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The Critic and Her Publics

by Merve Emre

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Latest episodes

Anna Silman

September 8, 2026 · 43 min

We try to end each season of The Critic and Her Publics with a little twist on our theme, something different and often risky or uncomfortable. A few years ago, our final guest Anna Silman interviewed and profiled me for Business Insider…
Isaac Chotiner

September 1, 2026 · 40 min

"I don't understand why people talk to Isaac Chotiner when his reputation precedes him. He's the best interview-assassin at work today, maybe the best ever. I suspect that each guest thinks they'll be the one to finally best Isaac—and…
Agnes Callard

August 25, 2026 · 46 min

"The philosopher Agnes Callard is one of the most genuinely curious thinkers I have ever met. Whether she’s writing about unrequited love, parenting, politics in the classroom, or the moral failures of people who like to travel, I get a…
Rachel Syme

August 11, 2026 · 48 min

"Rachel Syme has interviewed all the grand dames of New York and Los Angeles: she's had Cosmos with Carol Burnett, she's accompanied Sarah Jessica Parker to the ballet, she's shopped with Parker Posey at Rachel Comey, she's Skyped with…
Orna Guralnik

August 4, 2026 · 45 min

"Couples therapy. The words alone are enough to send many people running for the hills, but Orna Guralnik—star of Showtime's documentary series Couples Therapy—has people running to her office. Orna, a clinical psychologist and…

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Sarah Stillman

July 28, 2026 · 45 min

"Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most decorated investigative reporters of her generation. She's won several National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant. Her articles draw…
Sheila Heti

July 21, 2026 · 37 min

"In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Shelia Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chatbots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and George, and they had wild, undisciplined opinions about art, selfhood, and God…
Chana Joffe-Walt

July 14, 2026 · 40 min

The new season of The Critic and Her Publics—The Art of the Interview—begins! "Chana Joffe-Walt is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and a producer at This American Life. Her series on school segregation, Nice White Parents, examined how…
Money

August 30, 2025 · 46 min

In this final episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione series for 2025, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and publishers, who usually meet over contract negotiations, open…
Judgement

August 29, 2025 · 57 min

How do we decide which translations are better than others? In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Adam Levy of Transit Books reveal how they evaluate books for acquisition. And…
Practical Translation: 1,001 Nights

August 28, 2025 · 39 min

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage, to see how translators make their choices. But the text we’ll be examining, 1001…
English

August 27, 2025 · 39 min

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, we discuss the problem of English. What happens when you bring a nation’s literature into its colonizer’s language? Is it inevitably a kind of violence? Here, we look to the field of…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

About the show

Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they're looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what's unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new? Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton This season of The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the New York Review of Books and Lit Hub.