Ron Charles
I'm pleased to be joined today on Writers at Work by Ron Charles, the book critic best known for his reviews published in the Washington Post, his former employer. If you know Ron's work, it goes without saying that his unceremonious exit from the Post represents another blow to the relevance of bo…
Books Are Dying (Again)
“It truly is becoming a desert right now for book publicists.” — Bethanne Patrick
A couple of weeks ago, there was an “absolute bloodbath“ at The Washington Post with hundreds of workers laid off and the book section totally gutted. Ron Charles, the beloved fiction editor, is gone. So is Becca Roth…
Culture Gabfest - Taylor Swift’s Messy Maximalism
On this week’s episode, the panel is first joined by Slate’s music critic, Carl Wilson, to puzzle over The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated 11th studio album. Stuffed with 31 tracks, the two-part album is a departure from the billionaire pop star’s otherwise perfectly craf…
What Really Happened at the Washington Post (w/ Becca Rothfeld)
🌹 Use the code "15OFF" for a discount on Current Affairs: https://www.currentaffairs.org/membership
Becca Rothfeld is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an editor at The Point, and the former nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post, where she wrote until the paper eliminated its books section…
'Looksmaxxing’ is the dark new trend and Australian men are leading it
"Looksmaxxing" is a trend on social media where, as the name suggests, men aim to "maximise" their appearance in sometimes extreme ways. There are tales of breaking legs in order to be taller, and talk of "bone smashing" – where young men claim they are hammering their faces to heighten their cheek…
Let's Not Care About Aging Gracefully
What does it really mean to “age gracefully”—and who decided that was the goal in the first place?
We unpack the cultural pressure on women to look younger for longer—and what we can do to resist it. From celebrity beauty standards and the billion-dollar anti-aging industry to the “mask of aging,”…
Scoring systems, games, and value capture, with Thi Nguyen and Scott Black
How can scoring systems make games feel so joyful, fluid, and alive, yet drain the life from public institutions and everyday work? This is one of the central questions of a new book by University of Utah philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. In The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, published t…
Becca Rothfeld (with Herman Melville and John Updike)
In 2026, the Washington Post closed its book review section, where the critic Becca Rothfeld worked. She soon became a staff writer at The New Yorker, which recently published an essay of hers about the loss of book criticism in general-interest newspapers. “A newspaper," Rothfeld wrote, "is—or oug…
The intangibility of ‘good taste,' from literature to food
What does it mean to have 'good taste'? And what would it take to develop it? This hour, we talk about taste and discernment. Plus, a look at flavor and why some things taste good.
GUESTS:
Henry Oliver: Writes the literary Substack “The Common Reader,” and is the author of Second Act: What L…
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