Checks and Balance: A novel approach
Checks and Balance from The Economist
The Economist
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We take a break from the news this week to convene the first ever Checks and Balance Book Club. All summer we’ve been reading three works, picked by the team, from the canon of American literature. In this episode, we’ll present our analysis, hear what listeners thought, and work out what it means to be a Great American Novel. Plus, a very special quiz.
If you want to read along, the books we discuss are “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton, “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner and “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. For more reading recommendations, The Economist has published a longer list of Great American Novels, collated from suggestions from our correspondents.
John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard, Idrees Kahloon and Jon Fasman.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Everybody is talking about ESG at the moment, the danger is it's been reduced to easily |
| 0:08.0 | measurable metrics. |
| 0:09.0 | What we mean by actually ESG is how do we think about the investments we're making for |
| 0:14.5 | clients and the impact they have in the real world? |
| 0:19.2 | Find out more by searching for Bayley Gifford Actual Investors. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm John Prado and this is checks and balance from the economist. |
| 0:41.6 | Today we're doing something different. |
| 0:44.4 | Welcome to our summer book club where we're going to discuss what we think makes a great |
| 0:49.8 | American novel. |
| 0:50.8 | I won't say the great American novel because when I first suggested that there was such |
| 0:54.8 | a riot on the email chain that that was even an idea, even a thing we could possibly |
| 1:00.4 | solve that I decided against it, but a great American novel. |
| 1:04.6 | The way this is going to work is that I asked Charlotte Howard and Idris Calune and John |
| 1:10.6 | Fasmin to each pick one great American novel that they wanted to discuss on the podcast. |
| 1:15.8 | If you haven't finished reading the books that we're talking about, I'm afraid spoiler |
| 1:18.8 | alerts, we will talk about the endings and so if you mind that then you can always listen |
| 1:23.8 | to the episode when you're done and we're going to go in chronological order. |
| 1:28.6 | So the novel that was published first goes first and that novel was Charlotte's pick, the |
| 1:34.4 | Age of Innocence by Edith Warton which was published in 1920 but set in Guilded Age New |
| 1:40.8 | York, so in the 1870s. |
| 1:42.8 | Charlotte, to begin with, would you begin by just telling us a little bit about this book |
| 1:47.2 | what happens in it? |
... |
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