Episode

James Baldwin would be a leading progressive voice today

Podcast
The New Statesman Podcast, Subscriber Only Edition
Published
May 2, 2026
Duration seconds
1809
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://www.newstatesman.com/podcasts
Audio
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/nssubscribers1913/boggs_on_baldwin_mixdown.mp3?dest-id=814410
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/the-new-statesman-podcast-subscriber-only-edition-1939815/episodes/james-baldwin-would-be-a-leading-progressive-voice-today
Markdown
/podcast/the-new-statesman-podcast-subscriber-only-edition-1939815/james-baldwin-would-be-a-leading-progressive-voice-today.md

Actions

  • POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-new-statesman-podcast-subscriber-only-edition-1939815/episodes/james-baldwin-would-be-a-leading-progressive-voice-today/transcription-requests
    Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
  • GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-new-statesman-podcast-subscriber-only-edition-1939815/james-baldwin-would-be-a-leading-progressive-voice-today.md
    Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

Summary

For decades, James Baldwin has stood as one of the most piercing moral voices of the 20th century, But Baldwin himself has remained, in his own words, elusive. A new biography by Nicholas Boggs - Baldwin: A Love Story - sets out to change that. Drawing on newly uncovered archives and decades of research, Boggs reframes Baldwin's life through an intimate and sometimes unsettling lens: love. Luke O'Reilly sits down with Nicholas Boggs to discuss Baldwin's loves and contradictions, the relationship between intimacy and politics, and why Baldwin's insistence that "love is the only reality" might matter more now than ever.