Breaking History

For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, click here and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount. 

Roald Dahl gave the world Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was also a vicious antisemite.

A Broadway play about Dahl’s legacy; the new Michael Jackson biopic; Kanye West’s attempted redemption arc; all of these have the culture asking again: How do we approach brilliant art produced by morally compromised artists?

Throughout history, some of the world’s preeminent literary geniuses have also been deeply bigoted, even monstrous people. In this episode, Shilo is joined by Eli Lake, host of Breaking History, for a conversation about these geniuses, from Voltaire to Norman Mailer, and why we should read their work despite their odious prejudices.

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David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns for freedom of speech. The FSU will publish a new report examining allegations tied to Labour Together, the political network linked to Keir Starmer.

David joins Eli Lake to explain how his investigation describes a murky ecosystem involving claims of journalists labeled as Russian assets, the circulation of private intelligence-style dossiers, and the growing overlap between political advocacy and “disinformation” or “digital hate” laws in the UK.

Our special episode on the UK being a “censor’s paradise” is here.
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Eli Lake joins Robert Wright over at his podcast NonZero, which offers “conversations with a series of people who have nothing in common except that program host Robert Wright is curious about what they’re thinking” . Robert views the U.S-Israel military campaign against Iran as a serious mistake and a clear violation of international law. Eli sees it as a necessary—if legally awkward—response to decades of Iranian aggression and destabilization. Who wins? You’ll have to listen to decide for yourself.
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Arash Azizi lived through the democracy movement in Iran before he wrote about it. Now a historian at Yale, he joins Eli Lake to trace the arc from former president Mohammad Khatami’s unlikely rise to the crushed hopes of the Green Movement—and what it tells us about whether reform from within the Islamic Republic was ever really possible.
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What does it actually take to break a regime built on martyrdom?

Eli Lake sits down with Haviv Rettig Gur — host of Ask Haviv Anything and one of the deepest thinkers on the Middle East — to assess week five of the Iran war. They trace the ideological DNA of Iran’'s Islamic Republic from the Algerian National Liberation Front to Frantz Fanon to Ali Shariati, and explain why this is a regime designed to treat its own destruction as a form of victory. Plus: what a color revolution in Tehran could mean for Sunni Islamism, Hamas, and the future of the Palestinian question.
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