Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
17 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“The fact that he hasn’t returned to his home planet at the end — we don’t know if he actually lands and is safe there — I think is a clearer message of how .”
02 / uncertainty
“One thing I thought about while reading this book was — I don’t know if you have an opinion on this, but I feel like people don’t really write utopian literature anymore.”
03 / belief
“I think that the ambiguity, clearly, between you and I about what Le Guin is trying to tell us about these different systems is actually extremely valuable.”
04 / belief
“I wonder then, to me, I’ve always had this opinion. I think a lot of people don’t travel well for what they want to do.”
05 / belief
“I think many people, when they travel, end up staying within very similar social groups or even only with Americans or the people they’re traveling with, and have very little interaction with people and learning about their lives in any meaningful way.”
06 / belief
“I think there’s this current here which is trying to really undermine the idea that there are these ideals in the capitalist society that are actually .”
07 / belief
“One is that he makes a comment that I think is meant to fly under the radar very early in the book, which is that he’s only talking about cis, heterosexual men.”
08 / uncertainty
“Maybe there are other cultures who are writing utopias. I don’t know. You are the one who reads internationally.”
09 / belief
“I think Le Guin is pretty clear that she prefers the anarchist world but doesn’t shy away from the problems with it, which I think is usually the issue with utopian writing.”
10 / evaluation
“” Maybe it’s a knock against moral progress that the same questions are being debated over centuries. It doesn’t matter the format, it doesn’t matter the style, it doesn’t matter the background of the interlocutor.”
11 / belief
“Our main character is a physicist who travels between the two, trying to bridge the gap. I think that’s a broad summary.”
12 / belief
“I think he’s much more pessimistic about it than I am, given how quick the gains have been in my own lifetime around moral progress.”
13 / evaluation
“[laughs] I think there’s a comment made by a woman that Shevek, our protagonist, meets on his travels, where she says that it’s better to have the conflict outside of your head than to have the conflict within yourself.”
14 / preference
“At the same time, it’s just like many of the things that I’ve gotten from really productive travel experiences that have also been analogous to experiences when I read very, very good books or I hear a very, very smart argument or something like that.”
15 / evaluation
“I think that’s maybe slightly a little bit too much in The Dispossessed world because we know later on that his connections end up being the foundation for a really important technology that connects space, different planets.”
16 / evaluation
“. it’s hard because I was saying this to you before we started this, but most of the book is trying to convince you that the idea is a very heterodox idea, that we should care about men as well.”
17 / preference
“I think reading science fiction — it’s like a way of having conversations about politics without having to necessarily feel that.”