George Saunders on the 'Braindead Megaphone' That Makes Our Politics So Awful
About this episode
George Saunders discusses his story collection 'Liberation Day' and the moral imagination that fiction requires. He describes 'Love Letter,' written as a grandfather's message in a dystopic future, as an attempt to think through when ordinary people should resist creeping authoritarianism. The conversation revisits his essay 'The Braindead Megaphone,' which Klein calls prescient of social media: Saunders argues platforms like Twitter agitate and warp the malleable self, rewarding cruelty and flattening moral perception. He reflects on the writer's discipline of seeing others fully — drawing on Chekhov — and on storytelling in politics, admiring Barack Obama's narrative gifts. They also discuss the exhaustion of American political culture and the quiet, Buddhist-inflected attention Saunders brings to his writing and teaching.