Thread by @harikunzru

There's a new episode of Into the Zone out today. For 'It's Always Sunny in the Dialectic' I went to LA with @_hbraithwaite to eat at a place where your breakfast is a mantra:

We're living in difficult times. For some people, it's all about thinking positive

For others, not so much. This is Theodor Adorno, one of the pioneers of critical theory, who fled the Nazis and ended up in the world capital of positivity, Los Angeles

In this episode, I tell Adorno's story, which involves dialectics, twelve tone music and a sneaky fondness for road trips. And I clash him with his opposite, this guy:

To help understand Norman Vincent Peale, author of 'The Power of Positive Thinking', and ask whether positivity is always positive, I'm joined by @B_Ehrenreich

... and by Geoff Dyer, who takes me to peer through a wall in Brentwood to get a glimpse of where Adorno wrote Minima Moralia

So is positive thinking really positive? And is critical thinking negative? All this, and Thomas Mann in the new episode of Into the Zone. pushkin.fm/into-the-zone

Because fair use is fairly restrictive, you don't get to hear much of Adorno's own music in this ep, but there are some short pieces in the compendious ITZ playlist. Go to no. 78 and you'll be in the land of High Modernism open.spotify.com/playlist/0iESO…

Also a selection of positive sounds (Lonnie Liston Smith, - if you know you know), and a Japanese minimal ambient work by Chihei Hatakeyama, named after Adorno's Minima Moralia.

Spotify weirdly thin on Schoenberg but there's the (pre Serialist) Verklärte Nacht and a little atonal Sprechstimme. Maybe I'll have another look

Also while you’re here

Some people *really* like Adorno