Hello, you're listening to Culture Call, the Life and Arts podcast from the Financial Times.

I'm Lila Raptopoulos, an editor in New York.

Coming up on today's show.

What we have, which has never happened before, is the robust existence of a flourishing fantasy world,

a world of systematically disseminated untruths.

When we talk about reparations, we often talk about what do countries owe to their ex-colonies,

but we don't often talk about the companies who act as a mechanism through which the exploitation

is done.

As you may know, this season, my co-host Gris is on maternity leave, and I'm on a quest to make

sense of this year.

Kind of a big quest.

I'm exploring questions like, how can art and culture reflect 2020 and help us make sense of it while it's still happening?

And what's possible now for the future that would have seemed impossible before?

The U.S. election results are in. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be the next president and VP of the United States.

And on Saturday, November 7th, New York City

erupted. It happened slowly and then all at once when the results came in.

People were dancing and beeping in the streets and in the parks.

Where I was, I found people cheering toward the center, as if they were all watching

something. And so I pushed up into the center of the crowd myself. And I found that actually

nothing was there. It was just pent up energy needing to be released. I personally wasn't ready to cheer quite yet.

I felt still pretty gaslit from so many years of our democracy

and our sense of reality being challenged that I didn't quite know whether I could trust it

...