Baldwin's Enduring Relevance Today

The New States man . For decades, James Baldwin has stood as one of the most piercing moral voices of the 20th century. A writer who diagnosed the psychic and political crises of America with extraordinary clarity? His essays are widely quoted, his novels widely taught and of course read, and yet for all that familiarity, Baldwin has himself remained, in his own words, elusive. A new biography by Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin, A Love Story, sets out to change that. Drawing on newly uncovered archives and decades of research, Boggs reframes Baldwin's life through an intimate and sometimes unsettling lens: love. This is not a book that appeared overnight. It took Boggs more than 20 years, most of his professional life, to write. What began as a ch ance archival discovery grew into a project that shaped his career, taking him across continents, into private collections and personal relationships, and into intimate proximity with Baldwin's world. In that sense, this biography is not just about Baldwin's life, but also about what it means to devote one's own life to understanding another. I'm Tandril Rashid and you're listening to The New Society from the New Statesman . In today's episode, my colleague Luke O'Reilly sits down with Nicholas Boggs to discuss Baldwin's loves and contradictions, the relationship between intimacy and politics, and why Baldwin's insistence that love is the only reality might matter more now than ever . So this has been described as the first major biography of Baldwin to explore Baldwin's queerness in depth. Why do you think this aspect of his life has been largely unexplored. Well that was my uh my publisher described it that way. I'm not even sure that I would describe it that way. In part because Baldwin, you know, did not identify as queer or as gay. He rejected all of these labels . And the book looks at his, you know, it looks at his whole life, but it looks at these four really important relationships that he had with other men. Men who were his mentors in the case of Buford Delaney, his lovers in other cases, his col laborators. And so it's looking at these kinship structures he developed through them. I guess we would call those queer n today probably. But at that point in his life, um, again, he was rejecting all categories, gay, straight, black, white , uh, male, female, even. So in a k in a sense, it was hard to look closely at these relationships because we hadn't really developed the language for talking about these sort of unconventional kinship structures until queer theory came along, the rise of lesbian and gay and queer studies gave us a kind of a new lens for thinking through these relationships and how they impacted his life and art. That impacted it as well? Oh, for sure. I mean, he was raised in the church. His father was a preacher. He became a child preacher himself at 13. He writes about it beautifully in his nonfiction. But also his first novel, Go Tell on the Mountain, was very aut sobiogra phical, and it's about sort of uh John Grimes, who's based on Baldwin's adolescent self, grappling with his desire for Elisha, another boy, uh, and how that impacts his ability to sort of uh become saved in the church. Balden himself left the church eventually to become a writer in his later teens. And that was a major impact on his writing. Could be still his language was infused by the Bible. Many of his titles were drawn from the Bible. So even though he left organized religion, he remained marked by the church for his entire life. Aaron Ross Powell And I suppose Christianity is quite an expansive idea of what love is. And I think one of the things in your book is that it isn't just about romantic love, it's about the love, his relationship with his mother, with other women in his life. And can you tell us a little bit about that kind of idea of love in it? Yeah, so for Baldwin, love was not this kind of saccharine sense of love. He said, Love is love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. Love is very sort of a difficult and risky thing for Baldwin. And it interested me in in a couple of ways. First of all, yes, he had these relationships with other men that were sometimes a bit of a battle. Um and but more importantly, he fell for these men who he kind of knew he could never have the relationship that he said he craved, which was was it was a kind of domestic li felong relationship. And he sought out these impossible loves in part because they were very creatively productive for him. He would break up with them and then he would go write Giovanni's Room based on the breakup. But also he would have different other kinds of breakups, like with Richard Wright. That was not a romantic relationship at all. But their breakup helped him understand the sort of the aesthetics and politics of what he wanted to do in his first novel, Go Tell on the Mountain. And I think it all relates back somewhat to the fact that his love for America was an impossible love. That he would leave America and go back, leave and go back, you know, br basically breaking up with them. And what he said about America was that he loved her, this country so much, that he reserved the right to criticize her perpetually. So why these four men? Well, it's a long story. I'll try to make it short, because this book took me over 20 years to research and write, and it wasn't until very late in the process that I understood that I was even writing a biography. So it was in college at Yale that I discovered this out-of-print children's book at the Beineke. I was taking a class on Baldwin. And David Leeming's extremely important biography had just come out. This is 1996. And there were only-b there were only two paragraphs about this children's book. And it was illustrated by this obscure French artist named Joran Kazakh. So I wrote David Leeming like the second email of my life, email was a new thing, saying, do you know anything about Joran Kazakh? He wrote me back and he said, I never met him. A very nice email, but he said, I never met him. I don't know anybody still alive who met him, and I believe he's dead. So this didn't this is pre-Google, right? So I couldn't Google Jorin Kazakh. However, seven years later in 2003, I moved to New York City, I was getting my PhD at Columbia, and I sent out a bunch of emails to art historians in Paris, saying, do you know anything about this deceased French artist Joran Kazakh? Leaving my phone number. A few weeks later, the phone rings and I'm broke in Brooklyn in my studio apartment. The phone rings in my landlang, that's all we had, and it's this raspy French accented voice saying, This is Joran Kaz akh, I'm alive. I hear you're looking for me. Come to Paris. So I signed up for my third credit card and went over to meet him. And it was part of an effort to bring the children's book back into print, which with my co-editor Jennifer De Vir-Brody, eventually happened . It took 15 years. That's another story. But in the process of meeting Joran Kazak, I came to understand that there were these untold love stories that really helped explain Baldwin's entire life. Buford Delaney is the one who introduced Baldwin to Joran Kazakh, so there's already that kind of relationship. Joran Kazakh had a lot of similarities to Lucian Hapersberger, Baldwin's first great love, to whom he dedicated Giovanni's room. And then the last figure, third chronologically, was Engine Jazar. This is a Turkish actor that Baldwin followed to Istanbul in the 1960s and spent the entire decade there, really just coming back from major political events like the March on Washington, but Istanbul became his home and he wrote Another Country There, The Fire Next Time, he directed a play there. So it was clear that looking at these relationships more closely would help us understand Baldwin's life and work much better. Aaron Powell Just going back to Yoran Kazakh, uh what was that like the moment when he rang you? It was like a ghost. Had been um a ghost was come calling me from beyond the grave. I was studying for my PhD oral exam, so I was reading you, know, a century of literature, all these dead people. And then suddenly this living person from James Baldwin's life calls me. And that really changed my life. I mean, that was the moment . I didn't know it then, but that really was the moment where I was stopped being interested in writing an academic book and I knew that I wanted to write something about this living, breathing person and their relationship and have a wider readership. I didn't know that it would become a biography sort sort of organically happened over time that I slowly realized that these figures were all connected in certain ways and that um and that love that Baldwin's you know a love story is the subtitle that love is just the central theme of all of Baldwin's writing. Has all of his novels are love stories. And even something like The Fire Next Time, his whole argument there is that black and white Americans must come together metaphorically like lovers in order to sort of make freedom real. So it it organically over the course of 20 years came together to be what it what it finally was. Trevor Burrus But this phone call was in 2003. Trevor Burrus This was in 2003. This is a long process. This was a very Aaron Powell And obviously it must in some way from you come from a place of love, right? So can you tell us why? Well, you know, the first time I saw James Baldwin's face was in the eighth grade. I I went to the DC public schools. You know, in in America, public schools are the are state the s schools, right? Um and at the time uh my father was a civil was a civil rights lawyer, and the school was predominantly African American. I was one of the few white students. So in my eighth grade English class, Mrs. Miles, my wonderful English teacher, had had paintings and drawings of famous black authors on on the wall, and one of them was James Baldwin. And immediately I was taken with his eyes. She later told me, I hadn't , but after the book came out, we talked, she said, You don't remember you didn't just s see him on, you also got dressed up in a suit a week later and cave and came in and gave a presentation on his life. So I've been writing this book for over forty years. That's amazing. And what when when you were doing that and you obviously spent years and years doing it . Was it something that you kind of worked on while doing other things? How did this fit into the rest of your life? Well, I was young. I was out of the clubs as well. No, I'm kidding. But I was, I was, I knew I wanted to be a writer. So I finished my PhD like a year after the Joran Kazakh encounter. And then I did something s sort of unusual. I went and got my my MFA and creative writing afterwards because I I knew I didn't want to write an academic book. So I was in school a lot and I worked on uh a novella and I published part of that. Um and then I'll go back going back to that project next. But I also took up a teaching job at NYU for about nine years. And during that time is when we worked on getting Little Man, Little Man republished. But uh but then I quit that job in order to take these, you know, I had to go spend a lot of time in the archives of the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Beineke also has archives. So to do this book, I couldn't have held a regular job, for example, um and I couldn't have um done it. It it took the time, it took me a while to figure out what the book was. And even once I did that, it was another 10 years of work. And with the sense of uh exile in Baldwin's life and leaving America and going to other countries and two very significant cities, there's Paris and Istanbul, um can you tell us about the relationship that Baldwin had with Paris in particular? Well Paris was where he went in first of the late in the late 40s. He had his best friend had jumped off the George Washington Bridge to his death, Eugene Wirth. Baldwin was afraid that he would follow in his footsteps. And he also, as he put it, didn't want to be just a a Negro writer. So I think going to France in some ways was a way of saving his life as he put it, but also expanding his horizons as an artist. So he loved being in Paris in part because he didn't speak the language at first. And he found this kind of alienation from from the from the words around him allowed him to reconnect with with his own voice. This got even more extreme when he was taken to the Swiss Alps by Lucian , and he brought Bessie Smith records with him to this small village, and that's where he reconnected with the language of his youth. Um, so France was really liberating for him. It was part of, you know, obviously the allure of Hemingway, but also many African Americans had gone over there, including Josephine Baker, but especially Richard Wright, who was his early kind of mentor, had had recently gone over to Paris. So there was an exodus of African Americans over there. Although Baldwin never called himself an expatriate, he always called himself a transatlantic commuter. Now the commute to Istanbul was quite a was quite a long commute because he, as I said, he kept traveling back and forth between Istanbul and the States. The appeal of Istanbul was similar. He by this time he'd learned how to speak French but when he got to Istanbul and he never learned Turkish. And I think he did that on purpose, because that again, this sense of alienation. It was from Istanbul that he said, it's from another place that you can write about America, because in America there's nothing to compare America to. It really was this kind of comparative impulse that he had and lived by that in order to understand himself, but also the country of his origin, he needed to go elsewhere. There's also this sense of distance in his life, isn't there, that he's always trying to keep some kind of measured distance from people, from places. And you say that almost when he he meets someone and he has a relationship with them, he writes about it after he leaves them and he stays away from them. Uh and there's also a sense one of things I find quite interesting about him, these major loves of his life are all white. Why why do you think that is? Well, Buffer Delaney is not white. He's African-American. And Buford Delaney fell in love with Baldwin when they met in Greenwich in Greenwich Village. But Baldwin wanted him to be his spiritual father. But in fact, they had this lifelong kinship relationship that was sort of beautiful, but also complicated because there was this undercurrent. The major figures in the book that he sort of was yearning for and was involved with and dedicated novels to are White, you know, Lucian, Joran, I guess, En Engein althoughgein said that he was part African. But as I explore in the book, Baldwin also had several relationships with West Indian men, with uh French African men, especially later, especially later in his life. So that's just one important point. But again, I think that this impossible love that he had for America was part of the desire, perhaps, for these relationships with these men, uh Joran in particular, Lucien and Angine. However, um you know, I think that he would balk at the uh at being you know, there were rumors when he was that were like, oh Baldwin is only into this kind of man or that kind of man. And in fact, that's just not the case. He was involved with uh many uh African American men later in his life. But these relationships tended not to be the ones that were uh as creatively productive for him. Although one, Arnold, with a young jazz musician, was the inspiration for his wonderful short story, Sonny's Blues. Aaron Powell And there's a sense in the book where you're following him throughout his life and he's moving around the world, he's going from place to place, in a sense you're also pursuing after him. And he's quite an elusive figure. Do you think through writing it that you've gotten to know him better? I think through reading his letters in particular, um I've gotten to know Baldwin better. His his letters are extraordinary. Letters to Mary Painter, his best friend, this this w white woman American economist that he met in Paris. He writes for these extraordinary letters of the Beinickey. He writes from his first trip south in 1957 , after he meets Martin Luther King, but after he also almost like loses his mind because he sees burning crosses and he's reading KKK pamphlets and he comes back really politically transformed, um, but also um very sort of traumatized. So these letters offer an insight into Baldwin's emotional vulnerability that we don't get as much in in his published essays, although we do in some of his later essays actually, uh where he's going, he's re-examining his childhood . Um I think in a way there will always be something unknowable about Baldwin as as as my subject. Um and I kind of like it that way. I mean some people sometimes ask me, is there a question that you wish you could could could ask James Baldwin? And the truth is there's nothing I want to ask him. And part of the reason is it was the gaps in what we know about him that sent me on this journey, right? Not knowing what the relationship was with Joran Kazak, not knowing what Istanbul was like for him in full. I had to go over there a couple of times. Not knowing what exactly had happened to him in Corsica. I went to Corsica to the house where he lived for several months in the late fifties and where he contemplated taking his own life. So if I had the answers to all the questions that I had, it would kind of erase the impulse that sent me off on this journey in the first place. Aaron Powell And with Baldwin, uh he spent his life moving around the world going from so many different places. Do you think he ever found a home? Well he said perhaps home is an irrevocable condition. Um I think that he did find in both in Istanbul for a while, certainly, and then when he moved to the south of France, Saint Paul de Vance, he bought a home there. He'd have friends come through and visit him like Nina Simone and Miles Davis. Um and he really did create. It was called Shea Baldwin. His brother lived there with him for a while. I do think he considered this uh his home, and that's where he died in nineteen eighty-seven. But again, he became so famous that people would start visiting stopping by and visiting him there, that he would have to leave in order to get away from the hangers on. So one of his favorite, I think, late memories was actually when he went back to Istanbul for a for a summer in nineteen eighty two to spend with Engeen. So for him, I think home was more a people than it was a place. That's that's why I focused, you know, on several different people. But it wasn't just men. I want to emphasize that as I look at the book, you know, uh Lorraine Hansbury, the incredible African American woman playwright, was very important to him. Tony Morrison came to visit him in Saint Paul Devonce and he stayed up all night reading if Beelstream could talk to her to see if he got the voice right. So I think for Baldwin it was about kinship and connection and these communities that he forged. This is what created home. These places were just the places where he had to go to try to create the conditions of possibility for his relationships. Aaron Powell There's always been an element of Baldwin's writing that is in some ways autobiographical, even when it's fiction. As you made this memoir and you wrote or as you wrote this biography and you spent time learning so much about him and going through his diaries, did you ever think to yourself, I'm seeing so much more in his novels now than I'd seen before of moments in his life? Aaron Powell I did. And I think one of the things about Baldwin is he wasn't coy about the fact that he drew on his own life. I mean, some some novelists can say, oh well, this this has nothing to do with my life. And then the novel like is clearly based on somebody who grew up exactly the same way they did. Balvin was like, yeah, I'm John. John John Gotell on the Mountain is me and I'm him. But even David in in Giovanni's room was a white character. So aspects of myself are there. Uh Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone is it's about a sort of an aging uh actor, but it's a famous actor, but it's also very much clearly based on Baldwin. But he transformed these characters. I mean, look at if Beale Street could talk. This is a novel uh written from the first-person perspective of a pregnant black woman, Tish. This novel is dedicated to Joran Kazakh. So while it's very much telling a black heterosexual love story set in Harlem, it's also based on his interracial queer relationship with Joran Kazakh. So even when he is drawing from his own life, he's trans forming it into art. Have you worked out from if Beal Street could talk, what aspects you think he he's drawing from his relationship at Joran Kazakh? Oh, I mean all kinds of aspects. Uh Fani is an artist like Joran Kazakh who works with stone. Joran Kazakh does these did these incredible stone installations in Tuscany that Baldwin had seen. Um, Yoron's wife was pregnant with the child that would become Baldwin's godson while Baldwin was working on if Beelstreet could talk. Baldwin talked about his books as babies, as if giving give he was birth. So in a way, by collaborating with Joran Kosak on Little Man, Little Man on a children's book, he was sort of having a baby or trying to have a metaphorical baby with his lover as his lover's wife was giving birth to an actual baby, right? So it's not, it's not hard to trace. These are these are fairly odd. Once you start looking, these are fairly obvious overlaps. But again, it's never it's never a one-to-one. I mean, he writes his personal essays, he writes very directly about his own life in many of them. Notes of a native son, and you know, fantastic essay about his father's few death and funeral, which sort of doubles as Baldwin coming to grips with the realities of American ra cism. So he chose to write, I think, the personal essay when it was appropriate. And then when he wanted to do something different as an artist, he would turn it into a novel. I mean, for many of our listeners, Giovanni's Room is probably the work that they're most familiar with. Can you talk about the aspects of uh Baldwin's life that that feed into that novel? Aaron Powell Well, thanks for bringing that up because this year is the 70th anniversary of the publication of Giovanni's Room, and the UK actually plays a very important role in that fact. Uh it wouldn't Knopf, his publisher wouldn't publish it because of the homosexual content. He came over to England and Michael Joseph did publish it and eventually publishers in the US did, but it really was because of um his trip over here. So thank you to the UK. Uh, Giovanni's room is such an interesting book because, you know, one of the things that I learned by looking at letters is that it it wasn't really supposed to be a novel. Uh, he was at the artist's residency yaddo. He had just gone through a breakup with Lu cian, and he got in a lot of trouble because he kept making phone calls back to Lucian and others during the breakup. He racked up like a $3 50 phone bill at Yaddo that made them very angry that he never paid back. But he also wrote letters to Mary Painter and to others where he said, Oh, I'm up here, and this horrid short story that I can't stand is just keeps growing. And actually, now I think it's a novel called Giovanni's Room. So it was clear that this breakup with Lucian, right, was the inspiration for the short story becoming a novel. And it's a love triangle between David, Hella, and Giovanni. Baldwin was involved in several love triangles with Lucian. Lucian eventually married Diana Sands, who was an actress in in Blues from Mr. Charlie, Baldwin's play, you know. Um and in fact, uh, you know, when Baldwin first became involved with Lucian, he was also involved with a woman named Susie who became pregnant. So uh the the similarities are there, but again he transmutes it into these other characters, into Giovanni, into David, who are who contain aspects of Baldwin but are are different from Baldwin himself. Clearly, they're not African American, for example. But they have both have elements of his personality. Baldwin once said of Beaufort Delaney that no greater lover has held a brush. Delaney's paintings of Baldwin are beautiful. Well, what do you make of those paintings and how they shape the public image of Baldwin today? Great question. I'm so blessed that recently my partner and I were given a Beaufor Delaney pa inting, actually, from Kaylee Jones, who's the daughter of the novelist James Jones, who was one of Baldwin's great friends, and Kaylee was actually kind of raised a bit by Buford in Paris. So and there's a show coming out at the Phillips Gallery next year. There have been several Delaney shows in the last few years in New York. It's remarkable to see how his career has exploded and it's so deserved because when Baldwin met him in the late 40s, he was this eccentric figure in the village. Baldwin was working after school at a sweatshop, and he went over to uh Buford Studio. He'd been given a friend in common. And he walks into his tenement and he sees this short brown man wearing all white, and behind him are easels covered in white uh sheets. And when he pulls them off, he sees these beautiful paintings of jazz musicians and Washington Square Park. And this was the moment when Baldwin realized as he, put it, that a black man could be an artist. But just as importantly, Buford painted, you know, paintings of portraits of Baldwin, beginning with a semi-nude, dark rapture, but over the years many, many paintings of him. And he sensed that Baldwin was struggling to find self love. And he wanted Baldwin to see him as he saw him, a young man worthy of love. So those paintings were uh are a remarkable record of Baldwin's kind of growth over time and the sustainability of their relationship. And it was, you know, this was this was this is why he said no greater lover has ever held a brush. He meant that as he called him his spiritual father . It was not a uh romantic love, although Buford had wanted that at some point. It was a kind of all encompassing, deep, difficult. They did have a difficult uh relationship over the years, of course, like any long term relationship. But it was Bu ford who taught Baldwin how to see the world as an artist. There's that famous story early on. They're walking down Broadway together, and Buford port points down at a gutter and says, Look, what do you see? And Baldwin says, A gutter. He says, look again. And he sees in the water, like in the oily mercury water, that it's reflecting back the buildings around them in this beautiful way. And this was a moment. Then he saw was he saw that Buford was showing him how to see the world as an artist, not just as a visual artist , but also to be a writer, you had to notice these things. You had to find the beauty in the everyday. Aaron Ross Powell Baldwin was a great romantic and he was loved by many people. But do you think he ever loved himself? I mean do we do ever of us ever fully love ourselves? I don't think I I mean I don't know if he would delude himself into thinking that but I think by the end of his life he was and this is he died way too young at sixty-three. But I do think he was very much at peace with himself. I mean he, for example, earlier in his career, you know, some negative reviews had really angered him and upset him. Later in his life he was saying, which is true, that a true artist is not judged in their time. They're judged afterwards. And it's wonderful that we are now seeing in the last twenty years, but really the last ten years, that Baldwin is being celebrated and understood to be, in my opinion, the most important writer of the twentieth century. So I think he was at peace with that. I think he was surrounded by his brother who loved him when he died. Lucian, you know, kind of dramatically came back to his side. He was in a in a place that he loved. So I think he experienced deep, deep love. And I hope he understood, and I think he did, that this desire for a kind of one love, one person, was uh a kind of a fantasy that crumbles in most lives, right? And that what he actually achieved through these multiple loves and that that were sometimes erotic but then became friendships, then circled back in all these different kinds of ways, that what an achievement it is to have um to have brought together these these many people. I mean, one of the cliches about Baldwin that I wanted to fight against, there's a couple. One is that just this icon of the civil rights movement, which he was, but he's also a human being, but people often thought that he had this kind of tragic life, that he never found the great love, and that he had this decline as an artist. So the last ten years we've sort of reclaimed him as an artist in his later work, seeing how important it is. But I also wanted to show that his life, yes, it was a struggle, but it was also full of joy and full of community and full of love. Part of the resurgence of Baldwin, and I think what makes him so popular today obviously is that relationship with the civil rights movement. And I think in this country he came over here and he spoke at the Oxford Union and it made him this huge figure for a lot of people. Well what do you think he would make of the world today? Well, it's a tough question, right? I would never speak for James Baldwin in part because um he's all he was always changing his mind. He had a really, really an idiosyncratic mind. He changed his mind about Palestine. He changed his mind about gender and feminism. And he also moved much further to the left and later in the sixties and into the seventies. So you'd have to be careful to predict what he would say. However, what I think you can do is look at his later writings, particularly the ones that people had dismissed, and you'll see that he was already writing about the issues that are with us today. Two ex-I'll just give you two examples. The first one in terms of gender. One of his last essays, Freaks in the American Ideal of Manhood, he was saying we're all androgynous. Each contains the other, male and female, f female and male, black and white, white and black. He understood himself, but also he understood gender in general as this kind of performance, right? And that we're all kind of non-binary to use today's language, right? That it's a social construct. So that would be, I think he'd be an important voice in kind of trans debates today. But I also think his last nonfiction book, Evidence of Things Not Seen, was about the Atlanta child murders. Now, this book is often considered to be not good. And in a way, it was a little bit of a mess, but in part it was a mess because he was grappling with something very early on that we are now grappling with as a culture, uh, definitely in the States and and here as well, which is the ubiquity of suffering on our that we have to witness on our cell phones. So this was the Atlanta child murders was a moment when um suddenly uh instead of a kind of a lack of representation of African Americans in the media, it was saturated with these images of of violence and this sort of obsession with with with Black Death. And now we see that young teenagers in America can see their brothers and sisters being shot, right? And so how do you how do you deal with the desensitized desensitivization that happens through that ? What kinds of responsibilities do we have? You're seeing this now, right, with the lawsuits, et cetera, et cetera, with AI, all of that. What kind of responsibil ethical responsibilities do we have about uh technol about ver technologies and the kind of um the everyday intrusion of violence into especially young young lives and young minds. This book has been the work of half a lifetime. How does it feel to see it out in the world? People sometimes ask me, oh, do you have like a postpartum? Are you do you miss do you miss abs I'm thrilled. I'm so glad it's over. I never I did never thought it would take this long. You know, Baldwin died of esophical cancer and as I was finishing this book, I was at a artist residency in Key West, Florida, which should have been amazing, but instead I came down with this horrible throat ailment as I was writing this part of the book. I think my body was uh just very ready for it to be over. Um never want to write footnotes again, never want to have end notes again. Of course I'm honored to have spent my life writing about such a important figure and he'll always, you know, be be close to my heart, but um I am elated and thrilled to be at this at this stage of the game. You've been listening to the New Society from the New Statesman with Luke O'Reilly and Nicholas Boggs . If you've enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe so you never miss a future episode. The New Society Podcast will be back next week.