Today we’re rerunning an episode from 2018 featuring two interviews with Harper’s Magazine’s former New Books columnist, Lidija Haas, and with our current Easy Chair columnist Rachel Kushner. Listen in advance of our event tonight at the Center for Fiction, “What Happened to Gen X?,” which will see Harper’s editor Christopher Beha in conversation with his generational peers Rachel Kushner and Ethan Hawke as they explore the question at the center of our September issue.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, the event illustrated how we are socialized to perform and understand gender, race, and class. In this episode, New Books columnist Lidija Haas joined Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss a handful of recent publications that deal with these issues: Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, and Kristen M. Ghoddsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. In the second segment, Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and Telex From Cuba joined Lucca to discuss an essay she wrote that was included in the October 2018 issue’s Readings section, pulled from her memories of the late Nineties New York art world.

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* “Learning to Wait,” Rachel Kushner’s latest column for the October issue of Harper’s

* Rachel Kushner’s latest book, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020

* Lidija Haas in the Harper’s archive

* Lidija Haas’s review of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad for Bookforum

* “Red Letter Days,” Rachel Kushner’s 2018 essay on the late Nineties New York art world

* “What Happened to Gen X?”, our event tonight at the Center for Fiction

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harpersmagazine.substack.com

From the Audio Archive: Rachel Kushner