Manifesto!

A Podcast

About the show

Your regular visit to the archives of vanity, where men and women who stopped making myths turned to issuing commandments.

Your guides for this journey are the writers Phil Klay and Jacob Siegel, along with their trusty engineer, Jacqui Rigazio

May you continue to be a person.

Manifesto! Is now sponsored by Fairfield University, a Jesuit University in Fairfield Connecticut. Fairfield’s mission is to develop the creative intellectual potential of students and to foster in them ethical and religious values and a sense of social responsibility. Phil also teaches at Fairfield, in both their undergraduate English department and in their Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. We’re very pleased to be associated with Fairfield, and thank them for their sponsorship.

Episodes

  • Episode 64: Power of the Powerless and the Velvet Underground

    February 27th, 2024  |  1 hr 22 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by the novelist and essayist Jared Marcel Pollen to discuss Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” and The Velvet Underground’s second album, White Light/White Heat

  • Episode 63: How Money Culture Hurts the American Family and Girls

    January 26th, 2024  |  1 hr 12 mins

    Jake and Phil discuss "How Money Culture Hurts the American Family," by Ian Marcus Corbin, and episode seven of the first season of Girls

  • Episode 62: Last Men and Women: George Scialabba and the Challenge of Modernity

    December 7th, 2023  |  1 hr 20 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined live at Fairfield University by the great critic and essayist George Scialabba to discuss Last Men and Women

  • Episode 61: Red Music and Mal Waldron

    November 27th, 2023  |  1 hr 8 mins

    Jake and Phil discuss Josef Skvorecky's "Red Music," an account of playing jazz under Nazism and Communism, alongside Mal Waldron's "Mal Waldron Plays Erik Satie"

  • Episode 60: The Palestinian People and the Western Observer

    October 30th, 2023  |  1 hr 1 min

    Phil talks with poet and translator Philip Metres about the current conflict, his poem "Remorse for Temperate Speech," as well as his book "Returning to Jaffa."

  • Episode 59: Israel and Hamas

    October 28th, 2023  |  1 hr 53 mins

    Phil asks Jake about the recent conflict in Israel, and they take listener questions.

  • Episode 58: The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu

    September 27th, 2023  |  31 mins 24 secs

    Phil is joined by Sam Kimbriel, director of the Aspen Institute's Philosophy and Society Initiative, and Jennifer Shyue, a Spanish language literary translator, to discuss her recently published translation of Augusto Higa Oshiro's The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu.

  • Episode 57: Some Lying and Some BS

    September 10th, 2023  |  1 hr 34 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by Walter Kirn to discuss Kirn's essay "The Bullshit" alongside Mark Twain's "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It"

  • Episode 56: The Secular Saint

    August 9th, 2023  |  1 hr 35 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by Santiago Ramos, a contributing writer to Commonweal Magazine, to discuss Michael Novak's The Secular Saint and the epilogue to Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel The Elementary Particles.

  • Episode 55: The Great Mating Debate

    July 12th, 2023  |  1 hr 18 mins

    Phil is joined by Becca Rothfeld, BD McClay, and Jon Baskin to discuss Norman Rush's 1991 novel Mating, and whether it offers a roadmap for love in the 21st century.

  • Episode 54: Nirvana and The Trials of the Young

    June 13th, 2023  |  1 hr 20 mins

    Phil is joined by the great novelist, short story writer and essayist Mary Gaitskill to discuss Gaitskill's essay "The Trials of the Young" in the most recent Liberties Journal, alongside the Nirvana songs "Drain You" and "Moist Vagina."

  • Episode 53: Poe's Law and Philip K. Dick's Faith of Our Fathers

    May 16th, 2023  |  1 hr 36 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by Gurwinder Bhogal to discuss Poe's Law and Philip K. Dick's Faith of Our Fathers

  • Episode 52: True Believers and the Case of the Writer Turned Congressman

    April 13th, 2023  |  1 hr 51 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by former Michigan Congressman Peter Meijer to discuss longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, and the poem “On Reading Crowds and Power,” by Geoffrey Hill.

  • Episode 51: A Public Address, A Colloquium, or Maybe Just a Q&A

    March 21st, 2023  |  1 hr 9 mins

    Jake and Phil answer questions from our listeners.

  • Episode 50: El Greco, Picasso, and The Pleasures of Ignorance

    February 22nd, 2023  |  1 hr 8 mins

    Jake and Phil discuss Aldous Huxley's "Meditation on El Greco", and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

  • Episode 49: Angry Popes and Architecture

    January 26th, 2023  |  1 hr 33 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by John Davis, an environmental and architectural historian at the Knowlton School at Ohio State, to discuss Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope Pius X's encyclical against the modernists, and La Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, Spain.