You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

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Ear Hustle, the award-winning radio-topia podcast featuring sounds and stories that come from American Prison Life, is back with a brand new season.

And they're also celebrating their 100th episode.

In the new season, the show revisits its very first episode, a listener favorite called Sellies, about the relationships formed inside a prison cell.

But this time, the whole episode takes place inside a woman's prison.

The producers also spent a marathon 14 hours out on the road at San Quentin for this season.

From dungeons and dragons to dominoes, gospel to geese, weightlifting to just waiting, they've got new sounds and new stories that you have never heard before.

Listen to Ear Hustle, wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm doing something a little different for this episode.

I'm running a conversation I recently had with one of my favorite writers, James Campbell.

James Campbell's the author of Talking at the Gates, one of the first and the best biographies of James Baldwin.

He's also the author of Paris Interzone, a book about a moment when spies and writers and pranographers all converge in literary Paris in the 1950s.

For many years, James Campbell was also an editor and columnist at the Times Literary Supplement and a journalist for the Guardian.

He's just a terrific writer who I can't get enough of.

And so last spring when I saw he had a new book out, I couldn't help but pick it up.

Just go down to the road is build as a memoir about trouble and travel, but it's really much more.

It's the story of a young person growing up in Scotland in the late 60s, a boy who fails out of school at the age of 15,

but still makes his own way, eventually, to the world of ideas and literary success.

I met up with Jim this summer at his flat in London. We spoke in his living room for a few hours.

...