
Authority
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Andrea Long Chu
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By:
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Andrea Long Chu
About this listen
Read by the author, this bold, provocative collection of essays asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?
Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.
Criticism today is having a crisis of authority—but so says every generation of critics. In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this perennial crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2025 Andrea Long Chu (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"This brilliant collection from Chu showcases the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s reflections on literature, television, and the art of criticism . . . Intellectually rigorous and lucidly argued, this affirms Chu’s status as one of the most incisive critics working today." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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"I can’t wait to disappear into this collection of essays from one of my favorite critics . . . tackling culture in all its forms—and also, in two new essays, taking on criticism itself, and how it should (or can) be practiced today. If anyone should know, it’s Chu." —LitHub
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From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family’s land in Hawai‘i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui’s east side—given by King Kamehameha III in 1848—extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past. When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire.
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Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
- Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009’s Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life.
By: Maggie Nelson
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Project Mind Control
- Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA
- By: John Lisle
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory deprivation, and steering the movements of animals via electrodes implanted into their brains. His goal was to develop methods of mind control that could turn someone into a real-life “Manchurian candidate.”
By: John Lisle
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No One Left Alone
- A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal
- By: Liz Walker, Father Gregory Boyle - foreword
- Narrated by: Liz Walker
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As the first Black woman to anchor the Boston-area evening news, Liz Walker found herself in an industry that defined the neighborhood of Roxbury largely by violence. But when she became a pastor there, Walker grew close to households marked not only by trauma but by courage—including the family of Cory Johnson, a young father who was murdered. In the wake of their worst nightmare, the family reached out for help.
By: Liz Walker, and others
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The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club
- Surviving Iran's Most Notorious Prisons in 16 Recipes
- By: Sepideh Gholian
- Narrated by: Ashraf Shirazi
- Length: 3 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.
By: Sepideh Gholian
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