Show Notes
Thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest - a novel so sprawling, so formally strange, and so unnervingly prescient that it has never quite stopped happening.
Set in a near-future North America obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, and escape, the book asked a question that feels even sharper today than it did in 1996: what happens when a culture confuses happiness with anaesthesia?
Tanjil Rashid is joined by DT Max and Jonathan Derbyshire to discuss why the novel still matters, and what it can tell us about the world we’ve built since.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The New Society | culture from the New Statesman
Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature.
You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge.
Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting.
"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell.
A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore.