This is the London Review of Books podcast.

Today we have the first of three guest episodes from Myself with Others,

a new podcast presented by our US editor, Adam Schatz.

In this episode, he's talking to the writer and critic Margot Jefferson.

A friend from Brandeis and I were working as secretaries at Planned Parenthood, and we just sat down and said,

what are we doing with our lives?

Talking to him about and listening to Bud Powell, taking in that violent, self-destructive life,

and he loved Bud Powell and the beauty, the uncanny, but disruptive beauty of that music.

An earlier group of blacks,

including black women, had forged that path.

So, you know, they could tell me things.

They could be helpful.

So I knew perfectly well that part of what was going on

with my being hired was what they called the twofer. You never quite knew when it was suddenly going to kick in. in. You're listening to myself with others, a podcast about the life of ideas on and off the page.

And I'm your host, Adam Shats.

My guest on this episode is the writer and cultural critic Margo Jefferson.

Many of those listening to this podcast will know her from her memoir of growing up in a family

of black professionals in Chicago, Negro Land, which won the National Book Critic Circle

Award for autobiography in 2016.

Margot is also the recipient of a Pulitzer for her writings in the New York Times, where

she was critic at large for many years and a longtime professor of writing at Columbia University.

What distinguishes Margo's writing on culture is her extraordinary curiosity, her breath of vision,

...