Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.

And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.

You can find a link in the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode of the LRB podcast was recorded on the 12th of June, before Israel's attack on Iran that night.

You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and this week I'm talking to Lalekhalili about the relationship, or maybe we could call it the bromance, I don't know, between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon.

Lalikhalili teaches at the University of Exeter, and her most recent book is extractive capitalism,

Commodities, Cargo and Cronism, which I think it's right to say grew out of some of her pieces for the LRB.

They did.

The piece we're discussing today is a recent review of two books, The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West by Alexander C. C. Carp and Nicholas W. Zarmiska. And Unit X, how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the

future of war by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. Hello, Lally, and thank you so much for

joining me today. Hi, Tom. As always, it's really

lovely to see you. So Donald Trump recently announced that the US Department of Defense budget for

the next fiscal year will be more than a trillion dollars. That's up 30% about on last year and

it's more than Russia, China and several other countries combined. What are they going to spend it on?

Well, that's a really great question. So for, I don't know, more than two decades, the US budget

has consistently been, the US defence spending budget has been consistently larger than the next

...