How Prediction Markets Work

‘Music is both too difficult and too easy to access,’ Nicholas Spice wrote recently in the LRB, ‘and it seems that we have opted to stick with ease over difficulty.’ On this episode he joins Thomas Jones to discuss some of the difficulties: of listening, of understanding, of maintaining the distance necessary for aesthetic contemplation, of playing and how that differs from performing. But engaging with the difficulty of music – learning to attend to it – doesn’t mean rejecting more immediate kinds of response. Keeping music alive, Nicholas also argues, requires an active involvement, an openness of engagement, that’s as likely to be found in a group of schoolchildren singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ as it is in a professional classical performance at a concert hall. Read Nicholas Spice's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/spicelrbpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Autumn Journal, his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton wrote in 1985, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months. In this episode from their Close Readings series ‘Political Poems’, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with code 'AUTUMN25' at checkout (discount automatically applied): https://lrb.me/crautumn26 Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been more than three years since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, and Israel responded with a war of annihilation in Gaza that human rights organisations and experts widely describe as genocide. A ceasefire of sorts is in place, though it has allowed the killing and destruction to continue. The people of Gaza are confined to less than a third of their land, reduced to bare life, and under a blockade that cuts them off from the outside world. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Jaser Abu Mousa and Bashir Abu-Manneh to discuss life in Gaza and how Israel’s war of ‘politicide’ turned genocidal. They also consider the implications of the recent elections in Israel and the United States, and the history of Palestinian resistance, both armed and unarmed. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What lies behind this inertia, and the apparent resistance of the British state to any transformative policies? James Butler is joined by Aditya Chakrabortty, the Guardian’s senior economics commentator, and Daniela Gabor, a professor of economics at SOAS, to examine the systemic and political obstacles successive governments have faced in delivering the radical reform they keep promising. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 losers’. On this episode, he joins Thomas Jones to discuss how prediction markets work, who profits from them, who regulates them (or doesn’t), why they’re often a very bad tool for predicting the future, and what they may tell us about the state of the world. Read Geoff's piece: https://lrb.me/mannlrbpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi wrote recently in the LRB, he was a great reader, too. Moi, who was recruited by Jameson to Duke University in the mid-1980s and remained his colleague there until his death in 2024, joins Thomas Jones on this episode to look back at Jameson’s earlier work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) to The Political Unconscious (1981), and to retrace the intellectual path he took to arrive at that milestone. Read Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/toril-moi/fredric-jameson-as-reader From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name. Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance.  Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025) Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes. On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’. Further listening: Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/nicapplelrbpod Spotify: https://lrb.me/nicspotifylrbpod LRB wesbite: https://lrb.me/niclrbpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices