Maggie Nelson: "On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint"
Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Maggie Nelson to discuss\xa0her latest book,\xa0On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint.\xa0In 2015, Nelson\u2019s bestselling, genre-defying\xa0The Argonauts\xa0won the\xa0National Book Critics Circle Award, and her other works of criticism, memoir, and poetry include\xa0The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning;\xa0Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions;\xa0Bluets;\xa0Jane: A Murder; and\xa0The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Warhol Creative Capitol\xa0Arts Writing Grant, among other awards. Currently she is a professor of English at USC. Written in the wake of the 2016 election,\xa0On Freedom\xa0is an ambitious consideration of the complex knots of \u201csovereignty and self abandon, subjectivity and subjection, autonomy and dependency\u201d that form under the blanket of liberation. Focusing on four topics \u2014 art, sex, drugs, and the climate crisis \u2014 the book challenges the notion of freedom as a utopian state toward which we might move untethered from our responsibilities to the planet and to one another. At the same time, Nelson carves out a notable amount of space within realms many would be quick to deem as uniquely unfree: caretaking, addiction, conflict, and negative affect, even the ticking time bomb of global warming that leaves so many of us feeling helpless. Here, we\u2019re asked to consider what feeling free might have to do with feeling good \u2014 and what could be a better question than that?\nAlso, Rachel Greenwald Smith, author of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal, returns to recommend Heather Berg's Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism.