Andrew O'Hagan: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many loser ...  Show more

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ...  Show more

Robert reads Andrew Tate's horrendous book to Shereen Lani Younes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

Bad Book Club returns to review the Twilight fanfiction turned kinky nightmare that captivated suburban moms everywhere. This one has it all — a clinically insane man who tells our protagonist to "stay away" while constantly stalking her, the worst stock POC best friend character ...  Show more

It may come as a surprise to some, but "50 Shades of Grey" isn't all that taboo. In this Summer Short, Cristen and Caroline discuss several classic erotica titles and whether BDSM themes are bad for women.