to repetition,” he says. “You can have two works that have similar impact on first encounter, but only one of them can contain sustained scrutiny.” Cole also discusses how listening to music changes a person’s experience of a city, his recent trip to the Deep South to explore civil-rights history, and why he finds Switzerland to be an “endlessly fascinating” country.
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Movie Stars on Broadway
It’s hard to stage a successful Broadway production these days ...
It’s hard to stage a successful Broadway production these days without the draw of a movie star—“The Real Thing,” with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor, and “The Elephant Man,” starring Bradley Cooper, are just a couple of the current productions with Hollywood actors on their marquees. But greatness on film does not always translate to greatness on the stage. On this week’s episode of Out Loud, Hilton Als and Nathan Heller join Amelia Lester to discuss why film actors are drawn to theatre, what their presence indicates about the state of the dramatic arts, and what, exactly, it means for an actor to learn to project. “Often actors confuse it with speaking loudly,” Als says. “But, in fact, it’s a soul response.”
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The Puzzling Promise of Graphene
If you’ve heard about graphene, you’ve probably heard that it’s ...
If you’ve heard about graphene, you’ve probably heard that it’s a miracle substance. The only atom-thick material known to man, it seems to also be the lightest, strongest, and most conductive material on earth. Its potential applications seem almost limitless. The only problem, as John Colapinto explained in a recent magazine piece, is that nobody has figured out what to do with it yet. On this week’s Out Loud, Colapinto joins Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, and Vauhini Vara, a business and technology blogger for the site, to discuss the challenges that hyped new technologies face in the marketplace, and whether graphene is likely to live up to its promise.
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For Love of the Ice
Hockey fans make up a small but vocal contingent of ...
Hockey fans make up a small but vocal contingent of The New Yorker’s staff. On this week’s Out Loud podcast, three of the magazine’s most ardent rink rats—Ben McGrath, who recently wrote about the hockey player P. K. Subban; Nick Paumgarten, who plays regularly in a local league; and Adam Gopnik, who is Canadian—join the editor John Bennet to discuss the sport. They talk about how they first encountered hockey and learned to love it, the relationship between hockey and writing, and why, as Bennet puts it, having a child who plays hockey “seems to exacerbates the psychosis that is parenthood.”
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Famous on YouTube
In this week’s magazine, Tad Friend writes about the celebrities ...
In this week’s magazine, Tad Friend writes about the celebrities of YouTube and Vine, who gather millions of fans—and sometimes millions of dollars—with their viral online videos, even if most of us have never heard of them. Friend and Kelefa Sanneh, a staff writer who frequently covers pop culture, join Michael Agger, the culture editor of The New Yorker’s Web site, on this week’s Out Loud podcast to discuss the “Beatlemania-type receptions” of these figures, the economy of YouTube fame, and what the phenomenon reveals about the nature of modern celebrity. Friend says, “In the old world, someone like Kim Kardashian, everyone knew a little bit about her.... In the future, there will be people who are incredibly famous and deeply well known to a small group of people, but not known to everyone else.”
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Growing Up in the Rodeo
In this week’s magazine, Burkhard Bilger writes about the children ...
In this week’s magazine, Burkhard Bilger writes about the children who compete in rodeo in his home state of Oklahoma. Bull riding is the most dangerous sport in the world, and it’s become even riskier in recent years, as bull breeders have begun selecting for extreme aggression. But in the families Bilger interviewed for his story, little boys as young as three or four years old participate in rodeo events, and begin riding bulls around the age of ten. Bilger and Mark Singer, another staff writer and Oklahoma native, join host Amelia Lester on this week’s Out Loud podcast to discuss the kids who compete in rodeo, the parents who let them do it, and the attraction of trying to ride an angry two-thousand-pound animal. As Bilger describes it, when the kids start out, riding sheep and calves, “it’s like the best bumper-car ride you’ve ever been on. And then what you’re doing is just gradually turning up the volume. Or another metaphor might be the frog in the water that’s getting turned up hotter and hotter until it dies.”
