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The Active Voice

Hamish McKenzie

The Active Voice

An Arts, Society and Culture podcast featuring Hamish McKenzie
Good podcast? Give it some love!
The Active Voice

Hamish McKenzie

The Active Voice

Episodes
The Active Voice

Hamish McKenzie

The Active Voice

An Arts, Society and Culture podcast featuring Hamish McKenzie
Good podcast? Give it some love!
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Episodes of The Active Voice

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Today’s episode is guest-hosted by Sarah Fay, creative writing professor at Northwestern University, former interviewer at The Paris Review, devoted serializer, and lover of all things Substack. Her Substack Writers at Work helps creative write
Taylor Lorenz, a tech culture reporter for the Washington Post, has been both observer and participant in an internet culture that has been emerging since the early 2010s, a period of history that has seen the rise of massive social media platf
Even among politics and media junkies, few people had heard the name Richard Hanania before 2020. But then, as the pandemic intensified online tribalism, the political scientist emerged with a provocative analysis that carried the headline “Why
At a dinner party Substack hosted in San Francisco last week, I found myself sitting next to Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and former publisher of the Whole Earth Review. We were talking about the capital of the w
Both Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez, who writes as Yung Pueblo, arrived at writing through adversity. Writing became a way of life when each was faced with death, a healing mechanism that became a craft.When they met for the first time in perso
At first glance, Mike Solana and Ted Gioia might not seem to have much in common. Mike, the publisher of the newsletter Pirate Wires, is very much a child of the internet, a strong proponent of the tech industry and scientific progress, with a
I met Robert Reich in his overstuffed corner office on U.C. Berkeley’s campus, housed in what looked to me like a midcentury villa that could double as a restaurant that sells speciality bratwurst. I was shown into Reich’s office by Heather Lof
When he’s about to hit publish on a take that he knows will catch some heat, Ethan Strauss feels like he is about to step off a high diving board. He’s scared, but he knows he will do it anyway. “That, to me, feels good,” he says. “The entirety
Alison Roman is enjoying being an “elder millennial” and not feeling the pressure of being on TikTok or even doing all that much on Instagram, the platform that helped make her reputation (although she did meet her boyfriend when he slid into h
I met Patti Smith at Electric Lady Studios, the studio in New York’s Greenwich Village opened by Jimi Hendrix a few weeks before he died, and she immediately walked me down to the basement level to show me the original murals—psychedelic, space
When Emily Oster wrote an article for The Atlantic to suggest an amnesty in the pandemic wars, she received a shockingly sharp rebuke from those who weren’t ready to forgive. On the left, there were people who felt that the unvaccinated jeopard
Etgar Keret’s parents, both of whom survived the Holocaust, gave him the gift of imagination, a garden he has been watering with stories since he was a child. His father crouched in a hole in the ground for more than 600 days to escape the Nazi
Heather Havrilesky’s writing career has spanned the life of the internet, starting with the satirical site Suck.com, moving through Salon, The Awl, and New York Magazine, and ending up on Substack, where she publishes two much-loved newsletters
In the 1990s, the English writer Paul Kingsnorth was a radical environmental activist, taking part in road blockades and protesting at WTO summits. Today he calls himself a “recovering environmentalist” and doesn’t believe people can do all tha
Jessica DeFino’s face literally had to peel off before she gave up on beauty products and turned a critical eye on the beauty industry. As a journalist covering the industry, she had been inundated with free beauty products, which she enthusias
Ted Gioia, the great music and cultural critic, has never lived in New York and it has cost him. He knows he is completely out of touch. “I didn’t make the relationships, I didn’t have editors opening doors for me,” he says. “Things were harder
I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up on social media, especially as someone who says things in public—to try to figure out who you are as an adult while living under the panoptic gaze of TikTok and Instagram, or to have one’s intelle
You’ll have to forgive my self-indulgence in this conversation, because I’ve gone deep with Joshi Herrmann—not a celebrity name or a celebrated author, I hope he won’t be offended by me saying—about a bunch of things that scratch my particular
Doomberg, the top-earning finance publication on Substack, is led by a cartoon chicken that previously worked in heavy industry. Okay, so it wasn’t the chicken that worked in heavy industry—but its anonymous creators, with a background in hard
Chris Hedges is surprisingly cheery for someone who has, by his own admission, “a dark view of human nature.” When we met for this conversation at Substack’s office in San Francisco, he was full of smiles and good humor—at least during the time
Did you know that a votive candle is one of those short, squat candles that people use for prayer or, like, to put on their outside stairs when they’re hosting a fancy party? I did not. But “votive” is the word I blurted out when Cheryl Strayed
Among many notable things, Glenn Loury has been the first African American economics professor to get tenure at Harvard, an author and essayist, a firebrand on race issues from both the left and the right, and, in one dark chapter of his life,
I was hoping to meet Samantha Irby in person, since podcast interviews are more fun that way and she is a fun person, but she is obstinately committed to Kalamazoo, the small Michigan city plonked equidistant from three Great Lakes. This podcas
No one covered the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial in quite the way that Jessica Reed Kraus did on Instagram and Substack, taking her readers into the courtroom, behind the scenes, and into some of the most salacious details of the actors’ person
A couple of days after I interviewed George Saunders for the first episode of this podcast, I caught up on some of his recent posts on Story Club, his writing-focused Substack. In “A Lost Speech, Found,” he wrote about rediscovering the script
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