Becca Rothfeld (with Herman Melville and John Updike)

Welcome to the new season of The Writers Institute, the podcast from the New York State Writers Institute and Lit Hub. This is the first episode of five, and new episodes will come out on Wednesdays. In this season’s conversations with writers—who all listen to the institute’s archival sound of writers across decades—a new theme emerges. We’re going to hear, often, about how literary exploration leads us beyond a usual sense of who we are.

In 2026, the Washington Post closed its book review section, where the critic Becca Rothfeld worked. She soon became a staff writer at The New Yorker, which recently published an essay of hers about the loss of book criticism in general-interest newspapers. “A newspaper,” Rothfeld wrote, “is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.” In this episode, Rothfeld says, “Algorithms sort us into advertising buckets, and it’s very rare that you would encounter something that is totally out of left field for you, or that you might not expect, or not know that you like yet.”

Critics, on the other hand, can surprise us. In this episode, you’ll hear the novelist and critic John Updike, at the Writers Institute in Albany, delivering a wide-ranging talk on a writer whose work might also surprise and change readers: Albany’s own Herman Melville. As Updike—a New Yorker critic, like Rothfeld—says: “The preliminary feat of the creative imagination is to imagine the responder—the reader, the viewer, the listener—who will consent to be astonished, amused, and changed by the work of art.” Here, you can listen to the entirety of Updike’s talk on the author of Moby-Dick.