This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon and by Verso Books,

which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is The Amateur, The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, by Andy Merrifield,

Out Now in Paperback.

We have lost our amateur spirit and need to

rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love. In the amateur,

thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives, work, knowledge, home,

politics, have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters,

and pedants.

In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers, and square pegs,

who challenge accepted wisdom.

Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hanna Arendt, and Jane Jacobs show us the way.

As we will see, the amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable, seeks independence, and changes the world.

The amateur is a passionate manifesto for the liberated life, one that questions

authority and reclaims the iconoclast as a radical hero of our times. The Amateur, The Pleasures of

Doing What You Love, by Andy Merrifield, out now in paperback from Verso Books.

Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine.

My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

That right-wing people in the U.S. and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising.

He's a billionaire, he's Jewish, and, unlike most of his cohort, he is an actual intellectual who spends much of his money

on substantively progressive causes.

But I never known much about Soros, save for those few tidbits I just mentioned, until

...