The People

Nadav Ben-Eliezer spends his mornings at the coffee shop directly across the street from my apartment. He was born in Baghdad in 1936, emigrated to Israel along with most Iraqi Jews in 1951, and later landed in Brooklyn, where he’s lived for 30 years. For the last 8 of those years, he’s enjoyed reading his paper at a local coffee chain, where we met for this episode of the podcast.

One thing I really agonized about in the days immediately following my son’s birth was the question of circumcision. Where I come from, circumcision is the norm. Was I about to yield to a needlessly brutal practice?

Today on the podcast I talk to Emily Blake. Emily left her job as an OB-GYN to become a mohel, the religious figure who performs circumcision on newborn Jewish boys. In this interview, she explains the practice and defends it as a relatively pain-free act.

Steve Baldwin is the self-appointed authority on the wild parrots of Brooklyn — wild Argentinean parrots, likely escaped from either a pet store or the cargo area of JFK airport, have been observed in the city since the late 1960's. And for the last decade, Steve has been leading free public tours of their nesting sites. "Wild parrot safaris," as he likes to call them. To join Steve, upcoming tour dates are listed on his website: www.brooklynparrots.com

2014 interview of Jennifer Daniel, then a graphics editor at The New York Times.

Juanluis Pimentel is from The Bronx and still lives in the neighborhood he grew up in, right across from Yankee Stadium. In this interview, Juan talks about his parents (his mother is from the Dominican Republic and his father from Puerto Rico), why he chooses to work in Brooklyn, and his brushes with street violence as a kid growing up in the 70's and 80's.

Roberta Malkin is my mother. Here I offer you a bit of our usual schtick, in which she tells me what a major pain in the ass I was as a child. And while I accept that I was difficult — she says I was a projectile vomiter! — I think she was pretty damn proud of it. Follow my mom on Instagram, and check out her art at www.robertamalkin.com.

Jamie Nieves is a non-binary transgender skateboarder and a columnist for Wheelbase Magazine, which promotes diversity in the skateboarding community. In this interview, Jamie talks about growing up queer in Brooklyn, their* troubles in the school system, and their dream of living on some land with a halfpipe. (*Their = Jamie’s pronoun of choice.)

30 years ago, Maxine Sitkowski abandoned a career in fashion design to study Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), a controversial type of therapy involving hypnosis. In this episode, Maxine argues that hypnosis is not a magic act but rather a natural part of our everyday experience. And she demonstrates — on me — how easy and familiar a hypnotic experience can be.

Two summers ago, Meg Paska left her small garden in Brooklyn to farm an acre of land in coastal New Jersey. Despite poor soil and a meager budget, she soon offered fresh produce, flowers and honey to her neighbors in Monmouth County. In this episode, we drop in on Meg near the end of her second season. Meg is the author of The Rooftop Beekeeper, the Scrappy Guide to Keeping Urban Honeybees.

Steven Heller is a writer, lecturer, art director, and critic who cut his teeth in the underground newspaper scene in the late 1960's. At the age of 17, he walked into the office of The New York Free Press, trying to sell his cartoons, and ended up with a job "pasting up mechanicals.” Soon after, he was arrested in a pornography sting and told by his mob-related distributors that he was “the only person in New York who could make a sex paper fail." In 1974, he was called as a witness against Screw publisher Al Goldstein in a federal obscenity trial. By the age of 25, he was an art director at The New York Times, where he remained for over 30 years.