Let's Talk About the Anxiety Freedom Can Cause

Let's Talk About the Anxiety Freedom Can Cause

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and cultural theorist whose work includes the award-winning 2016 book “The Argonauts.” Her newest work, “On Freedom,” pierces right into the heart of America’s founding idea: What if there’s no such thing as freedom, at least not freedom as a state of enduring liberation?

And more than that: What if we don’t want to be free? Perhaps that’s the great lie in the American dream: We’re taught to want freedom, but many of us recoil from its touch.

Nelson describes herself as a “disobedient thinker,” someone who enjoys looking at “the difficulty of difficult things,” and this conversation bears that out. We talk about when and whether freedom is hard to bear, the difference between a state of liberation and the daily practice of freedom, the hard conversations sexual liberation demands, what it means to live in koans, my problems with the “The Giving Tree,” Nelson’s disagreements with the left, the difficulty of maintaining your own experience of art in an age when the entire internet wants to tell you how to feel about everything, and more.

Book Recommendations:

Possibilities by David Graeber

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jaksot(481)

Andrew Cuomo and the Performance of Power

Andrew Cuomo and the Performance of Power

Six months ago, Andrew Cuomo was on top of the world. He was touted as the anti-Donald Trump — the calm, fact-driven coronavirus leader the country needed. Now, amid allegations of hiding the true num...

19 Maalis 20211h 5min

Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything.

Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything.

Mark Bittman taught me to cook. I read his New York Times cooking column, “The Minimalist,” religiously. I bought “How to Cook Everything,” that red brick of a cookbook, and then, when I gave up meat,...

16 Maalis 202148min

How America’s Covid-19 Nightmare Ends

How America’s Covid-19 Nightmare Ends

On Jan. 28, I published a column that began like this: “I hope, in the end, that this article reads as alarmism. I hope that a year from now it’s a piece people point to as an overreaction.”Today, tha...

12 Maalis 20211h 1min

What Does Toxic Stress Do to Children?

What Does Toxic Stress Do to Children?

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s pioneering work on how childhood trauma shapes adult outcomes led to her being named the first surgeon general of California. That was in 2019. And then, of course, the novel...

9 Maalis 20211h 6min

Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.

Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.

We were promised, with the internet, a productivity revolution. We were told that we’d get more done, in less time, with less stress. Instead, we got always-on communication, the dissolution of the bo...

5 Maalis 202154min

What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like

What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like

If you watched this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, you heard a lot of debunked election conspiracies, dire warnings about “cancel culture” and unwavering fealty to Donald Tru...

2 Maalis 202158min

How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis

How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis

Last week, freezing temperatures overwhelmed the Texas power grid, setting off rolling blackouts that left millions without power during an intense winter storm. But this story is a lot bigger than Te...

26 Helmi 20211h 20min

A Radical Proposal for True Democracy

A Radical Proposal for True Democracy

One thing I want to do on this show is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one...

23 Helmi 202144min

Suosittua kategoriassa Politiikka ja uutiset

aikalisa
rss-ootsa-kuullut-tasta
tervo-halme
ootsa-kuullut-tasta-2
politiikan-puskaradio
rss-podme-livebox
et-sa-noin-voi-sanoo-esittaa
otetaan-yhdet
rss-asiastudio
rikosmyytit
viisupodi
rss-vaalirankkurit-podcast
rss-mina-ukkola
the-ulkopolitist
radio-antro
io-techin-tekniikkapodcast
popcorn-with-esko
rss-polikulaari-humanisti-vastaa-ja-muut-ts-podcastit
rss-merja-mahkan-rahat
rss-50100-podcast