Transcription
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Jun 2026 on The Ezra Klein Show.
The general take
Chris Hayes loved Ben Lerner's newest transcription, calling it particularly potent, though he acknowledges the appeal might be personal given their shared Brown connection rather than universal. He found it resonant enough to highlight during his appearance on The Ezra Klein Show, but notes the specific experience of their college connection may have enhanced his appreciation in ways others wouldn't share.
About
Winner of the Orwell Prize Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by The New York Times From “the most talented writer of his generation” (Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine ), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store―or to erase―our memories. The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail from the future and the past simultaneously and who reenchants the air when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
Who said what
Chris Hayes👍 Recommends
…book recommendation from chris hayes at end of episode
“I read and loved Ben Lerner's newest transcription. I will say as someone who went to Brown and he was in my class there and I just went to my 25th reunion with Kate, who I met there. It had a particular potency for me that may not have to the general audience.”
The Ezra Klein Show — Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attentionat 19:30
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