Nightvision
After testing positive in Lisbon, your host assesses Portugal’s expat and exile scenes. Plus! lunch with the writer Joseph Roth at a hotel on the waterfront.
Andrew Callaway
Herdest Immunity Special (New York after Rona part v of v)
Our New York after Rona miniseries comes to an end just in time for the latest Variant. The WHO turns to podcasts for a new endless stream of naming possibilities. Plus a ToE favorite playwrite returns with a new musical production of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.
Afterschool Special (New York after Rona part iv)
New York Schools were closed for most of the pandemic. Education reporter Anya Kamenetz explains why she calls it a stolen year. Plus we meet up with Lenore Skenazy to hear what parents can learn from her classic (and recently updated) Free Range Kids.
Below and Beyond (New York after Rona part iii)
Back in Summer 2020 a New Yorker named James Altucher penned a LinkedIn post proclaiming New York is Dead Forever. The piece went viral even Jerry Seinfield emerged with a rebuttal. For journalist and curator Alex Brook Lynn, this was one of the low points in ‘New York is Dead’ discourse. Her new immersive multimedia exhibition “Eulogy for New York City” offers a much smarter and provocative take on the city’s never ending end. You can listen to all the Eulogies she collected here.
Plus your host visits New York City’s first post covid ComicCon in search of post covid Batman.
Faraway, So Close (New York after Rona part ii)
March 2020, writer Craig Taylor believed he was finally done with his 11 year oral history project featuring the voices of people who live and work in New York City. He wasn’t. His incredible new book New Yorkers provides us with a number of first person accounts of the Covid19 crisis and primes us to think about what’s next for the city. Plus: photographer Renate Aller on the social distancing pictures she took on the street outside her Soho loft during the worst of the crisis.
That Was Real(New York after Rona part i)
We kick off our new ToE miniseries with a radical rethink on surveillance and the post pandemic city with theorist and writer Benjamin Bratton. His new book Revenge of the Real , both chronicles what went wrong during the crisis and offers a roadmap for how we can survive the next one. Also, your host visits the only New York city neighborhood that has gotten worse after covid, Hudson Yards, with journalist Charlie Warzel. Plus: we look back at one of the first viral videos shot in pandemic time.
Performance Peace
George Bush celebrates the 20th anniversary of 911 with some new ‘dark’ paintings. Your host marks the occasion with some high stakes performance art. Plus art lessons from the $150,000 banana.
Charlie Brown’s America
Cartoonist Charles Schulz wrote and drew Peanuts every day for half a century. In his new book Charlie Brown’s America, Historian Blake Scott Ball uses the strip (and the fan mail archive at the Schulz museum) to illuminate the Wishy Washy politics of Cold War America.
Louis Menand and the Cold War
Your host talks with Louis Menand about his new book “The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War”
The Return
The Return
Your host escapes the island and makes a return to New York. Plus, writer Tim Kreider on strange vaccine side effects.
