The LRB Podcast

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of ‘Tristram Shandy’ in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on ‘Emma’ as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider the ways in which the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.

Listen to the full episode on the LRB's Close Readings podcast.

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Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a report complaining of a ‘funding gap’ after reports emerged that it had received only a ‘tiny fraction’ of the $17 billion its members had pledged to rebuild the region.In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Muhammad Shehada and Jehad Abusalim to discuss the ongoing crisis on the ground in Gaza, the economic and political vision of the Board of Peace and the role of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a transitional body of Palestinian technocrats, in the so-called reconstruction.

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More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every individual; in the US it’s more than $7000, and the majority of this exists in the highest-denomination banknotes, such as the $100 and €500 bills. So where is it all? Remarkably, nobody really knows, but the assumption is that it’s underpinning much of the world’s criminal activity.

John Lanchester joins Tom to talk through the many ways this money is hidden and processed, from the three classic stages of money laundering (placement, layering and integration) to the methods used to bypass banks entirely, through the purchase of agricultural equipment or the use of store cards and cash-only businesses such as vape shops and nail bars.

Read John Lanchester on money laundering: https://lrb.me/lanchester052026pod

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Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the time when computer games didn't even have screens, and in this episode he talks to Tom about the enormous changes generative AI has brought to programming and the world of work in the past couple of years, from the threat of Claude’s secretive Mythos to one-person companies, and they consider what jobs might be like in the future, if they exist at all.

Read Paul Taylor on Claude: https://lrb.me/taylorclaude

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In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second in Scotland (tied with Reform UK), and lost nearly 1500 councillors in England. But while Plaid Cymru and the SNP were victorious in Wales and Scotland, in many ways the results in England were a disappointment for everybody, with no party making the breakthroughs they hoped for and the Conservatives pushed to the fringes.

James is joined by Richard King, Rory Scothorne and Andy Beckett to makes sense of this new political map and consider what the collapse of old party loyalties and the rise of nationalist politics means across all three countries.

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