The Editors

In the latest episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman and Helen Thompson talk to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo about better ways to do economics. From investing in left-behind places to helping people adapt to change, they discuss good and bad economic ideas about some of the biggest challenges we face, and how it all connects back to politics. They also talk about what some of the world‘s richest countries can learn from some of the poorest.

In the latest episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman, Helen Thompson, Catherine Barnard and Chris Brooke discuss where we might be heading. Does Boris Johnson have enough to persuade the wavering MPs he needs to get his Brexit deal over the line? Do his opponents have enough to stop him? Can European leaders still force the issue? If there is an election, does it all change again? What's actually in the Withdrawal Agreement Bill? And what does it all mean for the future of the Union?

In the latest episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman, Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson discuss the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine. They ask what it would take for Republican senators to desert him and what the collateral damage is likely to be for the Democratic presidential candidates.

A book to mark the LRB’s 40th anniversary, compiled by Sam Kinchin-Smith, is published today by Faber. More scrapbook than festschrift, it traces an incomplete history of the paper through reproductions of letters, drawings, postcards, fieldnotes, typescripts and covers from the last four decades, introduced and contextualised by writers, editors and designers from the LRB’s past and present. To keep the book under two kilos, we could only include a couple of pages from most of the manuscripts. But there’s no weight limit online, so here are all 29 pages of Oliver Sacks’s typescript for ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’.

In the latest episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman and Helen Thompson take a step back to unpick the tortuous history of how we got to the Brexit referendum in the first place. Does the justification that David Cameron offers in his memoirs stack up? What was he trying to achieve? And why did we end up with an in/out vote when the political risks were so great? A conversation linked to Runciman’s review of Cameron's book in the 40th anniversary issue of the LRB.