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A special Leonard Lopate at Large today, as Andy Statman and Larry Eagle perform some material live from their recent release “Monroe Bus,” paying homage to bluegrass legend Bill Monroe. 

A Grammy nominee and recipient of grants from the NEA Fellowship and NY Council of the Arts, Andy has been the subject of features in The New York Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, Billboard, Rolling Stone, NPR, BBC, CNN, CBS, Village Voice and DownBeat and has performed at Carnegie Hall, The Town Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Met, as well as at major concert halls and festivals throughout the US, Europe, Canada, Japan and Israel.

Percussionist Larry Eagle is a founding member of Bruce Springsteen’s Sessions Band. Their album “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” received a 2007 Grammy Award in the category of traditional folk music. He has also recorded with Odetta and John Legend.

Join Leonard for a conversation with Carrie Gibson on “El Norte” and the too often overlooked history that inspired it, on today’s edition of Leonard Lopate at Large. Because of our shared English language along with the celebrated origin tales... Read More ›

Join Leonard for a conversation with Carrie Gibson on “El Norte” and the too often overlooked history that inspired it, on today’s edition of Leonard Lopate at Large.

Because of our shared English language along with the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the US has always prized its Anglo heritage above all others.

However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in her book “El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America,” the nation has much older Spanish roots—ones that have long been unacknowledged and often marginalized.

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Johnathan Krohn discusses the events recounted in his article “How a Gay Teen, an Internet Nazi, and a Late-Night Rendezvous Turned to Tragedy” Friends remember Blaze (left to right: in first grade, at his... Read More ›

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Johnathan Krohn discusses the events recounted in his article “How a Gay Teen, an Internet Nazi, and a Late-Night Rendezvous Turned to Tragedy”

Friends remember Blaze (left to right: in first grade, at his 19th birthday dinner, and on vacation in 2017) as smart and generous, with a biting sense of humor.

On January 12, 2018, Sam Woodward was arrested and charged with the murder of a former classmate, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein.

Police had found a knife stained with Blaze’s blood in Sam’s room, along with blood inside Sam’s car. Sam told police he had hung out with Blaze the night he disappeared.

The story behind Blaze’s tragic death, as reported by Jonathan Krohn in his feature article for Mother Jones magazine “How a Gay Teen, an Internet Nazi, and a Late-Night Rendezvous Turned to Tragedy” (titled “Boy Meets Hate” in the print edition), is that of a boy driven by his white supremacist views and self-hatred over his own sexuality to take Blaze’s life.

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Sandy Hanna discusses reliving her unique childhood experience in “The Ignorance of Bliss.” Sandy Hanna’s biography “The Ignorance of Bliss: An American Kid in Saigon” recounts her experience of moving to Saigon, Vietnam when... Read More ›

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Sandy Hanna discusses reliving her unique childhood experience in “The Ignorance of Bliss.”

Sandy Hanna’s biography “The Ignorance of Bliss: An American Kid in Saigon” recounts her experience of moving to Saigon, Vietnam when she was 10 years old, where her father served as a military advisor to the South Vietnamese Army.

From the crushing poverty and extraordinary beauty that was Saigon in the 1960s, Sandy discovered a world of streets, villas and brothels, where politics and intrigue were the order of the day.

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Antonio Espree joins Samantha Michaels of Mother Jones for a conversation a discussion of what his life has been like returning from a life sentence. “When Antonio Espree was 16, he fatally shot an... Read More ›

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Antonio Espree joins Samantha Michaels of Mother Jones for a conversation a discussion of what his life has been like returning from a life sentence.

Antonio Espree

Samantha Michaels

“When Antonio Espree was 16, he fatally shot an innocent bystander during a drug turf war near Detroit,” reads a passage from Samantha Michaels feature article in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine.

“The state sent him to die in prison. But in April 2017, he was paroled thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions arguing that because their brains were not fully developed at the time of their crimes, kids should face more lenient sentences than adult perpetrators. The rulings, which took place between 2010 and 2016, have banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for teenagers, giving thousands of juvenile lifers around the country a shot at release.”

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, Mark Alan Stamaty talks about the process of turning his beloved comic strip into a graphic novel that New York Review Books calls “a thrilling, surprising, unexpectedly moving ode to art, life, and New York City.”

Every week, from 1978–1979, The Village Voice brought a new installment of Mark Alan Stamaty’s uproarious, endlessly inventive strip “MacDoodle St.”

Centering more or less on Malcolm Frazzle, a blocked poet struggling to complete his latest lyric for Dishwasher Monthly, Stamaty’s creation encompassed a dizzying array of characters, stories, jokes and digressions.