Airlift from Berlin Review

Why does so much political feeling produce so little political change? Recorded live at the Volksbühne, Catherine Liu, Sarah Stein Lubrano and Lea Ypi talk about how trauma became the language of politics, what it leaves out, and how the left can start winning again.

Yale philosopher Lily Hu refuses to use AI in her own work and bans it in her classroom. She talks with Tobias Haberkorn about why a certain kind of philosophy is about to have its lunch eaten, why her older colleagues are less worried than her younger ones, and what the humanities are for when they no longer get you a job.

Anne Carson is the 2026 Nobel laureate, a translator of Sappho and the author of some of the most beloved poems on grief and beauty. We discuss some of her greatest works like Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband and The Glass Essay.

The editor of The New York Review of Books and a New Yorker critic on what magazines are for, and whether it's better to be big and rich or small and free.

The writer Miriam Stoney on the line between a person and a character and on who, in fiction and film, gets to be disliked without being reduced to a stereotype.

In this episode the historian and writer Faith Hillis speaks about the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular, socialist Jewish political party founded in the Russian Empire in 1897. She discusses two new books on Jewish radicalism and the danger of reaching for the past as a weapon in current political fights.

Die Philosophin Eva von Redecker über ihre These, dass der Faschismus nicht mit Hass anfängt, sondern mit Besitz, auch wenn dieser nur eingebildet ist. Samir Sellami spricht mit ihr entlang von fünf Sätzen aus ihrem neuen Buch «Dieser Drang nach Härte. Über den neuen Faschismus». Sie diskutieren auch über Eigentum, die Angst vor dem Untergang, Longevity, Religion und die Frage, was die Linke dagegen tun kann.

In diesem Gespräch geht es um die katholische Gebets-App «Hallow», in die Peter Thiel investiert hat, und um den Longevity-Influencer Bryan Johnson aus dem Silicon Valley. Raphaela Edelbauer beschreibt die Zusammenhänge zwischen der Optimierung des Körpers und dem Beten per App – und erklärt, warum der Wunsch nach ewigem Leben zu einem Problem für die Demokratie werden kann.

A writer grows up poor, escapes her circumstances and writes about it with a mix of shame, guilt and pride. It’s one of the most classic tales in modern literature, and Claudia Durastanti thinks the story stopped being true just as the genre boomed. In this conversation, she and Lauren Oyler talk about autofiction, transfuge de classe narratives and what could be written instead.

Loneliness is no longer a luxury problem for philosophers and artists. Anthropologist Biao Xiang discusses how it became a mass condition and what gossip, Hannah Arendt, and hummingbirds reveal about a way out of this crisis.