The Laughter that Binds

When they aren’t apologizing for their inability to hold to a fixed release schedule, Will Orr and Ricardo Ruivo, hosts of the podcast Streetsweeper, are busy poking fun. Leading off a recent episode that coincided with the death of Bruno Latour, Ruivo cracked that the anthropologist, freshly reposed in the comradely embrace of bugs and mycelia, is “still an agent, as a corpse.” In a subsequent episode about King Charles’s former dabbling in town planning, one month after Elizabeth II’s death, Ruivo bemoaned the belatedness of the discussion. Orr was reassuring: “she’ll be dead for a long time.”

Less consistently morbid than they are gleeful and analytically sharp, the London-based podcasters use humor to skewer their opponents in architectural media and academia. This rogues’ gallery would seem to include just about anyone unversed in Marxist theory and, of course, members of The Working Class, whom Orr and Ruivo routinely invoke as the deus ex machina that they theoretically are. (Rise like lions after slumber and all that. I’m still down.) Yet, though the logline…