The Critic and Her Publics

Aug 04, 2026 — "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 psychoanalyst, has...

Jul 28, 2026 — "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 attention to...

Jul 21, 2026 — "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. Talking to them...

Jul 14, 2026 — 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 progressive...

Aug 30, 2025 — 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 up their...

No transcript available.

Aug 29, 2025 — 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, because so...

No transcript available.

Aug 28, 2025 — 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 Nights,...

No transcript available.

Aug 27, 2025 — 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 translation...

No transcript available.

Aug 26, 2025 — In this episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, the translators discuss the fraught emotional condition of their work: the sense that not only is their work shameful and grotesque but that they are too, for daring to attempt it. Translation...

No transcript available.

Aug 25, 2025 — In this second episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we explore beginnings. Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence of a text. First sentences are so...

No transcript available.