Roald Dahl: Genius and Bigot

For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, click here and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount. Roald Dahl gave the world Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was also a vicious antisemite. A Broadway play about Dahl’s legacy; the new Michael Jackson biopic; Kanye West’s attempted redemption arc; all of these have the culture asking again: How do we approach brilliant art produced by morally compromised artists? Throughout history, some of the world’s preeminent literary geniuses have also been deeply bigoted, even monstrous people. In this episode, Shilo is joined by Eli Lake, host of Breaking History, for a conversation about these geniuses, from Voltaire to Norman Mailer, and why we should read their work despite their odious prejudices. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episoder(52)

Who Owns the Declaration of Independence?

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, a quiet war is being waged over what the Declaration of Independence really means — with some on the new right dismissing it as globalist f...

27 Mai 1h 18min

A New Series From The Free Press | The Lindbergh Conspiracies

Hi Breaking History listeners! My colleague Joe Nocera has launched a six part series about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Enjoy episode one here and then head on over to The Lindbergh Conspiracies feed fo...

19 Mai 43min

What the Founders Really Meant to Say

Robert Parkinson is a historian at SUNY Binghamton who has spent 25 years studying the American Revolutionary period. His new book, Tyrants and Rogues, arrives just in time for the 250th anniversary o...

13 Mai 57min

Eli Lake and David Rose: The UK Censorship Machine Eats Itself

David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns for freedom of speech. The FSU will publish a new report examining ...

1 Mai 51min

Is This War Justified? Eli Lake Debates Iran with Robert Wright

Eli Lake joins Robert Wright over at his podcast NonZero, which offers “conversations with a series of people who have nothing in common except that program host Robert Wright is curious about what th...

16 Apr 1h 56min

Why Iran’s Reform Movement Failed

Arash Azizi lived through the democracy movement in Iran before he wrote about it. Now a historian at Yale, he joins Eli Lake to trace the arc from former president Mohammad Khatami’s unlikely rise to...

9 Apr 54min

Eli Lake and Haviv Rettig Gur on Why Iran's Regime Is Hard to Kill

What does it actually take to break a regime built on martyrdom? Eli Lake sits down with Haviv Rettig Gur — host of Ask Haviv Anything and one of the deepest thinkers on the Middle East — to assess w...

31 Mar 1h 27min