The audio companion · New every other Tuesday
On Soft Power and the Long Afternoon
A reading of this week's essay, recorded in the studio on Berwick Street with a single cold microphone and the windows open to Soho. Jasmine reads the essay in full, then sits for nineteen minutes with contributing editor Naima Okafor (Lagos) on what the word "influence" actually buys a woman in 2025.
In this episode
The essay, read aloud, and what it left out the first time around.
Jasmine reads On Soft Power and the Long Afternoon in full — the essay sent to subscribers on Tuesday 11 November — before sitting down with Naima Okafor, contributing editor from Lagos, to ask the question the comments section kept returning to: when we say a woman is "influential," whose attention are we actually describing, and at what cost to her attention in return.
The conversation moves from the essay's central image — a televised press conference in which a politician's eyeline is interrupted by a child's question — to the longer history of women being asked to perform composure in public, and ends on a small, surprising note about the camera phones in the third row. The episode runs forty-seven minutes and is published alongside a full transcript in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Turkish and Yoruba.
"Influence is a relationship, not a possession. You cannot hold it in a drawer. The moment you try to, you have already lost the room."
The full archive
Eighteen episodes, ordered most recent first.
Every episode is accompanied by a full transcript and the essay that informed it. The first eight episodes are free to read; the rest are reserved for paying subscribers, alongside the weekly newsletter.
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18
12 November 2025
On Soft Power and the Long Afternoon
The essay in full, then a nineteen-minute conversation with Naima Okafor on what "influence" actually buys a woman in 2025. New
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17
29 October 2025
A Small History of the Apology
On the public apology as a literary genre, with contributing editor Mira Sengupta in Mumbai.
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16
15 October 2025
What the Algorithm Took From Us
A close reading of the platform's 2024 transparency report, read against three letters to the editor.
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15
1 October 2025
The Long Walk Home from the Launch
Recorded live from the after-party of the Brooklyn book launch at Greenlight Bookstore, Fort Greene.
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14
17 September 2025
On Reading in a Second Language
With translator and contributing editor Léa Marchand in Paris, on the nine-language translation programme.
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13
3 September 2025
A Letter to a Reader Who Quit
On the seven readers who wrote in August to say they had cancelled, and what one of them got right.
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12
20 August 2025
The Editor's Long Table
Jasmine is joined by all four staff editors for the publication's sixth-anniversary roundtable.
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11
6 August 2025
On Quiet Rooms, Five Years On
A re-reading of the very first essay, sent to 312 subscribers from a kitchen table in March 2019.
A note on the charts Tame Notes charted at #14 on the Apple Podcasts Society & Culture chart within its first thirty days of release, the highest debut for an independently produced UK editorial podcast that season. No agency, no network deal — just the editorial team in London and a very patient engineer in Berlin.