Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2023
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this special episode, Tyler sat down with Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss three books: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Of Boys and Men by Richard V. Reeves.
Spanning centuries and genres and yet provoking similar questions, these books prompted Tyler and Jerusalem to wrestle with enduring questions about human nature, gender dynamics, the purpose of travel, and moral progress, including debating whether Le Guin prefers the anarchist utopia she depicts, dissecting Swift's stance on science and slavery, questioning if travel makes us happier or helps us understand ourselves, comparing Gulliver and Shevek's alienation and restlessness, considering Swift’s views on the difficulty of moral progress, reflecting on how feminism links to moral progress and gender equality, contemplating whether imaginative fiction or policy analysis is more likely to spur social change, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded May 22nd, 2023.
Other ways to connect
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. |
| 0:13.6 | Learn more at mercatis.org. |
| 0:16.4 | For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit Conversationswithtiler.com. |
| 0:26.0 | Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:29.3 | Today I am sitting here in Arlington, Virginia with the great Jerusalem Demsets, |
| 0:34.2 | formerly of Vox, currently at the Atlantic, red across the entire world. |
| 0:40.3 | Today we're going to do something different. |
| 0:42.0 | This show is called Conversations with Tyler, but this time we're actually going to have a conversation with Tyler. |
| 0:48.8 | So now we start, Jerusalem, welcome. |
| 0:51.7 | Hi, thanks for having me. |
| 0:53.2 | We agreed to go away and read and then talk about three books. |
| 0:56.8 | So let's start with Ursula Laguin, the dispossessed. |
| 0:59.8 | The other books will be Jonathan Swift, Oliver's Travels, and Richard V. Reeves of Boys and Men. |
| 1:05.4 | But Ursula Laguin, where do you want to start? |
| 1:07.9 | Well, I first read this book. |
| 1:09.7 | I think I must have been early high school. |
| 1:12.4 | And I don't know if this is what you were like when you were early high school, |
| 1:15.8 | but I was very angry about a lot of things. |
| 1:17.7 | It was hard to have conversations about anything to do with politics without getting very upset or angry. |
| 1:22.6 | And that's what I think a lot of my peers felt at the time. |
| 1:26.5 | And I think reading science fiction, it's like a way of having conversations about politics without having to necessarily feel that. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Tyler, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Tyler and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.