In 1980, MoMA’s senior film curator Laurence Kardish organized a comprehensive retrospective of actor/director John Cassavetes’s career. The retrospective gave a second life to underseen films like Opening Night and offered a holistic overview of an artist that, as Kardish puts it, describes “the whole glorious arc of American cinema.” In this podcast episode, we spoke to Kardish and Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, about Cassavetes and his relationship with MoMA.

For our first installment of Books that Matter, we read Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). Hartman is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. For the last few decades, she’s been writing about and analyzing the afterlife of slavery in such books as Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Her most recent book, Wayward Lives, follows the lives of young black women at the beginning of the 20th century in New York and Philadelphia, and the ways that they tried to break free from imposed and invisible forms of servitude. It’s unlike any history book we’ve read before.

Being an artist or a writer in Russia has never been particularly easy, or free of risk—especially during the 19 years since Putin became the nation’s president. For this podcast episode, writer Alex Halberstadt spoke with Masha Gessen, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, including 2017’s National Book Award–winning The Future Is History. They talked about the legacies of the Soviet period, self-censorship, and what the experiences of Russia’s artists can teach us about the dangers of tyranny everywhere—a subject touched on in Gessen’s forthcoming book, Surviving Autocracy.