Louisa Thomas

speaker
56 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 6 Feb

Louisa Thomas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months
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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Can I take you on a really weird digression?
Okay, down a rabbit hole.
Have you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
I read it when I was a sophomore in college.
I was one of those annoyingly good students who took notes in the margins and I wrote all my papers on time.
Anyway, so my daughter was five or six.
I picked up the book again and I started reading it to her.
I picked up the same copy I'd had in college.
It was filled with these meticulous notes.
All the words were defined, the logic puzzles were solved, discussions in the back pages about the Victorian era and the creation of leisure and, like, the category of childhood.
Then I started reading to her, and I realized I had completely missed the point of this book.
In this book, Alice is just always too small or too big.
She was just like my five-year-old daughter.
You know, she's caught between infancy and adulthood.
The way in which she experiences this is that the rules of this wonderland are completely arbitrary.
Exactly.
They're subject to the whims of the authority figure.
But what she's doing over the course of the book is developing a moral sensibility, which is not the same as moralizing.
There's actually a character, the duchess, who does all the moralizing, and she's a buffoon.
Basically, it's a story about a person growing up and gaining confidence to question the irrationality of these orders and rules that don't make any sense and are changing all the time.
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