Episode 61: The Meaning of Various News Photos to David Shields
Can combat photography be beautiful without making a case for war?
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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.
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleSleeping 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...
View ArticleAppendix: 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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