Long Distance
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, the distances travelled in search of love and safety. The Finnish novelist and playwright Saara Turunen has written beautifully about what it's like to navigate a relationship between Helsinki and Barcelona. We chat to her about European culture clashes and what feminism looks like in the two countries she lives between. Plus, Europe's failed refugee policy, magical taps, and ill-chosen words by a billionaire populist (no, not that one).
Saara's piece appears in Europa28, a collection of writing by European women which comes out on March 12.
Read the New York Times investigation on how oligarchs milk EU farming subsidies here.
Fancy seeing Lysistrata in Dortmund on March 23 or Greentea Peng in Lisbon on April 23? We have free tickets! Tag us in a post alongside @liveurope for your chance to win.
Thanks for listening. If you like the show and have a couple of spare dollars a month, you can help keep us running at patreon.com/europeanspodcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's my dry cough. |
| 0:18.1 | Oh dear, you can only laugh. Hello, Dominic. How are you? Hmm, there's my dry cough. |
| 0:22.9 | Oh dear, you can only laugh. |
| 0:24.8 | Hello, Dominic. How are you? |
| 0:28.0 | Hi, Katie. I'm fine. I also, of course, developed a dry cough. |
| 0:33.3 | I mean, I shouldn't laugh about it. Sorry, everyone that's having a horrible time out there, |
| 0:40.8 | this laughter is merely out of anxiety, but I think it was just a psychosomatic cough i'm like the most health anxious person in the world so this crisis is great for me but i don't think i'm |
| 0:46.4 | going to infect you over the over Skype good to know i'm also having quite an anxious and uncertain |
| 0:52.2 | week same as everybody else really. But mine hasn't |
| 0:55.0 | been helped by the fact that, like everyone else in France, I have joined the current literary trend, |
| 1:00.0 | which is to read The Plague by Albert Camus. It's not really a good week to be reading it, |
| 1:05.2 | but it is a great book. I'm really enjoying it. Why would you do that to yourself? |
| 1:09.1 | It's just like the zeitgeist, didn't it? My husband's |
| 1:11.7 | reading this seminal book about the AIDS crisis in America called The Band Played On, which also |
| 1:18.1 | I was like, why now? Not a good time to be reading literature about infectious diseases. We're going |
| 1:23.9 | to try not to talk too much about coronavirus this week, because it feels like people are talking about nothing else right now. |
| 1:29.1 | But I do want to send our love and support, especially to our Italian listeners. |
| 1:32.8 | We hope you're staying strong in all of this craziness. |
| 1:35.2 | It's just absolutely mad what's happening. |
| 1:37.2 | Yeah, it's really mad and I'm getting really angry with the people. Well, no, I understand why people are playing it down, like to try and be relaxed, |
| 1:44.3 | but I get really annoyed when people are like, oh, only a few thousand people have died of it |
| 1:49.0 | and all these people die of other things. And it's just annoying that some people don't seem |
... |
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