Past Present Future – Details, episodes & analysis

Today’s bad idea is about how ideas get adopted, argued over and rejected: David talks to political philosopher Alan Finlayson about what’s wrong with seeing this as a competitive marketplace. From St. Paul to Citizens United, from John Stuart Mill to Jordan Peterson, what happens when ideas get turned into commodities? Who wins and who loses? And what is an ‘ideological entrepreneur’? Looking for Christmas presents? We have a special Xmas gift offer: give a subscription to PPF+ and your recipient will also receive a personally inscribed copy of David’s new book The History of Ideas. Find out more https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts To sign up for the latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter, out tomorrow, join our mailing list https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters Next Bad Idea: Modernisation! Past Present Future is part of the Airwave podcast network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For our latest bad idea with an interesting history David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about what’s wrong with Nobel Prizes. Why do we revere the winners of the science prizes when we know how contrived the other prizes are? What makes us so attached to this relic of an outmoded idea of scientific progress? And what happens when someone is struck down with ‘Nobelitis’? Looking for Christmas presents? We have a special Xmas gift offer: give a subscription to PPF+ and your recipient will also receive a personally inscribed copy of David’s new book The History of Ideas. PPF merch available too! Find out more at https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts Next up on Bad Ideas: The Marketplace of Ideas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today’s great political film is Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a much-loved tale of the little guy taking on the corrupt establishment. But there’s far more to it than that, including an origin story that suggests Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) might not be what he seems. From filibusters to fascism, from the New Deal to America First, from Burton K. Wheeler to Harry S. Truman, this is a heart-warming film that still manages to go to the dark heart of American politics. To hear our bonus episode on Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (in which Burton K. Wheeler becomes America’s Hitler) sign up now to PPF+ for just £5 per month or £50 a year and get all our other bonuses plus ad free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus Next time: Citizen Kane Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 11 in our series on the great essays explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power. It is an essay that connects digital technology, medieval mystery and Dan Brown. Plus David talks about the hidden meaning of Julian Assange. More from the LRB: Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange ‘I’d never been with a person who had such a good cause and such a poor ear.’ Frank Kermode on the Name of the Rose ‘This novel has so much in it that differs from any known kind of detective story that we must look to Eco’s pre-semiotic career for help.’ Jenny Diski on Eco and ugliness ‘The breadth of Eco’s search spreads out to include disgust, horror, fear, obscenity, misogyny, perversity, bigotry, social exclusiveness, repression, inexplicability, evil, deformation, degradation, heterogeneity.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 10 in our series on the great essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy. Was he right? What did he miss? And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump? More on David Foster Wallace from the LRB: Jenny Turner on Wallace and his moment ‘The risk Wallace takes is to guess he is not the only "obscenely well-educated", curiously lost and empty white boy out there; that his sadness is also the experience of a whole historical moment.’ Patricia Lockwood on Wallace and his influence ‘It was the essayists who were left to cope with his almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own.’ Dale Peck’s notorious takedown of Infinite Jest ‘If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype machine can still work wonders.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie? More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive: Thomas Powers on Didion and California: 'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.' Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory: 'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.' Martin Amis on Didion's style: 'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".' Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now: 'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 8 in our history of the great essays 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 in the LRB: Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship  ‘At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.’ James Wolcott on Sontag and polemics ‘The upside of Sontag’s downside was that her ire was generated by the same power supply that electrified her battle for principles that others only espoused.’ Mark Grief on Sontag and identity ‘One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior.’ Joanna Biggs on Sontag and Paris ‘Paris let her say no to an academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafes, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide? More on Baldwin from the LRB: Michael Wood on Baldwin and power  ‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’ Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin ‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 6 in our series on the great essays is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising. Read ‘Human Personality’ here For more on Weil from the LRB archive: Toril Moi on living like Weil  ‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’ Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil ‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism. David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again. For more on Orwell from the LRB: Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics ‘He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party.’ Julian Symons on Orwell and fame ‘If George Orwell had died in 1939 he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels.’ Terry Eagleton on Orwell and experience ‘Orwell detested those, mostly on the left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless.’ More from the History of Ideas: Judith Shklar on Hypocrisy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices