The podcast of Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics. LibertiesTalk will be an irregular series of wide-ranging conversations on culture and politics hosted by Celeste Marcus, the managing editor of Liberties. These lively discussions will feature our writers and the larger Liberties community.
Episode 14
Jewher Ilham
Jewher Ilham, Uyghur activist and the daughter of celebrated economist Ilham Tohti (now serving a life sentence in jail in China), joins Leon Wieseltier and Celeste Marcus to discuss the Uyghur Genocide. Jewher describes how the conditions for Uyghurs have changed in China over the past few decades, what the concentration camps are and what goes on in them, who her father is and what he was fighting for, and what the international community can and should be doing to help the Uyghurs.
Episode 13
Agnes Callard
Agnes Callard joins Celeste Marcus to discuss the movie Winter Light (1963), faith, faithlessness, body hatred, and, of course, Ingmar Bergman.
Episode 12
Mamtimin Ala
Mamtimin Ala, a Uyghur activist and intellectual, talks with Celeste Marcus not only about the Uyghur genocide in China, but also about the syncretistic beauty and wealth of Uyghur tradition. Among the tragedies of the Uyghur story is that they are known most often for the horrors they now endure, and not for their vast, rich history. The Analysis of Uyghur culture - and Chinese culture - sheds much light on the origins of the current outrage.
Episode 11
Michelle Dauphinais Echols
Michelle Dauphinais Echols talks with Celeste Marcus about the alleged rape and torture of Michelle's nine cousins, the Charbonneau sisters, at St. Paul's Indian School in the 1960s and 1970s.
Episode 10
Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld and Celeste Marcus discuss Sanctimony Literature, the relationship between art and politics, and how to evaluate political art.
Episode 9
Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha talks with Leon Wieseltier and Celeste Marcus about Modi's disastrous mishandling of the pandemic in India, the ensuing disaster, and the historical and political context for the current crisis.
Episode 8
Andrea Marcolongo
Andrea Marcolongo talks with Celeste Marcus about how the pandemic has altered her self-perception as a writer, and about what a writer's role is.
Episode 7
Elliot Ackerman and Leon Wieseltier
Elliot Ackerman and Leon Wieseltier talk with Celeste Marcus about American foreign policy. Regarding the decision to pull all troops out of Afghanistan: "We'll either never think about this again or we'll think about this in eighteen months when Kabul falls to the Taliban and people are being executed in the streets and we have to answer for it in some way."
Episode 6
David Greenberg
David Greenberg talks with Celeste Marcus about the process of renaming public spaces and buildings, concerns about how such decisions are made, and suggestions for how to ameliorate these processes.
Episode 5
Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier and Celeste Marcus discuss the Syrian crisis in honor of its tenth anniversary, and use that occasion to talk about American foreign policy over the past decade and going forward.
Episode 4
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams talks with Celeste Marcus about making sense of and participating in the vicissitudes of American culture from across the ocean in Paris.
Episode 3
Shawn McCreesh
Shawn McCreesh talks with Celeste Marcus about what it was like to grow up in a suburb of Philadelphia ravaged by the opioid crisis.
Episode 2
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff, rector of Central European University, chats with Celeste Marcus about what it was like to watch America desecrate its own sacred institutions from Europe, and what that desecration represents for the United States and the world.
Episode 1
Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier and Celeste Marcus talk about hope and fear, and how to keep our heads in all our crises.
