Airlift from Berlin Review

Recorded live in front of an audience in Berlin, Emily Greenhouse, editor of The New York Review of Books, and Merve Emre, critic and staff writer at The New Yorker, talk with Berlin Review editor Tobias Haberkorn about how magazines get made and who they're made for.

They discuss what an editor owes a writer, why the ideal edit dissolves both egos, and what happens when a piece goes viral online but barely registers on the magazine's own site. Along the way: Omer Bartov on the Eastern Front, Pankaj Mishra on Germany in 1933, Aryeh Neier's essay on genocide in Gaza, and the endless something-maxing headlines.

Berlin Review is an independent magazine, funded by its readers and listeners. Subscribe at blnreview.de/abo.

Airlift is hosted by Lauren Oyler and Tobias Haberkorn.

Recorded live in front of an audience, the writer, translator, and artist Miriam Stoney reads from her new essay and talks with Berlin Review editor Hana Szabo about characters: in fiction, in film, and in the self.

They get into how a literary character is built backwards while a self is built forwards; the difference between being disliked and being hated; and who is granted the nuance to be unlikable without collapsing into a stereotype. Along the way: Marguerite Duras, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights and its whitewashing of Heathcliff, Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, and the critic Andrea Long Chu on criticism and cruelty.

Berlin Review is an independent magazine, funded by its readers and listeners. Subscribe at blnreview.de/abo.

In this episode Hannah Szabó speaks with the historian Faith Hillis about the Jewish Labor Bund and the renewed interest in the history of Jewish radicalism, including two books Faith reviewed or Berlin Review: Molly Crabapple’s “Here Where We Live is Our Country” and “The Radical Jewish Tradition" by Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone.

They discuss the scattered archives and memoirs where Faith has researched the history of this radical movement, what anti-Zionism meant before the war and how it differs from definitions today and how the tradition of Bundism might be carried forward today.

Faith’s essay “Radical Jewish Traditions: Then and Now” in Reader 7 of Berlin Review: https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2026-06/geschichte-juedischer-radikalitaet-faith-hillis

You can also find all our reviews, essays and podcasts at blnreview.de.

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