Essays
by Daniel Kalder
The Road to Muskville, Texas
A road trip to Elon Musk's company town in Bastrop, Texas.
Frank Zappa: America’s last rebel
Doubtless the fake nonconformist is an American type that goes back centuries, but we surely reached an apex of fraudulence in the early 2020s. How passionately the rioters of Antifa demanded the same
American politics will be born again
Whenever I return to Britain from the United States, I am always struck by the compactness of the landscape. The tidy square fields, the orderly rows of homes with little gardens, the narrow ribbons o
Hooked on Hillbilly Horror
When Hillary Clinton finally shuffles off this mortal coil, what words will she be remembered by? My money would be on her“basket of deplorables” comment delivered at a donor event in 2016. T
Are People Really Fleeing Texas?
Today we live in a world of narratives, but many of those narratives are false or misleading. This essay takes a close look at the phenomenon.
Getting Into Death
Life is short, so don't spend any of it wasting time on things like effective altruism or Christopher Nolan movies.
Existential Miami: a guide
Miami isn't just about sea, sex and sun. Sometimes it burns. Sometimes it is a darkness.
lone star weird
Thus Spake Daniel Kalder No.30 The theme of this latest installment of TSDK is the stranger side of my adopted home, Texas. The impetus was a piece I did for UnHerd on the transformation of Austin fro
Tech Bros Are Destroying Weird Austin
Not so long ago, Silicon Valley was a magical land where unicorns flourished; anybody with an idea and a little luck could become richer than all the kings of folklore....
February Is The Cruelest Month
“April is the cruelest month” said T.S. Eliot, but having just spent February in Scotland for the first time in 27 years I would beg to differ. I had forgotten how relentlessly miserable the weath
Why Doesn’t Scotland Love King Charles?
Scotland's complicated relationship with the monarchy, explained.
Please Do Not Disrespect The Dictator
I wasn’t planning to experiment with ChatGPT: the tone of the coverage, either hyper apocalyptic or breathlessly techno-utopian, bored me.
Bambi’s Mum Had To Die
When Sergei Eisenstein saw Bambi, he was highly impressed. The great Soviet film director, responsible for such world classics as Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky, pronounced Walt Disney’s f
Here Be Deplorables
A few years ago I was at a wedding in Delaware when the father of the bride, on learning that I lived in Austin, asked whether Texans still wore spurs and had guns holstered at their hips. I assumed h
Tradition and the Individual Tyrant
The dictators of the 20th century were firm believers in the power of the written word. Lenin had read the theories of Marx and the Russian radical tradition but it was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s n
Voice
A selection of radio broadcasts and podcasts for the BBC and elsewhere, usually with me as a contributor or interview subject.
Immortal North
BBC Radio 3 (Kalder as Contributor) As the clock ticks down towards midnight and a New Year looms, it’s hard to escape thoughts of the passage of time, ageing, the meaning of it all. We lose ourse
Chess City: A Monument to an Impossible Dream
(Daniel as Contributor) Radio producer Gary Waleik and I had so much fun working together on the Gaddafi piece that we later collaborated on a story about Chess City, the fantastical vanity proj
Lost in the Stacks
(Daniel as Contributor) I did a ton of podcast and radio interviews when The Infernal Library came out. In the early stages I even did a radio tour, which involved answering the phone
The Worst Sponsorship Deal in the History of Pro Sports?
(Daniel as Contributor) While I was promoting my third book, The Infernal Library, I met producer Gary Waleik and did a couple of fun things with him for the sports-themed NPR radio show Only a
Podcast: The Killer’s Canon
There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won’t ever want to read,
The Digital Human: Protection
BBC Radio 4 (Daniel as Contributor) Aleks Krotowski explores living in a digital world. Listen here
Cornerstones: Siberia
Cornerstones: Siberia BBC Radio 3 (Daniel as Presenter) Daniel Kalder conjures up the vast landscapes east of the Urals, where taiga becomes tundra. Siberia is more a state of mind than a place, given
Digitising Stalin
BBC Radio 4/BBC World Service (Daniel as Presenter) For Stalin, privacy was key. So how would he feel about his secrets being revealed? The Stalin Digital Archive is the result of a collaboratio