The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. 

Subscribe to The Critic and Her Publics, available wherever you get your podcasts!

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From the episode:

Merve Emre: A friend of mine described Andrea Long Chu’s approach to criticism as perfecting a rigorous negativity. We all know how deeply fun it can be to hate on something for long and intense periods of time, but as any good analyst or theorist of emotion might point out, there always exists a hard kernel of love in hate. It’s an abiding love for the sheer act of thinking that I always sense in Andrea’s work. She’s this year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the book critic at New York Magazine. Her book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. I’m sure many of you have read her blockbuster reviews of books by Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and most recently Zadie Smith, as well as her essays on Phantom of the Opera and—my favorite—on the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. I’m very happy to have her as our inaugural guest. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea Long Chu: Thank you for having me.

For a full transcript and details of the piece Andrea responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books [link]

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Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females: an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.

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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Wesley Morris has served as critic at large at The New York Times since 2015, covering film, politics, and pop culture. He joins this week to discuss this year’s Academy Award nominations.

At the top, we discuss the omission of Greta Gerwig from the Best Director category, former Secretary Clinton on Barbie-gate, the ‘perversely effective’ nature of Killers of the Flower Moon, and the ways in which Bradley Cooper’s Maestro upends the traditional biopic. Wesley then reflects on his early adventures in moviegoing, the indie film boom of the late ‘90s, the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, what the Best Picture nominations of 1988 can tell us about 2023’s slate, and the erosion of the ‘middle’ across film and culture.

In the back-half: Todd Haynes’ beguiling new film May December, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, the Academy’s fraught relationship to diversity, the function of Wesley’s work in 2024, and a reading of his moving, personal review about Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: What we’ve lost is the ‘middle’ of movies, the drama or comedy that has no great aspirations. It was not made to win or be nominated for awards. I want to try to unpack how—and why—we’re here. Do you see any parallels between the decline in film criticism with the decline in filmmaking? Did one precipitate the other?

Wesley Morris: Well, that’s a more complicated proposition, because the decline in film criticism is related to the decline of periodicals where film criticism thrived. I think the two things are related but not necessarily causal of each other. I do, however, think that in the last fifteen years, there’s been a sort of downgrading of what a review can do and should do. You know, there’s this tension between coming up with a review—liking something a lot, they love that—or really panning something. When I worked at The Boston Globe, for instance, we gave things stars. If I was like, “Killers of the Flower Moon: two stars” that would have superseded anything I would have necessarily wrote about it. That middle place, the middle of moviemaking is gone, a kind of mixed criticism… people have lost patience for that. That a movie can’t have things that work and don’t work. The disappearance of the middle— there are so many middles that have disappeared. Middle ground, middlebrow, middle class. There’s either, or. There’s very little room for not even debate and disagreement, but just complexity. I find it really interesting that none of the ten nominees on this Best Picture list include May December. Did you see that movie?

SF: I love it.

WM: Yeah, I did not the first time I saw it. Then I went and saw it again, and was like, “What was my problem?” I saw it the next day. That’s a movie that has so much going on. It’s so of a piece with where we are right now. It’s not telling you what it’s doing or how it’s feeling or what it even is. It’s like the weird touchless-ness of Todd Haynes, even though there is so much touching in this movie— the music is touching, the butterfly metaphors are touching you. His fingerprints are all over this thing, but it still feels like the hand guiding it is completely invisible and these characters are just doing whatever it is that they’ve been set on this earth to do. To sit down and talk about this movie and what is happening here… it is really deep and really satisfying to unpack it or argue with people about it. Like, I leave a movie and do not trust my response to it. And in the case of May December, I just went the next day and saw it again. It was like seeing something dead come to life right before your eyes. I found that expansion of my mind exhilarating.

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Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Novelist Ed Park joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the role of alternate histories and counternarratives in popular culture, public record, and the general consciousness, via his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. Park talks about depicting and reimagining well known events and eras, including the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910-1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-World War II division of Korea into North and South, which became sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to until 1953. He reflects on writing about more recent history, as well as his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The conversation suggests that positive alternate timelines, like the one Park creates, invite readers to learn more about actual events, whereas a more pernicious spin on the past may edit for the benefit of a particular group. Park reads from the novel.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Same Bed Different Dreams begins in a speculative future in which a writer ends up reading a manuscript by another, who is an older man known as Echo. That manuscript is an alternative history of Korea, that is kind of an interesting echo, and that manuscript itself appears within your book. And that manuscript is called Same Bed Different Dreams: Being a True Account of the Korean Provisional Government. Since today we’re talking about alternative histories, we’re going to focus first on this part of your book. So of course, that true account is true and also not, and as one of your characters notes, Americans know almost nothing about Korea, despite U.S. involvement with important parts of Korean history. 

I thought that for the benefit of our listeners, we would just start with some basic events. So you write about and reference the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-WWII division of Korea into the north, administered by the Soviet Union, and the South, administered by the U.S.; the North and South becoming sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. And going past that there are other incidents as well. Why did you decide to start with a period right before the occupation and the rest of the colonial era?

Ed Park: I started writing the novel, and one of the narrators was Korean American and had some of my biographical background. And, I’m essentially a comic novelist—or at least I think of myself as one—but as I wrote, I realized I was getting into something that’s both very important to me, and something that didn’t appear at all in Personal Days. Personal Days was kind of a dark office comedy. There’s a very small reference to ethnicity at, like, two points in the book. Part of that was because I had a very clear idea what that book was going to be, and it was going to be about the office. 

I almost streamlined it to focus on the comic aspects. And with Same Bed, which took about nine years to write, just the fact that this was kind of an Ed Park-like narrator, that should have made it easy for me in some ways, but then I realized people don’t really know about the history of modern Korea. People will have heard of the Korean War, but I bet you most Americans don’t know when that was – it’s called “The Forgotten War,” it’s commonly labeled that here – and why should they? I feel like even I, somebody who, you know, my parents came in the late 60s, I was born in Buffalo. It’s hard to get that information. You can say the education system should be better or whatever, but it’s a very complicated history. 

I’m interested in lots of periods of Korean history, but I didn’t want to do like a Charlie Kaufman adaptation and start at the beginning of all Korean history, but I thought giving a clear sense of Korea before it became a colony, and leading up to the Korean War, and then of course, it extends beyond by a couple of decades. This is mainly because I realized that it would place the narrator and some of the other characters more firmly in the reader’s mind in a historical sense. What are they? How is it that there are Korean people in America? What’s he doing in Buffalo? 

This is something, as a kid, sometimes I would think like, what am I doing? Why am I here? I mean, I love Buffalo in many ways, but especially in the 70s and 80s, you kind of stand out.  Every other generation in my family was in Korea, speaking Korean, and here I am speaking English. And I understand some Korean but it’s fading. 

I’ll say one more thing, which is that a lot of what I know about Korea isn’t through books or through pop culture, it comes from my parents. My dad would tell me about his early life. He’s old enough that when he first went to school he had to learn Japanese. The school was conducted in Japanese. He’s old enough that he knew the chaos post WWII leading up to the Korean War. And he’s old enough to have been in these very harrowing moments during the Korean War. In a way, it’s helped me understand the characters better and the situation, and also, my parents and myself, I suppose.

Whitney Terrell: So the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) began by resisting Japanese occupation, and a version of it plays a significant role in your book. Can you just talk to us about the actual KPG? 

EP: For various reasons, Japan wants Korea, and they annex it in 1905, and it becomes a full-fledged colony in 1910. 1919 is when the last real king of Korea dies, and there’s going to be a mass display of mourning. But what happens instead is the Koreans organize all across the peninsula—remember, it’s not North and South yet, it’s all one country—and they form a peaceful protest, and there’s a declaration of independence. That’s in March of 1919. Just a little bit after that, the Korean Provisional Government forms, and the headquarters is in Shanghai, China. So a lot of these members are in exile. They choose as their president a man named Sigmund Rhee, who is already in the U.S. at this point. He’s mostly living in Hawaii, but he’s kind of been all over. He’s one of the major historical figures in the book. He’s elected in exile, and they don’t really have any power. 

It’s a figurehead government, and they just want to publicize what’s happening, and that Korea is its own nation, its own people. I believe I first read about them in this modern Korean history class that I took in grad school. This is like in the early to mid-90s. I got a lot out of that class. But somehow that idea fascinated me, and the word “provisional” fascinated me—that adjective is so full of possibility. As a fiction writer, I just thought it would be fun to play with, and it took me 30 years to follow up. 

But my KPG is based in that original reality. What I do in the book is imagine it lasting beyond 1948, and also rounding up people who were not at all part of the KPG. Sigmund Rhee was definitely part of it and some of the other figures, but a lot of them, even the Korean ones, I just shoehorn them in. When I realized the KPG was going to be in this book, it gave me a tremendous amount of freedom and inspiration to talk about these different people who have fascinated me for a while.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo. Photograph of Ed Park by Sylvia Plachy.

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Ed Park

Same Bed Different Dreams • Personal Days • Weird Menace

Others:

Charlie Kaufman • Philip Roth • Richard E. Kim • Jack London on Korea • Thomas Pynchon • BTS

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?

Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

In 1817 and 1818, the discovery of two sets of Czech manuscripts helped fuel the Czech National Revival, as promoters of Czech nationalism trumpeted these centuries-old works as foundational texts of a national mythology. There was only one problem: they were completely forged. In this episode, Jacke talks to David Cooper about his new book, The Czech Manuscripts: Forgery, Translation, and National Myth, which looks at why people were so eager to fall for this hoax – and what happened when the truth was learned. PLUS Jesse Kavadlo, President of the Don DeLillo Society and editor of Don DeLillo in Context, discusses his choice for the last book he will ever read.

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Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Megan Hunter’s 2018 novel, The End We Start From, has been adapted for the screen by director Mahalia Belo and stars Jodie Comer. We asked Hunter about the experience.

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How does it feel to see your characters come to life on screen?

It’s an experience that’s very hard to describe; there’s something genuinely life changing about seeing aspects of your imagination take physical form in that way. When I walked onto the set of the flooded flat (which was a real house) I cried—it was somehow exactly as I’d imagined it, down to the water marks on the walls.

There was a real shift in my experience from that moment on, the whole process having an emotional force I was unprepared for, a kind of reliving not only of my experience of writing but of aspects of my own life. Then when I first saw the film I again realized some of its images were just as I saw them when as I was writing; there was something haunting in this, like an echo of a memory filtered through fiction and then the lens of a camera years later.

For all this talk of recognition it is so important to say that the film is something completely new—a work of art in its own right—so beautifully directed by Mahalia Belo, brilliantly written by Alice Birch, and with stunning performances by Jodie Comer and many others. I feel extremely lucky to have had my work adapted—and transformed—by such a dream team of visionary people. I am aware that it’s quite unusual to feel such faith that an adaptation will retain the spirit of the book, but I always did. So each glimpse—and then each viewing of the film—has been a confirmation of this.

But then I also love the parts where the film diverges from the book and adds something new and unexpected. There’s this whole section towards the end which expresses something visually about a woman (and baby) in nature that the book couldn’t have done. There is a scale and beauty there that is unique to the film. I loved seeing that: it felt like something I hadn’t seen before on screen and that it was exciting entirely in its own right, cinematically.

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What’s the best part of having your work adapted for film? 

I think it’s that sense of the work opening out—in new directions, to new people, having your story re-imagined and then worked on in so many different ways—by another writer initially and then by casting, costume, set design, cinematography and so on. There is something magical and thrilling about this in its breadth and opportunity.

When I visited the set I was astonished to see, in person, just how much work goes into every single element, and by so many different teams of people. The collaboration is happening through the work itself, seeing your work become part of someone else’s work, witnessing people finding their own meanings and perspectives within the story.

This process has also helped to awaken my own interest in adaptation and in writing for screen—I’m currently adapting my second novel, The Harpy, for television and also working on other screen projects, and have discovered a real love of this form of writing and collaboration.

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What’s your favorite book to movie adaptation (other than your own)?

I am partial to The Price of Salt/Carol—I read the book first, swiftly followed by the film, and the two are somehow joined in my mind while still remaining distinct in their own identities. There is a dialogue between the forms, a way that the film manages to express the book’s essence visually, and most of all a subtle emotional potency (particularly in the final scene!) that can be read between the two: it’s as though you can look at them simultaneously, without discord or contradiction, or (as in the case of lesser adaptations), that awful sense of something falling short, being unable to capture the original. It’s a failure to achieve its own life, I think, this sense, to literally live up to its source material. But Carol does create its own reality, while holding the heart of the book close.

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What notes or pieces of inspiration for the story/characters did you share with the creators?

I met with Alice Birch before she wrote the script—I’m a huge admirer of hers—and one of the things we discussed was names; in the book everyone is known by their initials, and the narrator is nameless. Alice asked me how I felt about this in relation to an adaptation, and we discussed its importance in giving the book a certain universal, but also mysterious and perhaps even timeless quality.

This was kept in the script and the film, as well as the book’s emphasis on the name of the baby: Zeb. He is the only one with a name, and it’s wonderful to see how many babies played “Zeb” in the movie! I also loved seeing the credits roll and the long list of initials at the end. It felt playful but also fitting, just as I hope it does in the book.

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How was your relationship with the book changed during the process of adaptation?

There is a sense in which the work becomes less personal to me, in this form, and I welcomed that—it was interesting to have another stage in the publishing process, from the intense attachment of the writing of the book, to publication when there is a loss, in some sense, of the book to the world, and then this rare opportunity for another stage, when the book becomes something else, when there is a metamorphosis into an entirely new form.

I am always wary of the book/parenthood analogy but I can see something here in the process of letting go, seeing something become independent from you but always with that origin, that root in your creation. There is also something personal in this for me as the book has ‘grown up’ alongside my children—they were 3 and 6 when I wrote the book and will be 11 and 14 when the film comes out…

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Over the past decade, writer and actor Dan Levy rose to prominence for his work on Schitt’s Creek. After co-creating the series with his father, Eugene Levy, he turned to a more personal project.

Said project is his heartfelt directorial debut, a film entitled Good Grief. At the top of our conversation, Dan shares the origin of this story  and we discuss the importance of friendship, his experience working as a director, and a pivotal, full-circle moment from his time in London. Then, we discuss how he charted his course as a co-host on MTV Canada, the red carpet experience that clarified his path forward, and his ultimate arrival at making Schitt’s Creek.

On the back-half, we unpack the pure, timeless nature of the hit series, Dan’s journey to making Good Grief after the show’s momentous conclusion, a powerful scene from the film, the universality of loss, and the responses that encourage him to continue creating.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

In Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, she describes relocating to Sonoma County from San Francisco in 2017, just as the drought-driven wildfire seasons began to accelerate. The turbulence of the years since the pandemic and the out-of-control California wildfires started changed her life, and inspired and shaped her new memoir.

“When the pandemic started, I was working on a novel,” she explains. “Cut to three years later and I’ve just published a memoir. A lot has happened! The Last Fire Season takes place in 2020, which as we all know was also the first year of the pandemic. The events in the book arguably began in 2017, when I moved from the city to the woods during a different horrific wildfire season. At that time, I also began experiencing the health crisis that has accompanied me ever since, in the form of chronic pain, which also plays a role in the book. So 2020 wasn’t my first wildfire experience, but it was a turning point for me in my awareness of fire as a permanent presence in my life, and of the wildfire crisis as one that is linked to others.

“Unfortunately,” she adds, “the years since 2020 have continued to be excellent case examples of what’s often called polycrisis. With the memoir, I’m interested in finding a way to portray life amid all these shifting baselines while also exploring the context—whether historical, ecological, or personal.” Our email conversation took place within miles of each other, in Sonoma County. The fact that I, too, had experienced the chaos of Northern California wildfires coming in the night, with no warning, no option but to run, shortly after relocating from an urban environment (Brooklyn) brought with it an appreciation of how well she captures these intense, nearly indescribable moments. The Last Fire Season is both heart-stoppingly dramatic and profoundly rooted in an understanding of where we fit in the natural world.

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Jane Ciabattari: How did you decide to structure the book by months, from August through October, according to the dramatic turns of the fire season of 2020 in California?

Manjula Martin: There’s a note I wrote myself at one point in the drafting process that I tacked up above my desk. It says “just write what happened.” The book weaves together a few different threads—the fire crisis, my own bodily pain, and the larger polycrisis of this moment in time. So from the beginning I knew I needed a simple, straightforward structure. A chronological timeline is a classic for a reason!

In addition to following the months of that fire season, each section of the book is inspired by the qualities of a different natural element, with Fire as a constant thread or presence. This concept could easily get a bit precious, so I don’t call a lot of overt attention to it on the page, but it was an important part of my writing process. You’ll see it show up in things like chapter names, and the little icons at the start of each section (which are actually images from element-inspired tattoos that I have, thanks to the book’s graphic designer!).

JC: One chilling aspect of your fire season chronology is how close fire comes. You describe driving in the Sierra “with spotty cell reception over an unpopulated mountain some part of which was already on fire,” with a towering cloud of pyrocumulus smoke visible out the window, to the summit of some 8,300 feet, and coming down the other side safely. A suspenseful trip to read about! And the helicopter rescue of a group of tourists at the reservoir near where you had hiked the day before, “three hundred vacationers…corralled toward by lake by flames on all sides.” (The Creek Fire “surged through 20,000 acres within the span of a day.”) How did you describe the experience from inside the fire? Did you take notes at the time? How did your fire narrative evolve?

MM: Yeah, during those weeks there was such a sense that fire was following me everywhere I went. Yet, interestingly, I didn’t encounter fire face-to-face until I formed a direct relationship with it while learning about prescribed fire, later in the narrative.

In the scene you mention, I actually took a video with my phone, with Miles Davis audible on the car stereo and everything. That moment felt so strangely beautiful and terrible at the same time, I knew I’d later want to prove to myself it happened. Of course, it turned out I didn’t need the video, because it was imprinted permanently in my amygdala! When it came to fire scenes I wasn’t personally present for, I started with my own memory of hearing about them, and then went to research—local news, social media, interviews, and similar reporting sources.

One challenge I encountered in writing the book was portraying fire itself. In the first chapter, I write about how wildfire is always described using these monstrous, ravenous verbs, and so throughout the book I play with different ways of portraying fire, using vocabulary that evolves and changes as my understanding of fire changes throughout the story. This is where you’ll see the elements show up too—in the way fire is embodied, sometimes moving like water, sometimes acting ethereal, and so on.

JC: You have another story you set out to tell after you relocated from San Francisco to rural Sonoma County—the story of how your garden and the forest around it had become your “companion in damage and renewal.” How did you figure a way to weave that into your ongoing fire season narrative? Or vice versa?

MM: I knew I wanted to include the story of my body in the story of the fires, in part because they happened simultaneously (“write what happened”!) but also because these crises are intrinsically connected. Like the rest of the natural world, women’s bodies have historically been idealized as both fonts of fertility and objects of purity, ripe for possession—with harmful and lasting results. Both these stories involve site-specific injuries caused by larger, systemic harms. In the case of the land on which I live, the harms are the result of colonization, extraction, and an exploitative relationship with nature.

In the case of my body, the systems at play include a for-profit healthcare industry and a sociopolitical system obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive health. The interweaving of these two storylines in the book actually came very naturally once I realized that the place where they connected for me—physically as well as metaphorically—was in my garden. So the scenes in the garden became the key to interlacing all this stuff. I think I figured this all out somewhere in the third draft!

JC: How did you research the parts of your story based on Native American use of fire focused on the overall health of the ecosystem (including “prescribed fire,” sometimes referred to as “good fire”) and on renewing important cultural and survival resources?

MM: In my research I read widely, of course, but I think the ideal way to learn about fire is to have relationships with living people who are out there every day putting fire on the land. Traditional ecological knowledge, including that of fire, has been violently suppressed since colonization. As a result, the archives of institutions (many of which were colonialist institutions from inception) aren’t always going to show you the whole story.

So if I was able to interview a person or go visit a place, instead of quote a study, I tried to do so. Some of the awesome Indigenous fire practitioners I had the pleasure of learning from included the staff of TERA—Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance, in Lake County—and a fire expert named Margo Robbins, who is cofounder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council, based in the Yurok nation in Northern California.

JC: How did you come up with the concept of “future memories,” in which you jump ahead into another moment? For instance, you describe standing in your yard with Sasha Berleman, a fire scientist, wildland firefighter and nonprofit director, looking at wildflowers that have grown in a cleared area. She asks for seeds to sprinkle in burn areas, and says, “Good fire changes fear into action.” All of this is a future moment inserted into the ongoing narrative.

MM: I could talk endlessly about memoir structure choices! But for the sake of brevity, I’ll say that from the beginning I knew I’d place the main narrative in what I’m calling a hard past-tense. (There is probably a better grammar word for this but I do not know it.) That choice was necessary for me to gain distance from the book’s events, which were ongoing in my life, enough so that I could successfully write about them.

So the “past memory” scenes—which are told in the present tense, as are other memories—began as a bit of a formal trick. I needed a way to work in the research and interviews that I conducted after the events of the main storyline. For me, with memoir, these kinds of decisions about the book’s formal structure all serve a purpose: they remind me to question my own perception of time, history, what is and isn’t fixed, and who—and what language—decides that.

JC: How have your attitudes toward fire changed in the course of these years of experiencing and writing about California’s wildfires?

MM: Drastically. The more I learn about fire; the more I see and interact with fire; the more I understand the histories that brought fire to play its current role in the landscape and my life—the less afraid I feel.

JC: How has being in nature, fostering beauty through gardening—“linking” your body more closely to the body of this place” where you lived, served as a healing process?

MM: I think the healing I’ve found in gardening is in the ways gardening makes space for ambivalence. In many ways this book is trying to push against binaries—fire is bad or good, nature is innocent or ravaged, etc. That includes the idea of being “healed by nature,” as well as the concept of being “damaged” at all. My body is all of those things, all the time. It’s also a damn miracle. And that is something I am learning directly from the land. Gardening allows me to inhabit pain and pleasure, powerlessness and control, joy and grief, life and death, care and violence—all of it.

JC: What was the most difficult aspect of writing this memoir?

MM: Living through the events of the book, then immediately signing up to live through the events of the book over and over, in my head, for the next few years, was in retrospect perhaps not a super healthy thing to do! I’m partly joking, but the writing process was more difficult than I anticipated—psychologically because I was still living through it, and physically because of my chronic health issues.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

MM: Everyone says you’re supposed to start your next book before your current book comes out, so you’ll have something to obsess about that is within your control, and also, you know, a career. But I’m not sure when one is supposed to do that. In some ways it feels like I just finished final edits! Last week I did finally have time to clean out my little writing lair for the first time since finishing the memoir, and I put up a big sheet of butcher paper and began mapping a new novel.

The new novel is (roughly) a multi-decade narrative about two sisters who take very different, sometimes surprising, paths in life. It’s about women’s relationships, solitude, and the subversive potential of art during the rise of fascism. So, not at all timely, haha!

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The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin is available from Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

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Today, Kate Brody discusses her literary crime debut, Rabbit Hole, inhabiting and subverting the crime genre, writing sex scenes, writing men, the narrative use of a gun in the novel, what drives us to consume true crime, and more!

From the episode:

Kate Brody: I feel like the book does well with the lit fic people who are closet crime people. […] Story is just so much of who we are as human beings. I was a big crime reader as a kid; I still love a really well-written crime novel. I love the Tana French books, and the writing is beautiful. Any kind of genre fiction [in MFA programs] is the ugly stepchild, but you see books that are doing it really well, and you think, okay, there’s no reason why the quality of the writing can’t be where I want it to be, and also work in this space. I was never going to write a straight down the middle crime novel.

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Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jill McCorkle about her new story collection, Old Crimes.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I saw a lot of nostalgia in your stories, not necessarily in the stories but the impact on the reader.  Most of your characters seem to be wistful or have important memories of times before cell phones and of Esso gas stations and you brought up Charlotte’s Web a few times and those first indelible memories that help shape us.  

Jill McCorkle: I think there is this longing for the purity of those early beliefs and hopes and dreams. Obviously, there are a lot of schoolteachers and librarians along the way. And you know, I do go back again and again to some of the earliest memories in life. I often tell my students that when you’re trying to evoke a certain emotion on the page or to give feeling to a character, I think one of the best things we can do as writers is to reach back into our own memories and maybe not the most recent experience of an emotion but to go all the way back to when it is so pure and so clear and not cluttered with all we know.  As a kid you really know joy and you know, sadness.  I always use the analogy of like the Crayola box of crayons, you know, those primary colors, there’s no denying what the color is or what you’re feeling in those early, early memories. So, I find myself looking back to childhood, a lot and what was learned in fairy tales and those scary, scary stories that serve a very good purpose.

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Jill McCorkle is the author of four short story collections and seven novels including the New York Times bestseller Life After Life.  Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories.  She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is currently a faculty member at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.  Her new short story collection is called Old Crimes.

This conversation is a combination of two discussions, one on November 9th 2023 at the event of Philip Pullman receiving the Bodley Medal at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the other on November 10th 2023 at a launch event for Philip Goff’s book Why? The Purpose of the Universe at Blackwells bookshop in Oxford.

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Nigel Warburton: Let’s begin with the obvious question. Philip’s book is called “Why?” I’d like to ask why did you write it? And what’s it all about?

Philip Goff: Good question! It’s not a book I would have imagined myself writing five years ago; it’s been quite a journey. So many people, in the West at least, feel they have to fit into the dichotomy of either you believe in the God of traditional Western religion, or you’re a secular atheist. I was raised Catholic, actually, but I gave that up when I was 14, when I decided I didn’t believe in God. And I was quite happily on Team Secular for over twenty years. I didn’t have a god shaped hole in my life as far, as I was aware. However, gradually, over the last five years, I’ve come to think that both of these worldviews are inadequate, that both of them have things they can’t explain about reality. I now believe the evidence points to what I call ‘cosmic purpose,’ that is to say, some kind of goal directness at the fundamental level of reality, but existing in the absence of the traditional God of Western religion. And that’s what I argue for in this book, as well as discussing its implications for human meaning and purpose.

Nigel Warburton: That’s quite an interesting position to take as a conventional philosopher. Pre-Darwin, perhaps, it was difficult to see how apparent design in the universe could have arisen without there being an omniscient creator or something like that. But most contemporary philosophers I know of would say that post-Darwin we have the impersonal mechanism of natural selection to explain apparent design. Is what you’re trying to do ‘post-Darwin’? Are you suggesting to evidence now points beyond the Darwinian paradigm?

Philip Goff: Yes and no. At the start of the scientific revolution, everyone believed in God and God even played a bit of a role in Newton’s theory, giving the planets a bit of a nudge every now and again to keep them in status. Then as time goes on, God starts to look more and more redundant from physics. We have the famous anecdote about the French physicist Laplace, who worked out a way of removing God from Newton’s physics. When Napoleon read Laplace’s his work he demanded to know where God featured in the theory. Laplace allegedly replied: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.” Before Darwin, you still seemed to have evidence for God or apparent design in the complex functioning of organisms. But, as you say, post-Darwin even that seemed to be removed. For over a hundred years, there was no evidence for God or anything God-ish. As a result, we get this mindset that science has ruled out anything God-ish, maybe even that science and spirituality are opposed.

From the seventies onwards, however, the evidence starts to change, as the fine-tuning of physics for life begins to emerge in our theories (I’m sure we’ll get to this soon). And I now think we’re in a period where we’re in a bit of a bit of denial about this. It’s like in the 16^th century where we first started getting evidence that we’re not in the center of the universe and people struggled to accept this because it didn’t fit with the picture of reality they’d got used to. And nowadays we scoff at our anti-Copernican ancestors and think, “Oh, those stupid religious people, why didn’t they just follow the evidence?” But every generation absorbs a world view they can’t see beyond. We’ve got so used to the mindset that “Science has ruled out cosmic purpose,” that as the evidence has changed—as I think it has to support cosmic purpose—it may take time for the culture to catch up.

Nigel Warburton: Well, we’ll come back to what you could possibly mean by ‘God,’ in that context, and also what you mean by ‘purpose’ as well, which is very important. But I’d like now to bring the other Philip in. And my question is, why are you here, Philip Pullman? Why are you here in this discussion with somebody putting forward an idea which, on the face of it, is antithetical to many things that you’ve said in public?

Philip Pullman: Well, you shouldn’t take too seriously what authors say. Publicly, we say these things on the spur of the moment and then deny it afterwards. The things you say in a public event are not the same sort of things you would say in a philosophy seminar or to a group of experts on a particular subject. Yes, I have said I’m an atheist, but the reason that I say that is that I haven’t seen any evidence for God in the world I’m in. But simultaneously, I know that everything I know about the world and everything I could find out about the world—however much I look—is the most tiny pinprick of light in the huge, vast encircling darkness, in which there might be anything. There might be a God out there, there might be all sorts of monsters and demons, heaven knows what. I know these two things simultaneously by changing my perspective.

But I’m very interested in Philip’s idea, the one for which he’s best known, perhaps, which is that of panpsychism. He can explain it far better than I can, but it’s to do with the presence of consciousness. What do we mean by consciousness? What do we mean by awareness? I’ve always felt—‘felt’ rather than ‘thought’—that one of the purposes of my life is to extend the amount of consciousness in the universe. It’s a bit of a grandiose thing to say, but I’m very much on the side of those people who are extending our consciousness—by telling us things, discovering things, making things clear—and Philip Goff is a wonderful example of this. In his book Galileo’s Error, he talks about that period in our intellectual history when consciousness was quietly shown the door. As Galileo pointed out, we didn’t need anything more than numbers to explain the universe and everything around us, we simply didn’t need to refer to consciousness in our picture of the universe. I’d never seen that put so clearly and so vividly before as in that book. That’s why I started reading Philip Goff. And this this new book is an extension of that original insight and is fascinating to me.

Nigel Warburton: I’d like to support the idea that Philip Goff is one of the clearest philosophy writers we have at the moment, and we’re very fortunate that he has an ability to explain actually quite complex ideas and make them seem straightforward. Maybe ‘straightforward’ isn’t the word, because some of the ideas are quite exotic, but certainly understandable. You feel you can get a grasp of the ideas, but also see how they might apply. It’s not just some kind of abstract discussion of specialist interest, like solving crossword puzzles. All the things he says have real implications for life. At the same time I don’t agree! I’m probably, in Philip’s eyes, still stuck in the teenage phase of subjectivism and skepticism about cosmic purpose. But that’s my problem, not yours, Philip.

Philip Goff: Don’t worry, Nigel, I forgive you.

Nigel Warburton: And have you [Philip Goff] likewise found philosophical inspiration in Philip Pullman’s work?

Philip Goff: Actually, no! [Laughs] At least not intentionally. I was obsessed with the His Dark Materials series as a teenager and a young adult (I was 18 in 1997, so I guess I was the target audience). One thing I loved about Philip’s work is that he drew on cutting-edge science (something else I was obsessed with…), such as dark matter and the multiverse. What I didn’t appreciate at the time is that Philip also drew on contemporary philosophy in his novels.

I went on to became a philosopher and made my name defending panpsychism, as Philip said a moment ago. But, to be honest, it never occurred to me that the theory I was defending had any connection to ‘Dust,’ which of course dominates the world of His Dark Materials. In fact, I only made the connection when Philip Pullman himself entered into one of the philosophical discussions I was having on Twitter (I spend too much time arguing on Twitter…). I vividly remember looking at my phone and thinking, ‘That’s a good point…Oh shit, it’s Philip Pullman! We emailed a bit and then ended up having a public discussion—in this very venue of Blackwells in Oxford—for my first book Galileo’s Error.

In researching that, I was flabbergasted—and I don’t use that word often—to find real resonances with the panpsychism view I’d been arguing for. Most strikingly, in The Subtle Knife we find the scientist Mary communicating with Dust particles—or ‘shadows’ as she calls them. She asks them “Are you what we would call ‘spirit’?” And the particles reply, “From what we are, spirit. From what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one.” That perfectly captured the view I’d been defending for the previous 15 years! So it’s possible I’ve built my career on sub-consciously plagiarizing Philip Pullman.

Anyway, I’m delighted that Philip liked my new book Why? and was willing to do this again.

Nigel Warburton: Sticking with Philip Pullman for a moment longer, you’ve talked about Philip Goff as a writer and your interest in panpsychism. But what about this particular book? He’s asking the question ‘Why?’ and getting to the really big questions that philosophers don’t often discuss, about what the meaning of life or purpose of life could possibly be. Does that resonate with you?

Philip Pullman: Well, I when I was a teenager, I was very struck by existentialism, at least what I could find out about it. It seemed to consist of smoking Gauloises and wearing a black polo neck sweater and that sort of thing. And it was all rather sexy and fun. But what it did was to make clear to me that we are responsible for a lot of what we do and what happens. It’s not up to anybody else. It’s not up to this absent God. It’s up to us. The existentialists famously said “Existence precedes essence.” In other words, we’re not born with our essence and predispositions fixed. We have to create ourselves out of the bare fact of our own existence. I quite like that. So that where I come from philosophically. Maybe I shouldn’t say ‘philosophically,’ because it wasn’t anything as grand as that, but that’s where I come from in terms of feeling.

Also a big, big part of what made me was poetry, especially the poetry of the English romantics, Wordsworth and so on. And from them I had a sense that the world is actually full of life—it’s alive. “Something far more deeply infused,” as Wordsworth puts it in his poem “Tintern Abbey.” Philip’s notion that consciousness pervades everything, and that it is in fact the ground on which everything else exists, was very, very attractive to me. It made sense. It made sense in an emotional as well as an intellectual way.

Philip Goff: I think this is a good moment to say that another thing I got out of Philip’s work is that it seemed to me ‘anti-religious’ but ‘pro-spiritual.’ Perhaps the best way to capture this is with the two conceptions of the afterlife we find in His Dark Materials. First we have the land of the dead, the bleak, desolate wasteland where all the souls of the dead—saints and sinners—end up, despite the promises of The Authority that paradise awaits his followers. We find there the ghost of a monk who is so blinded by a dogmatic belief in The Authority that he refuses to accept the evidence of the senses, declaring the desolate realm of the dead to be land of milk and honey for those with the eyes of faith. I think that’s such a powerful representation of the darkness of dogmatism, which, to be honest, atheists as well as religious people can be subject to.

In contrast, we have the ‘life after life after death’ that Lyra and Will create for the souls of the dead, in which they are ecstatically absorbed into the universe around them. At the culmination of the series, when Lyra and Will have to part for the rest of their lives, they promise each other that when they meet that fate, their particles will entwine forever. I must confess, I cried my eyes out revisiting that on the recent BBC dramatization!

A huge proportion of the public self-identify as ‘spiritual but not religious,’ and yet artists and academics don’t tend to cater for that group of people. The result is that we see being ‘spiritual but not religious’ as ill-thought out fluffy thinking, but I think that’s just a contingent result of the fact that work hasn’t been done to articulate and make sense of such possibilities.

Philip Pullman: I have never said ‘I’m spiritual but not religious,’ and I never would, because I have no idea what is meant by ’spiritual.’ The word seems to cover an area of meaning that includes such clearly definable senses as the emotional, aesthetic, and moral, but also woo-woo. I know what each of those words means, and if I wanted to use it I’d have no difficulty in doing so; but ’spiritual’ feels to me almost entirely empty of any meaning apart from those, and it’s never quite clear which one people mean when they say, for instance, “The Bishop is a very spiritual man.” When I see it written or hear it spoken I feel an irritation or unease that is actually almost physical, because it’s combined with my sense of the utter lack of anything there at all to make a gulf or abyss that I seem to be looking into, and I have a horrible fear of heights.

‘Religious’ is easier, because it’s linked with open professions of belief and with participation in ceremonies like Communion as well as the practice of private prayer and so on. I can actually see the point of those, and I can understand why people take part in such things. To that extent I could say that, if anything, I was religious but not spiritual. The existence or not of God is neither here nor there: we’re talking about human behaviour at this point.

Philip Goff: Looks like I got it precisely wrong, then! Still, I claim my right as the reader to determine the meaning of Philip’s texts. [Laughs]

Nigel Warburton: Turning to Philip Goff’s book Why?, at the core of your book is the fine tuning argument. Could you sketch out what that is? Probably many of the people in this room know something about the fine tuning argument, although not everybody. It’s an argument for the existence of God, a form of design argument, but it’s got a particular scientific twist.

Philip Goff: Taking a step back, the core argument of the book is that there are things that traditional belief in God can’t explain, but there are also things that traditional atheism can’t explain. In terms of the problem with the God hypothesis, it’s the familiar difficulty of reconciling a loving, all powerful God with the terrible suffering we find in the world. What traditional atheism—by which I mean the conviction that there’s a meaningless, purposeless universe—struggles to explain is, as you mentioned, Nigel, the fine tuning of physics for life. This is the surprising discovery of recent decades that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain very narrow range.

Perhaps the example that’s most baffled cosmologists revolves around dark energy (as opposed to dark matter, which I know Philip likes). Dark energy is the force that pushes apart the universe. We discovered in 1998 that the universe isn’t only expanding, it’s accelerating. So physicists postulate this force that’s pushing things apart. Now, once you do the calculations, it becomes apparent that if that force had been just a little bit stronger, everything would have been pushed apart so quickly that no two particles would have ever met. We wouldn’t have had stars, planets, any kind of structural complexity whatsoever. Whereas if it had been significantly weaker, it wouldn’t have counteracted gravity, and so the whole universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the Big Bang. So to get any kind of life or structured complexity, the strength of this force had to be, like Goldilocks porridge, ‘just right’—not too strong, not too weak.

As you say, Nigel, some people use this as an argument for God: God’s fixed the numbers to get human beings. You might think that’s a bit anthropocentric, and I don’t think you have to take this in a good direction. As I said, I think the God hypothesis has got problems too. So what does fine-tuning tell us about reality, if not that there is a God?

I think fine-tuning forces a dilemma on us. Either it’s just an incredible fluke that these numbers in physics are just right for life (the example I gave is just one of many)—that seems to me to improbable to take seriously—or those numbers in our physics are as they are because they are the right numbers for life. In other words, that there is some kind of goal-directedness towards life in the very early stages of the universe. And that’s what I mean by ‘cosmic purpose.’ This is weird, but we should put aside our biases, both religious and secular, and just try and follow where the evidence seems to be leading.

Nigel Warburton: My wife once left her phone in a taxi in London. The taxi driver picked it up, it was open, and he called ‘home’ and got through to me, and said, “I’ve found your wife’s phone in the taxi.” I said, “It’s okay, I’m coming to London tomorrow. I’m not sure where I’ll be, but when I finish work, I’ll call you up and I’ll pay the taxi fare from wherever you are.” The next day, I came out the gallery where I was working on the Old Brompton Road, I called the taxi driver, and at the exact moment I phoned he was ten yards from me giving somebody a ride. We couldn’t believe what had just happened, and it affected me quite strongly. But ultimately, rationally, I think that was just a fluke.

We are the kind of creatures who want to find meaning in coincidences, in things that happen. Who’s to say that we aren’t just the result of a fluke? Sure, it’s mind numbingly small odds, but maybe that’s just the way it is. There wouldn’t be a question for anybody to address unless we existed. We are just this phenomenon that’s occurred and we just have to take it that it is a fluke. Who’s to say that’s wrong? At what point can you say it can’t be a fluke?

Philip Goff: Yes, that’s interesting. There are all sorts of things that are a bit improbable, for example, when you think of someone, and then at that exact moment they phone, and we’re happy to think that’s just coincidence because it’s not so improbable. I give the example in the book of ‘Jesus in toast;’ if you Google ‘Jesus in toast,’ you get all these examples of a birth mark that’s uncannily like Jesus—or Jesus in Western art, I guess.

Nigel Warburton: That’s quite probable, in my experience of toast!

Philip Goff: Well, it’s kind of a bit improbable, and that’s why it’s entertaining, but it’s not that improbable. But then we find examples where it passes a point where it’s so improbable, that it’s no longer a rational option to say it’s just a fluke. We can surely all agree there are such examples. Imagine burglars break into a bank and there’s a ten digit combination on the safe and they get it right first time, nobody would say, “Oh, maybe they just fluked it?”

Nigel Warburton: What else could you possibly say in that example? There’s no other plausible explanation, given the presumption that they’ve not got some kind of telepathic powers.

Philip Goff: But you wouldn’t think they’d just guessed it, right?

Nigel Warburton: I would.

Philip Goff: Really? Surely the rational thing to think is that they knew someone on the inside who gave them the combination.

Nigel Warburton: But the way you set it up, they didn’t.

Philip Goff: Oh, sorry, maybe I’m not telling the story right. I’m just saying all we know is that they that they got the combination right.

Nigel Warburton: Yes, so you look for the most plausible explanation.

Philip Goff: I was meaning to leave open whether they had inside info or whether they’d just guessed it. Given that choice, I think everyone would agree it’s rational to suppose they had inside info, as the alternative is too improbable. Here’s a different example, one I give in the book. It’s hard to relate to the fine-tuning because it’s abstract physics, and so because it’s hard to make concrete, it’s easy to think “Oh, it could just be a fluke.” To make it more concrete, imagine you’re roll a dice. (I think we can say ‘dice’ now rather than ‘die,’ because language has changed, right? Philip Pullman is the expert on this one…). Suppose you roll the dice 70 times and it comes up ‘six’ every time. 70 times in a row! In that situation, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, that’s just what happened.” Rather, you’d say, “The dice is fixed!”

Nigel Warburton: Yes, but you check, and you find it out it’s not fixed. And then there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation other than it being a fluke. You’re saying it could be some kind of purposeful organization of the universe that made it this way. But that’s not evidence; that’s just commitment that comes from intuitions pointing in a different direction.

Philip Goff: If we could rule out all possible explanations—and it’s hard to know how we’d do that—then we’d have to say: “Jesus, that’s just an incredible fluke!” However, when you have happenings that are so improbable, if there is an alternative to chance, then that alternative to chance is what we should go for. That’s just how probabilistic reasoning works. Now, many scientists and philosophers do think fine-tuning needs explaining, but think we can explain it in terms of the multiverse hypothesis. I argue in the book that that’s not actually an alternative to chance, and so doesn’t really work out as an explanation of fine-tuning.

Nigel Warburton: Okay, so let’s get to your alternative explanation of fine-tuning: cosmic purpose. When we use the word ‘purpose,’ we usually think of a mind with intentions that’s doing something purposeful. But that’s not exactly what you’re suggesting, is it? What you’re proposing is something built into the structure of the universe rather than a conscious mind doing stuff intentionally.

Philip Goff: I consider a range of hypotheses. The book is very much an exploration of different options. As I said earlier, the challenge as I see it is to explain both fine-tuning (which traditional atheism can’t explain) and suffering (which the traditional God hypothesis can’t explain).

Perhaps the most straightforward way of doing this is just by tweaking God’s characteristics a bit. So maybe the designer of our universe is bad, or amoral, or has limited abilities and has made the best universe she can (she’s like, “Sorry guys, I know it’s going to be messy, but this is the best I can do!”). I also consider the simulation hypothesis, associated with Nick Bostrom (or David Chalmers in his recent book Reality+), according to which we’re in a computer simulation and our creator is some random software engineer in the next universe up. So that’s the first hypothesis, a sort of nonstandard designer.

However, as you said Nigel, it’s not obvious that we do need some kind of conscious mind to underpin cosmic purpose. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has explored in great detail the possibility of what he calls ‘teleological laws:’ laws of nature with purpose built into them. On this view, there is just a sort of impersonal tendency directed towards life in the basic causal principles which govern our universe, a tendency which interacts with the known laws of physics in ways we don’t fully understand yet. The third and final hypothesis I explore, which relates to my previous work on panpsychism that Philip Pullman referred to earlier, is the possibility of cosmopsychism, the view that the universe itself is a conscious mind with its own goals and purposes. I argue that this hypothesis has the edge over the first two, although I take all of them seriously.

So I think there are these ways of making sense of cosmic purpose. The evidence of fine-tuning, in my view, give us empirical grounds for taking these possibilities seriously. I don’t think there’s any incoherence or improbability in these hypotheses. The thing that puts people off is that they’re weird. But who cares what’s weird? What’s ‘weird’ is just a contingent cultural thing that changes over time.

Nigel Warburton: What do you think about all this Philip Pullman?

Philip Pullman: Well, when it comes to dice, I can’t help remembering the Big Jule character from Guys and Dolls, who was a famous gambler who had a blank dice. People asked him, “Where are the spots?” and he said [puts on strong New York accent], “I had the spots removed for luck.” And they said, “But how do you know what numbers come up?” He said, [strong New York accent] “I remember where the spots formerly were.”

That got me thinking…could it not be that the character who’s running the universe is in fact malicious? You see, when we talk about a ‘goal’ and a ‘purpose-driven universe,’ we kind of assume it’s a good purpose. But could it in fact be a bad purpose? Could we be the playthings of a gigantic, immortal Chicago gangster?

Philip Goff: [Laughs] Well, the first thing I would say is there is obviously a great deal of uncertainty about all this. I do think there’s evidence for some kind of cosmic purpose, but there’s a great deal of uncertainty involved in saying anything more. But in terms of the bad designer hypothesis—which I explore in the book—I actually think the philosopher Steven Law has a compelling argument that the Bad God hypothesis is no good either, because it faces the mirror image problems of the Good God hypothesis. If you’ve got a Good God, why is there all the suffering? If you’re got a Bad God, you have to explain why she created all the wonderful things.

I think the universe, as we find it, is a mixture of accident and design. There are things that are too improbable to be chance, like the fine tuning (also certain things about the evolution of conscious understanding I go into in the book). But there are also things that are gratuitous and arbitrary. So we need a hypothesis that can accommodate both accident and design.

Philip Pullman: The Bad God hypothesis has a long history. It’s what lay behind the idea of Gnosticism. The Gnostic idea was that this universe, the physical universe, that we can see it and move about in, is the creation of a demiurge—a Bad God—but inside each of us there is a little spark of true divinity. Our task as individuals is to look after that spark and escape from this malevolent universe, where people get ill and there are crocodiles and thieves and so on, back to the infinitely distant God out there. This is a very attractive idea at certain times in history; it was very attractive at the end of the end of the Roman Empire. It was also very attractive around the millennium, when we had programs like The X-Files—”The Truth is Out There”—and The Truman Show where, the main character is caught up in a universe that’s entirely false and he has to get out of it. It’s an attractive idea that keeps coming back. But you weren’t tempted that way, Philip Goff?

Philip Goff: I don’t think it’s the most plausible hypothesis, because we need to explain both the good things and the bad things. Another option is Manichaeism, the religion of Saint Augustine before his conversion to Christianity.

Philip Pullman: Yes, that’s a kind of Gnosticism.

Nigel Warburton: For people who don’t know, Manicheans believed that there’s a perpetual struggle between good and evil, and good tends to get the upper-hand from time to time, but not always.

Philip Goff: When I was still writing the book I gave a talk on it and someone raising this in the Q&A, so I ended up talking about it a little bit in the book. The problem with having both a Good God and a Bad God is that you need to say exactly what the distribution of powers is between them, and how that results in the exact distribution of good and bad we find in the universe. I’m open-minded, but I suspect any worked out version of such a theory is going to end up very complicated, and as scientists and philosophers we want our theories to be as simple as possible.

I’m much more sympathetic with the hypothesis of a Good God of Limited Abilities, which I think ends up being a simpler explanation of the data. We can simply posit a God who’s only able to create from a singularity, and only able to create a universe with physics of a certain form, essentially the form of our actual physics, except that God can fiddle with the numbers. So the only way God can create complex, intelligent life is by creating a universe with the right numbers in its physics so that it’ll eventually evolve intelligent life. In this way, we explain the good in terms of God’s actions and the bad in terms of God’s limitations. Nice and simple!

Having said that, overall I think cosmopsychism is the best hypothesis. I try to show in the book that a conscious universe is not as extravagant a hypothesis as it at first appears, and that it fits with an independently plausible view of consciousness, namely panpsychism. Why postulate a supernatural designer outside of the universe—whether good or bad—if we can instead suppose that the universe designed itself?

Nigel Warburton: Is that more or less what Spinoza’s God was? I’m not sure if Spinoza’s God was meant to be conscious. But he talked about ‘God or nature,’ and got the Jewish equivalent of being excommunicated as a result, because he was claiming that God is just nature. That was a God that Einstein was happy to believe in, as an atheist. And as an atheist myself, I think I would buy that if you don’t have to think the universe is conscious, because then it’s just another form of atheism, really. We’re not saying that there’s anything beyond what we are and what exists in the material world. We’re not saying there’s heaven or hell, we’re just saying that when people talk about this life force and the way the universe is all interrelated, we might as well be talking about it as ‘God.’ This is the reason why we’re here, and that’s all that we have. We don’t have a personal god. We don’t have the kind of stuff religion needs to get going.

Philip Goff: Yes, what I really want to do with the book is just open up a discussion of all of these options.

Nigel Warburton: So this is building up to the Big Question, which is why are we here and how does all this relate to morality and how we treat each other? You do connect to those things in the book, and it’s really ambitious and admirable that you’re taking on these big questions. So I think it’d be really useful for you just to sketch what you think the meaning of life is. It’s a huge question, but in 4 minutes, please.

Philip Goff: [Laughs] Why do we exist? Well, you have to buy the book if you want to find out. I’m only joking, of course. Most of the book is just the cold blooded scientific and philosophical argument for this position. What I’m most driven by is a deep curiosity to understand the ultimate nature of reality. We’ll never know for certain, but I want us to try to have our best guess as to what reality is like. When I talk to my colleague David Faraci about fine tuning, he says “Yes, maybe you’ve got a reasonable case for cosmic purpose, but I don’t care. I make my own meaning, so it doesn’t matter to me whether or not there’s cosmic purpose.” So you could accept most of the book whilst not thinking its conclusions make any difference to your life.

However, in the final chapter, I do consider the implications of cosmic purpose for human life and meaning, exploring connections to spiritual practice, community, even political struggle. Overall, I defend a sort of middle-way position—It’s always the middle ways for me. At one extreme, you’ve got the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, who says if there’s no point to the universe, it’s all pointless. He even says we might as well rape and kill each other, if we want, because it’s life it just totally meaningless. It’s not only religious people who take this position; the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar thinks it’s immoral to have children, in part because life is too meaningless, and so we should let the human race pass out of existence. The other extreme is the familiar humanist position of my colleague David Faraci I just referred to: There probably isn’t cosmic purpose, but even if there is, it doesn’t matter.

I defend a middle-way view between these two positions. I think we can have perfectly meaningful lives independent of cosmic purpose, through filling out lives with meaningful activities, such as kindness, creativity, and the pursuit of knowledge. I like to think I had quite a meaningful life before I got interested in cosmic purpose. But if there is cosmic purpose, I think there’s the potential for our lives to have more meaning.

Nigel Warburton: What’s the added value? Where’s that extra value coming from?

Philip Goff: I think we want our lives to make a difference. If you can potentially contribute in some tiny way to the purposes of the whole of reality, that’s huge. That’s about as big a difference as you can imagine making.

Nigel Warburton: So we’re expanding the mind of God? So when Philip Pullman does the kind of things which he does brilliantly, both as a writer and a champion of reading and writing and libraries, he’s literally expanding the mind of God, on your view?

Philip Goff: That’s an interesting way of putting it. I suppose whether we’re expanding the mind of God would depend on which version of cosmic purpose you’re going for. The way I’d put it us that it’s about expanding the ethical project. A typical humanist conception of the ethical project is that it’s about trying to improve life for human beings on this earth. Some people are now talking about ‘sentientism,’ an ethical project of trying to prove life for all sentient beings (that gets a bit tricky for me, because I think plants and trees are sentient, as well as animals…), and maybe that’s an expansion of the humanist ethical project. Belief in ‘cosmic purpose’—‘cosmic purposivism’—is essentially the broadest possible expansion of the ethical project. According to cosmic purposivism, the good projects we’re pursuing here are part of an all-encompassing ethical scheme that incorporates the whole of reality.

I don’t want to be dogmatic about the ‘One True Way’ of having a meaningful life, but I can say in my own experience of the last few years of living out cosmic purposivism, I’ve found it to be a meaningful way of framing one’s existence in a broader context. Perhaps most of all, I’ve found it’s given me a deep sense of peace. I’m pretty career-driven. Partly, I hope, for pure motives—I really believe in the things I’m arguing for, and I want to persuade the world of them. I’m sure also there’s some ego in there, wanting to make my mark, or whatever. Living in hope of a bigger purpose has made me less bothered my these things. Not because they’re not important, but because I’m conceiving of them as one tiny part of a much bigger thing that’s going on. And my task is just to do the best I play a small part of in advancing this much bigger thing that’s going on. Thinking in this way makes me less bothered about my personal successes and failures, and frees me up to enjoy life a bit more (not that I was miserable before…).

What I want to do in the book is to invite people to consider this option that’s neither the familiar religious option nor the familiar humanist option. You never know, you might get something out of it.

Philip Pullman: So God is not quite there yet, but he’s showing promise.

Philip Goff: I suppose you could say that [laughs]. The idea is there is a directness towards greater things that has already brought about life, intelligent life, and conscious beings which understand the universe around them can contemplate their existence. It could be that’s the end of it: “That’s all, folks,” as Porky Pig used to say. But once you take seriously the possibility that there is cosmic purpose, you might think it’s a bit improbable that we happen to be living at the final culmination of it. It’s more likely that cosmic purpose is still unfolding in ways we don’t fully understand, that there will emerge a greater form of life or consciousness as unfathomable to us as our existence is to worms.

I’m a huge fan the 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James. In his paper “The will to believe” (which he later said should have been called “The right to believe”), he argued that it can be rational—to a limited extent—to hope beyond the evidence. I agree with that, and I think there’s a bit of that going on in any worldview or fundamental commitment. We only live once. And if you can find a hope that gives meaning and motivation to your life, then that’s okay, even if you lack certainty.

What do you think, Philip?

Philip Pullman: I think it’s simply more interesting to live like that.

Philip Goff: (Laughs) That’s as good a reason as any.

Philip Pullman: It’s a richer way of living, a richer way of feeling and thinking. It allows us to do that thing which is commanded in the Christian church as one of the virtues: Hope. I like reminding people that hope is not just a temperament; it’s a duty, a virtue. And this gives us a reason and a justification for being hopeful, against the possibility that the universe is just a dice with the spots taking off.

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