Margaret Atwood

speaker

143 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Mar

Margaret Atwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism · 9 May 2025 podcast

Not yet. I know they're pitfalls, having read so many of them. You'll notice that I put one into Oryx and Crake and the Mad Atom trilogy, and that's an engineered species that lacks our drawback, shall we say. But they're also, for a human being like us, very boring.

They're joined at the hip. And let us say also that one person's utopia is another person's dystopia, which is a theme you often find in the writing of utopia's dystopias. The other thing goes back to your initial queries about stories. What happens to stories once you have utopia? What are we going to tell stories about? Because surely there's no conflict anymore. We've eliminated that.

It's a problem. So the utopia in which everybody absolutely lives happily ever after forever and ever is very unlikely because we are who we are. So what people did in certain kinds of communist societies was it was fine to tell stories about how awful things were before communism. That was great. You could do that. So certain kinds of stories become more possible than others.

So in the middle of a totalitarian dictatorship, you don't want to be telling stories about how awful totalitarian dictatorships are, because off with your head.

Yeah, they're going to have to do preventing disaster plus improving people's lives plus it'll be fun.

Well, there is a puritanical self-flagellating streak on the left as it is currently constituted that if it's fun, it can't be good. They miss a point. If it's not fun on some level, people aren't going to do it. So is it about how virtuous you are, or is it about actually trying to better conditions? So if it's only about how virtuous you are, then you're probably an antinomian Puritan.

And if it's actually about trying to improve conditions, you might be a William Morris socialist. So William Morris thought that not only could you improve conditions, but you could make them more fun and more beautiful. Whereas a lot of puritanical antinomians think that beauty is beside the point, it's actually not.

Well, I think that report says it all. We don't know what to make of any of this. And if you then don't have more of the story, of course it's going to move on, because if the story is we don't know, there's not much to add to that. We don't know. Oh, and now it's Tuesday and we still don't know. And Thursday, we also don't know on Thursday.

So it isn't a story if it ends with we don't know and there's nothing else to add. It's again the nature of the stories. If there is no next chapter, what can you say? We still don't know.

There are many disadvantages, but there are many advantages. And if there weren't many advantages, we wouldn't be doing it.

Oh, how about mushrooms? Let's talk about mushrooms. That's a really good story. I love the mushroom story. So Merlin Sheldrake is probably the person you want to be talking to. And we are now learning how to make all kinds of things out of mushrooms that we weren't even thinking about a little while ago. So you can get a mushroom coffin. And you can make building blocks out of mushrooms.

You can make fabric out of mushrooms. And this is even apart from any food and medical uses that they may have. So I'd say keep your eye on the mushrooms. They may be entering your life sooner than you think.

Don't do this to me.

Okay. So I did pick out, I was told, three. And I have three, and I'm going to show them to you. So this is Margaret MacMillan's book on war. pretty general reader book, How Conflict Shaped Us. One of the takeaways from it is apparently we're not teaching military studies or military history in universities anymore. That's a mistake. So good read, War, How Conflict Shaped Us, Margaret MacMillan.

This one is by somebody who lives out near you called Jennifer Eberhardt. And it's called Bias. And it's got the statistics. So for people who want to know, well, actually, how does this skew life in real time in the actual world? Here's the book that talks about that. It's racial bias. And she's done the work. It's not just anecdotal. And this one will surprise you. I hope.

It's by Eliza Reid, Secrets of the Sprachar. And what is it about? It's about life in Iceland. You surprised? So Iceland, a small country where people tend to be related in some way to one another, and the fact that this land of the erstwhile Vikings, which always had pretty powerful determined female figures, how women's equality, gender equality, and financial equality play out in Iceland.

So is it possible to have a more equitable society? Yes, says Iceland. Not that they don't have problems. It's not a utopia. I've been there several times, and what's always impressed me about it is the resources are fairly sparse. They don't have a lot of stuff to make stuff out of. But what they have, they use. So you can get baked seaweed jewelry there. Pretty interesting place.

Maybe only works so well because it's not huge.

It doesn't always work. So Scotland wasn't huge, but they're always having battles.

Am I allowed to say Charlotte's Web? Absolutely. Okay, I'm saying Charlotte's Web about a spider who saves the life of a pig doomed for slaughter, interestingly enough, through words. So the spider manages to tell a story about the pig that makes him exceptional. Isn't that, it's a good use of words. So that, dare we delve into Lord of the Rings. Is that a children's book?

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