Jake and Phil talk about the political and social obligations of art. To set the stage they discuss W.E.B. Du Bois' "Criteria for Negro Art" originally delivered as a speech to the 1926 Conference of the NAACP in Chicago. The main event is a consideration of James Baldwin's famous 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel." For the finale, the gents

talk about James Thurber's 1931 short story, "The Greatest Man in the World."

Other works referenced in this episode:

Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Black+is+Beautiful%3A+A+Philosophy+of+Black+Aesthetics-p-9781405150620

Ta-Nehisi Coates, I'm Not Black, I'm Kanye

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/

Francois Mauriac's Nobel Prize Speech

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1952/mauriac-speech.html

Edward P. Jones, The Known World

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060557546/the-known-world