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
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Episode 73: Is America Ready for a Religious Revival?
November 26th, 2024 | 1 hr 30 mins
Jake and Phil are joined by Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of the forthcoming Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, to discuss Ross' essay "Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback" and Christian Wiman's 2008 essay in the American Scholar, "My Bright Abyss"
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Episode 72: Revolutionary Art and Coat-Snatching Ghosts
October 28th, 2024 | 1 hr 13 mins
Jake and Phil discuss Leon Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" and Gogol's "The Overcoat"
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Episode 71: Politics and Merciless Nature
September 27th, 2024 | 49 mins 14 secs
Phil and Jake discuss Joan Didion's "Politics in the New Normal America" and Robinson Jeffers "Fire on the Hills"
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Episode 70: Punk and Metal
August 30th, 2024 | 1 hr 31 mins
Jake and Phil are joined by Nate DiMeo, podcaster and author of the forthcoming The Memory Palace, to discuss the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, Steve Albini's The Problem with Music, and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
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Episode 69: Should We Bring Children Into Existence?
July 25th, 2024 | 2 hrs 4 mins
Phil and Jake are joined by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the authors of What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, to discuss David Benatar's 1997 paper "Why It Is Better Never to Come into Existence," alongside Paul Schrader's 2017 film First Reformed.
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Episode 68: The Serious Artist
June 28th, 2024 | 1 hr 48 mins
Jake and Phil are joined by the poet and critic Alice Gribbin to discuss Ezra Pound's The Serious Artist and Eliot Weinberger's The Life of Tu Fu
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Episode 67: Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety
May 30th, 2024 | 59 mins 17 secs
Jake and Phil are joined by Sam Kimbriel, director of the Aspen Institute's Philosophy and Society Initiative, to discuss Wallace Stegner's 1987 novel Crossing to Safety.
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Episode 66: Hobbits, Goblins and the Very Adult World of Fairy-Stories
April 29th, 2024 | 1 hr 23 mins
Jake and Phil are joined by the novelist and chronicler of post-secular religious movements, Tara Isabella Burton, to discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's 1939 essay “On Fairy-Stories” and Christina Rossetti's 1862 poem, "Goblin Market."
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Episode 65: Orwell and Ukraine
March 30th, 2024 | 1 hr 11 mins
Phil and Jake are joined by the Matt Gallagher, author of Daybreak, to discuss George Orwell's "Looking Back on the Spanish War, and Benjamin Busch's photographs from Ukraine, "Nine Dialogues: Conflict in Context"
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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
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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
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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
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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"
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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."
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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.
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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.