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. I'm Thomas Jones.

And this week I'm talking to Brett

Christopher's, who teaches human geography at Uppsala University in Sweden. His most recent book

is The Price is Wrong, Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet. And he was last on this podcast in February

2025 to discuss whether or not the world has surrendered to climate breakdown.

Our subject today is not unrelated to that. In the latest issue of the LRB, Brett has written

about the problems of waste. The amount of rubbish that we produce, where it goes, when we discard

it, what happens to it next, and why it's so hard ever actually to be rid of it. The piece is a

review of three books, Waste Wars, Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife

of Rubbish by Alexander Clap, Wasteland, the dirty truth about what we throw away, where it goes

and why it matters by Oliver Franklin Wallace and the idea

of waste on the limits of human life by John Scanlon. Hello Brett and thank you very much for

talking with me again. It's lovely to be back with you Thomas. Thanks for having me. Just a shame that

it's again talking about a depressing subject. As I was just setting up my mic to join the call, actually, it occurred to me that

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