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Episode 62: Language Is Speech: An Interview with Joshua Beckman

A conversation with poet Joshua Beckman about the aural delights of reading, writing, and listening to poetry.

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Episode 63: Radio Free

Toni Morrison once said that good writing shouldn't be "harangue passing off as art"—but she hadn’t heard Free Black Press Radio.

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Episode 64: Christopher Owens Live

This week’s episode is a cut from our first live podcast event at PROXY in San Francisco: a conversation with the great songwriter Christopher Owens (also of the band GIRLS), who illustrates his talk...

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Episode 65: Happy Golden Baby: A Conversation with Lil B and Steve Roggenbuck

A conversation between the hyper-earnest and deeply irreverent rapper Lil B and the hyper- earnest and deeply irreverent poet Steve Roggenbuck.

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Episode 66: Toward an Architectural Theory of Hugs

A conversation with Craig Dykers, of the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, on the invisible (but noisy) demands of building design.

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Episode 67: The Scientific Method of the Ramones

On Joey Ramone, Sigmund Freud, and our head-bangingly repetitive drive into the unknown. Plus: live music and conversation with Sonny Smith.

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Episode 68: The Metaphysics of Dub

The Nigerian-Jamaican- American writer Louis Chude-Sokei on black cyborgs, black blackface, and the intersections of race, technology, and robotics.

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Episode 69: The Testosterone Abyss

The website Weird Dude Energy is singularly devoted to collecting the most inexplicable male behavior on the internet. It’s funny and weird, but if you study it carefully, it also raises some troubling...

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Episode 70: A New Career in a New Town

SNL’s Kyle Mooney on the art of crafting a three-dimensional bro impersonation and the ways in which the act of uploading a video to YouTube constitutes character development. Also: David J, the...

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Episode 71: Everybody Loves a Winner

The story of the guy who wrote a minor hit for a new label in 1961, watched everyone around him get famous singing his songs, and survived to write a great album about it all fifty years later.

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Episode 72: Baptism of Solitude: Paul Bowles's Morocco Tapes

Driving around Morocco in the late 1950s with counterculture icon Paul Bowles at the wheel, with a case of hot Pepsi, a brick of hash, and a massive, state-of-the-art Ampex tape recorder in the backseat.

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Episode 73: What We Talk about When We Talk about Two Bears High-Fiving

Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot test has become ubiquitous in pop-culture as shorthand for both psychiatry and the subconscious. The first biography of Rorschach explores how our popular idea of the test...

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Episode 74: It's Very Indian to Watch AbFab

Tommy Pico’s first book is one long poem in the form of a text — call it an epic sext. But it doesn’t just chronicle Pico’s dalliances with "boys, burgers, and booze" — it rewrites the figure of the...

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Episode 75: The Cool Gaze of Madame Realism

Lynne Tillman writes art criticism starring a fictional character, “Madame Realism,” whose experience of art includes more than just the viewing of paintings. Here, Tillman takes the Organist on an...

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Episode 76: A Radio Wave In My Brain

What is the position of acne-picking in contemporary literature? Otessa Moshfegh, author of Eileen and most recently the collection Homesick for Another World, writes descriptions of bodily functions...

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Episode 77: The Self-Rattling House

In houses that double as musical instruments, Solange Knowles, Will Oldham, and five-year-old children perform on sonic architecture that reflects the raucous acoustics of life in New Orleans.

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Episode 78: The Topiary

Martin Starr (Silicon Valley, Freaks and Geeks), Matt Bush (Adventureland), and Lilan Bowden (Parks and Recreation) star in this science-fiction audio drama. On a distant space colony, Leon carves...

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Sleeping Knowledge

How can sound heal a body? With our guides, Susan Rogers—who recorded albums for Prince and David Byrne—and hypnotherapist Daniel Ryan, we explore the psychoacoustic properties of lawn sprinklers and...

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Appendix: Hypnotic Induction

“If you’re listening to this while driving a car, obviously, leave your eyes open.” In this special appendix to our recent episode on psychoacoustics, you’ll hear a hypnotic induction as performed and...

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The Voice is a Thief

We explore the extremes of the human voice with essayist Elena Passarello, winner of New Orleans’ annual “Stella!” scream competition, in which participants channel Marlon Brando’s abject bawling....

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Ravening for Delight

Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and the Alien movies all trace their tone of cosmic dread back to the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories were published in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 30s. Paul...

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Private Ears

This week we’ll hear from two artists whose work investigates the growing prevalence of surveillance in societies around the world. Both Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Trevor Paglen approach their art as...

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The Mother Road

If you drive along I-70 through Missouri, you’ll see site-specific contemporary art displayed on the billboards. What happens when that artwork says “Keep Abortion Legal”?

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The Show About the Show About the Show

In the vein of Werner Herzog, Larry David, and Spalding Gray, the radical documentaries of Caveh Zahedi find comedy in pushing social norms. His oddly life-affirming efforts to merge lived experience...

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magnificentwebsite.com

In this four-part episode, MF Doom, in absentia, sends imposters to wear his steel gladiator mask and rap at his concerts. Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings, writes a novel live online while heckled...

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Appendix: Still Not Dotcoms

At last! An unobstructed view of the internet’s lacunae: Brian McMullen reads his Still Not Dotcoms, an epic catalog of one thousand unclaimed URLs, in its totality.

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Incense, Sweaters, and Altadena: An Interview with Martine Syms

Fresh off her first solo show at the MoMA, Martine Syms talks with the Organist about how growing up in Altadena, a red-lined suburb of Los Angeles led to her fascination with DIY culture and...

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The Ideological Organ

In Stockholm, an organist plays hymns in a cathedral; at night, he sleeps in a makeshift recording studio in the cathedral’s basement where he composes otherworldly electronic music based on a...

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A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream

From in utero to the studio, Clive Desmond gives us a history of the golden age of radio ads, featuring Frank Zappa, Ken Nordine, Linda Ronstadt, and Randy Newman. While the 1960s shift in print and TV...

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The Gospel of Ndegeocello

Meshell Ndegeocello’s debut album kicked off the era of neo-soul, inspiring Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and D’Angelo. Twenty-three years later, Ndegeocello is still making art, but she’s expanded her...

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Antigonick

Antigone is one of the most widely performed plays in the world. Poet Anne Carson’s experimental translation of Sophocles’ tragedy incorporates 2,500 years of its performance and interpretation. The...

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How to Be in Two Places at Once: The Firesign Theatre in the US and Vietnam

Four comedians trained in poetry and psy-ops, Firesign Theatre created dense, album-length art-objects that could take multiple spins to understand. Comedy in the form of abrasive soundscapes that...

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Bonus: Neighborhood Secret

New Edition was an unlikely boy-band from Boston that launched Bobby Brown’s career and incubated the smooth 90s R&B of Bell Biv DeVoe.

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The Organist returns Thursday

From KCRW and McSweeney’s, the Organist returns with its fifth season on July 12!

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The Voice of God

Actor and writer Ellie Kemper (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), director Penelope Spheeris (Wayne’s World), and voice-over master Peter Coyote (Ken Burns’ documentaries, including The Vietnam War) describe...

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Two Years With Franz

The poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright recorded 546 audio tapes in the two years of his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. The tapes show incredible vitality in the face of death. Over...

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Borderlands

This week, two stories from the U.S. borders. The first, from Javier Zamora, who crossed into the U.S. without his parents when he was nine years old. The other comes from our border with Canada, which...

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Bingeing Texas

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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The Secret Life of Plants

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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The Blindfold Challenge

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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Between Speaking and Singing

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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Low Fidelity

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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The New World

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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The Dogfather

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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Angelyne

For decades, Angelyne pouted down from Hollywood billboards, looking like a New-Wave Jayne Mansfield: a dense cloud of bleached blonde hair and abundant cleavage barely contained by furry pink bikini...

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A Call in the Night

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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Death in Twin Peaks

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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Consider the Grackles

Take a weird, thoughtful and pleasurable journey into literature, music, art, philosophy, the internet, language, and history with McSweeney's and KCRW. This unconventional arts-and-culture magazine...

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The Narrative Line

What happens when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves turn out to be wrong? And what if the attempt to shape our life stories to fit some formulaic narrative arc fundamentally distorts them?...

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Give Everybody Everything: The Financial Life of Bernadette Mayer

If poetry makes nothing happen, it also makes very little in the way of income. Take the acclaimed poet Bernadette Mayer. Often aligned with the Language Poets, Mayer overcame entrenched sexism to...

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