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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your host talks with Louis Menand about his new book “The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War”

Your host escapes the island and makes a return to New York. Plus, writer Tim Kreider on strange vaccine side effects.