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 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

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    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.

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    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.

  • Episode 48: The Ultimate Revolution

    November 22nd, 2022  |  1 hr 56 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by Becca Rothfeld to discuss Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and Sheila Heti's That Longing for a Holy Completeness (from her novel MOTHERHOOD)

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    Episode 47: The Democracy Engineering Complex

    October 18th, 2022  |  58 mins 27 secs

    Phil is joined by Sam Kimbriel, the founding director of Aspen's Philosophy & Society Initiative, to discuss Sam's essay "What the Democracy Engineering Complex Misses"

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    Episode 46: Sunday Morning and God's Grandeur

    September 19th, 2022  |  1 hr 12 mins

    To celebrate Phil's birthday, Jake joins Phil to discuss Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur."

  • Episode 45: Spielberg and Roxy Music

    July 21st, 2022  |  1 hr 58 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by culture critic Armond White to discuss Make Spielberg Great Again and Roxy Music's 1979 album Manifesto

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    Episode 44: We're All Stars Now In the Dope Show

    June 17th, 2022  |  1 hr 38 mins

  • Episode 43: Tradition and the Individual Talent

    May 28th, 2022  |  1 hr 17 mins

    Jake and Phil discuss T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", and James Joyce's "A Mother"

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    Episode 42: The Transmogrifications of Gary Leib

    April 11th, 2022  |  1 hr 9 mins

    Phil is joined by Peter Catapano, of the New York Times, and graphic novelist Jess Ruliffson to discuss Peter's essay on the life and work of cartoonist Gary Leib

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    Episode 41: To Be Incarnational

    March 5th, 2022  |  1 hr 45 mins

    Jake and Phil are joined by the great poet Tom Sleigh to discuss his essay "To Be Incarnational," on the World War I poetry of David Jones, as well as Tom's poem "In Which a Spider Weaves a Web on My Computer Screen"