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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to The Spectator, and my guest this week is a psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen, whose new book is called All the Rage, Why Anger Drives the World.

Now, Josh, this is a book with huge sweep and it pushes into some of the angriest corners

of modern life.

But you start with nextdoor.com.

Is that a sort of uncharity begins at home thing?

Yes, it might be.

I was trying to think about the first place to start

when thinking about anger. And in a way, it's in the body. I wanted to convey a sense of what

it feels like to be angry. And the sort of immediate ordinary to hand experience was going through

this email dance that I seem to get every morning from Vera's Next Door correspondence.

I was interested in the particular conditions, if you like, under which people participate in Nextdoor,

because Nextdoor.com is a resource for neighbourhoods, which means that only those in your

neighbourhood are posting on it, which means that there isn't really the space for that kind of

megaponic, declamatory, grandiose rhetoric that you get on

other social media platforms. And so people speak with a much more sort of gritty, bodily

irritation. The grain of the speech is entirely different. And instead of speaking from

the Olympian height of judgment and condemnation, people really just talk about how pissed off

they are about this or that experience in the neighborhood. So I was interested in contrasting

these, you know, one very visceral and bodily expression

of anger and one rather sort of abstract and performative.

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