The Daily12 Jan 2025

The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’

“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, Gerald Fremlin, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up.”

The judgment would prove premature. In July 2024, two months after Munro’s death at age 92, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of her three daughters, revealed in an essay in The Toronto Star that Fremlin had sexually abused her.

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.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(2937)

Will Michigan Rewrite the Rules of Democratic Politics?

In Michigan, a race for U.S. Senate is not only testing the growing appeal of left-wing populism. It could also be a turning point in a long-running debate among Democratic voters about the importance...

4 Aug 40min

The Tangled Tale of the Tate Brothers and the Trumps

Warning: This episode contains strong language. Over the past decade, the Tate brothers have built a global empire around pornography, hypermasculinity and overt misogyny. At the same time, they have ...

3 Aug 39min

After Losing Her Limbs, Our Cooking Columnist Returns to the Kitchen

For decades, the kitchen was the centerpiece of Yewande Komolafe’s life. She spent long hours there, first as a restaurant cook and later as a recipe developer. But though she loved the often-intense ...

2 Aug 31min

The Fight Tearing Apart Silicon Valley

For years, a debate has been simmering in Silicon Valley over the right way to build artificial intelligence. Should it be open and free for anyone to use, or should we tightly control how it’s made a...

31 Jul 26min

Europe Is Burning

This summer, wildfires have been raging across Europe. France and Spain have been hit particularly badly, with hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated and entire communities devastated. Chico Harla...

30 Jul 29min

Israel, AIPAC and Difficult Questions for Democrats

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group known as AIPAC, has spent a record amount of money in this year’s midterm elections to either oust or support candidates based...

29 Jul 39min

The Iranians Who Want More War

Fractures in Tehran are pitting a faction favoring negotiation with Washington against hard-liners who oppose making a deal with the United States. Guest: Abdi Latif Dahir, a Middle East correspond...

28 Jul 29min

What A.I. Is Actually Doing to the Economy

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, people are getting more nervous about how it could change the economy and their jobs. Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for The New Yor...

27 Jul 34min