Books Podcast: is it time to stop working?

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Josh Cohen, author of the Not Working: Why We Have To Stop (reviewed here by Houman Barekat). Josh is a literary critic and a working psychoanalyst, and his book is a thoughtful and subtle discussion of the way in which work dominates not only our lives and identities but our leisure time too — and a speculation about some of the ways we might set about changing that. His references range from Max Weber and Freud to Orson Welles, Andy Warhol, Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace. Is it all the fault of “late capitalism”? Has the digital age made quiet contemplation impossible? And why, I wondered, does his eccentric list of great idlers include some of the most insanely productive people in history?