Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Angela Flournoy about her novel, The Wilderness. Moving back and forth from the early 2000s to the present, the novel looks at the stories of five women living in New York and Los Angeles, capturing the mess and power of their deep, complicated friendships as they navigate love, motherhood, careers, and everything in between. Angela discusses how she developed these characters, how she works with scenes and dialog, and why she wanted to write about Black female friendship.

In this special episode, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss how Big Tech dreams – from iPhones to social media to AI – have become nightmares. How did these decade-defining innovations end up making modern life feel sadder, lonelier, and scarier? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Using two recent books — Cory Doctorow's Ensh*ttification and Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine—as reference points, the hosts discuss labor practices, government regulation, the place of spirituality and religion, cottagecore fantasies, and how they personally navigate unplugging from the machine.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her new movie, The Mastermind, out in theaters now. Josh O'Connor stars as an unemployed carpenter named JB, who hatches a plan to rob the museum in his small Massachusetts town of its collection of Arthur Dove paintings. JB soon he finds himself on the run, leaving his young family behind for a Greyhound tour of 1970s America, a country torn apart by the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Reichardt talks about her own childhood, her obsession with art heists and how we all, ultimately, get caught up in the sweep of history.

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with writer Grace Byron about her debut novel, Herculine. Set between the freelance rat race of New York and an equally cutthroat commune for trans women in rural Indiana, Herculine follows a narrator trying to put her life together. Featuring demons, conversion therapy, and blood rites, the novel is part horror part coming-of-age tale. Byron discusses how the book emerged from a memoir project, as well as the joys and struggles of making community and a life as a trans woman. Byron is also a critic and essayist, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation and other publications.

Chris Kraus joins Kate Wolf to talk about her new novel, The Four Spent the Day Together. Organized into three linked sections, the book begins with a portrait of Kraus's avatar, Catt Greene, and her family, as they struggle to overcome the isolation of the suburbs after moving into their first home in Milford, Connecticut, in the late 1950s. The book's second part takes place many decades later: Catt is now a well-known novelist grappling with sudden fame and her failing marriage to an alcoholic ex-con named Paul Garcia with whom she lives part time in the woods of Minnesota. The final section finds Catt investigating a crime that has taken place near her home with Paul, in the neighboring town of Harding, when three teenagers senselessly murder a man after spending a full 24-hours together. What binds the stories together is alienation, chance, the acceleration of history and the spoils of late capitalism, the devastation of addiction, and an attempt to reconcile something even darker and more ineffable about the American project as it exists today.

Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde. It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era's cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman compiles the work of various musicians, painters, filmmakers and poets who gave birth to everything from Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Protest Folk, Black Arts, and Underground Film, and more often than not, faced censorship and legal consequences for their innovations. The book reifies the link between artistic vanguardism and progressive politics, exploring the web of connection between artists and fate of the city—and country— at a time of ruthless redevelopment, labor strikes, atomic bomb scares, and emerging civil rights battles.

Eric and Alejandro dive into the cultural discourse around polyamory—why it seems to be more visible in recent years and what's driving the backlash to it–as well as how capitalism shapes modern love. They also discuss the challenges of thinking and writing through heartbreak, and how grief and love can make us unreliable narrators.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to the photographer and writer Sally Mann about her new book, Art Work: On the Creative Life. In describing her path to becoming an artist, Mann provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come between you and your work. The book includes selections from Mann's rich archive of photographic work prints, explaining some of the ideas that have gone into her pictures, as well early diary entries that portray a fierce determination alongside equally fierce self-doubt. She also includes excerpts from her long correspondence with a fellow photographer named Ted Orland. Mann's advice is to write letters, keep your receipts, make lots of lists, and remember that being an artist isn't necessarily such a big deal, it's a job like any other: you have to work at it.

In this special episode, hosts Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the "crisis" du jour in American publishing: the erosion of male literary stars and their readers across the landscape of contemporary fiction. Is this even happening—and if so, why? Tackling cultural anxieties about the waning centrality of the straight, white male author alongside spurious statistics and questions about the material realities of publishing in the 21st century, the hosts break down the forces they see lurking behind the discourse.

Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/opinion/men-fiction-novels.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/style/fiction-books-men-reading.html

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/

https://www.vox.com/culture/392971/men-reading-fiction-statistics-fact-checked

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n16/emily-witt/do-you-feel-like-a-failure

https://theconversation.com/a-new-publisher-will-focus-on-books-by-men-are-male-writers-and-readers-under-threat-255874

Kate Wolf speaks with historian Fara Dabhoiwala about his new book, What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. A foundational aspect of the U.S. Constitution, free speech is a relatively recent invention and one rooted less in democratic ideals than first may be clear. Tracking its evolution from the pre-modern age through the Enlightenment to our present day, Dabhoiwala explores how free speech and freedom of the press initially served imperial and corporate interests rather than those of common citizens. His book also examines the counterintuitive ways free speech continues to be an engine for questionable ends today, benefitting tech companies and upholding misogyny and racism. But while it has never been equally distributed, free speech has also resulted, at times, in more freedom rather than less, so what are we to do with this abiding concept and how might we modify its absolutism to better serve those it claims to protect?