Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show

By Gil RothArtsBooks
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Virtual Memories Show episodes

  • Episode 637 – Vauhini Vara

    Virtual Memories Show 637:

    Vauhini Vara

    “I’m interested in power, the relationship between individual agency and how we define meaning for ourselves, find value for ourselves.”

    With SEARCHES: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon), tech writer Vauhini Vara explores how our sense of self has been co-opted, quantified, and exploited by big tech as a way of selling us more stuff or selling us to third parties. We talk about what we talk about when we talk about our Google searches (& Amazon purchases, Twitter subject preferences, etc.), the interface of exploitation and self-expression, what selfhood means to tech companies vs. what it means to us, and what she learned when she fed chapters of her book into ChatGPT. We get into agency vs. coercion, how the promise of tech so often gets inverted, how ChatGPT tried & failed to express her grief from her sister’s death from cancer, why she brought memoir into SEARCHES alongside its other experimental modes, how her husband serves as a low-tech foil in the book, and whether or not we have a say in how the online era plays out. We also discuss why she doesn’t post about her personal life, how the book’s multiplicity of voices offsets the corporate voice of ChatGPT, what she got out of Bill Gates’ biography, the importance of non-VC-funded technology to help us escape exploitative models of information, whether an essayist ever really changes over the course of an essay, and more. Give it a listen! And go read SEARCHES!

    “I was thinking of the way in which big technology companies’ products are both a site of self-expression and communication and a site of exploitation.”

    “Writing Ghosts was an enactment of a change that was taking place in me off the page.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. She lives in Fort Collins, CO.

    Follow Vauhini on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Vauhini by Brigid McAuliffe. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 10 min
  • Episode 636 – Craig Thompson

    Virtual Memories Show 636:

    Craig Thompson

    “I’m not that interested in what I can just see or know; I’m much more obsessed with the mysterious and the things that I don’t know how to communicate or understand.”

    Artist Craig Thompson joins the show at long last to celebrate his new book, GINSENG ROOTS: A Memoir (Pantheon). We talk about how he spent 10 summers of his childhood helping farm ginseng, how that herb connects rural Wisconsin with China and South Korea, how he balanced history, journalism, economics, and memoir in the pages of his book, and why he chose to make Ginseng Roots as a serial comic rather than a standalone book and how that affected his creative process. We get into how the book serves as a sort of midlife revision of his breakthrough book, Blankets, how the last chapter of the book had to happen in near-real-time, how a degenerative condition in his hands became a unifying theme to the book while almost derailing it, how he found the design language of the book and obsessed over a two-color process (to amazing results), and whether this is his swansong for comics (spoiler: it’s not!). We also discuss what home means to him, 8 months into being on the road, what it was like discovering that he had a global audience, his ongoing relationship with his evangelical Christian upbringing, his editor’s concerns that Ginseng Roots could open him up to accusations of cultural insensitivity (and how he got over it), all while geeking out over our fave cartoonists from the ’90s indy period (go, Dylan Horrocks!), and more. Give it a listen! And go read GINSENG ROOTS!

    “There were moments in the flow of the book where I didn’t know wha the next issue would be, so it took time to figure it out.”

    “I miss the days when you’d walk into a comic shop with 20 bucks and come out with 6 books.”

    “My parents are the children of their parents, who are the children of their parents, and you start to see this long, long thread of how trauma manifested in them, and how it manifested in you.”

    “After this book tour, I’ll have to face the question of where I’m supposed to live, and I don’t have a clue right now. I’ll take suggestions.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Craig Thompson is a cartoonist and the author of the award-winning books Blankets, Carnet de Voyage, Good-bye Chunky Rice, and Habibi. He was born in Michigan in 1975 and grew up in a rural farming community in central Wisconsin. His graphic novel Blankets has won numerous awards, including the Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz Awards, and has been published in nearly twenty languages. His new book is Ginseng Roots: A Memoir.

    Follow Craig on Instagram.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a friend’s NYC apartment on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Craig by Adam Arnold, who designed the jacket; 1st selfie by me, 2nd by Craig. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 26 min
  • Episode 635 – Ari Richter

    Virtual Memories Show 635:

    Ari Richter

    “If I’m not obsessed with this history, then this history goes away.”

    Artist, professor and now like-it-or-not cartoonist Ari Richter joins the show to talk about his fantastic book, Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (Fantagraphics). We talk about how he he began this project in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre in 2018, how it helped him exorcise the demons of his imagination after a lifetime of hearing his family’s stories about the Holocaust, and how the book centered around intergenerational trauma and collaboration. We get into how he incorporated his grandfathers’ holocaust memoirs into the book, why he found different styles for each section of the book, what he had to learn about comics storytelling after a career in fine arts, the revelation of reading Miriam Katin‘s memoirs and why he avoided rereading MAUS during the 5 years he worked on this book. We also discuss how drawing comics has changed his brain, why he was stunned by the commercialism of Auschwitz, why he’s glad he got a German passport, why comics folks seem friendlier than fine arts people, the insanity of composing his comics pages in Photoshop (and what happens when he forgets to label his layers), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz!

    “I never in my life had a project with such a long time horizon. It was disorienting, like I ceased to exist in the world creatively.”

    “I did not expect I’d be in the Disney World of concentration camps.”

    “One thing I miss in drawing on the computer instead of by hand is the possibility of the mistake, the ‘beautiful oops.'”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Ari Richter is a visual artist and Professor at the City University of New York. His drawings, sculptures, videos, performances and lectures have been presented in museums, galleries and academic spaces throughout the U.S. Richter is the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, as well as a fully public education from grade school to graduate school. The grandson of Holocaust survivors and son of therapists, he lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

    Follow Ari on Instagram.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded in a drawing studio on Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Ari by Daria Carmon. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 32 min
  • Episode 634 – Dan Nadel

    Virtual Memories Show 634:

    Dan Nadel

    “You could tell a story about the history of comics, and drawing, and even music through Crumb’s life.”

    Author and curator Dan Nadel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his amazing new biography, CRUMB: A Cartoonist’s Life (Scribner). We get into Robert Crumb‘s significance in American art, comics, and culture, Dan’s first experience with a Crumb comic (it was an ish of American Splendor), the challenge of capturing the underground comics scene of the ’60s & ’70s, and what it took for him to get over the “R. Crumb” persona and realize how integrated Robert’s personality is. We talk about Crumb’s role as nexus in the history of comics, the book’s focus on Crumb’s drawing and how different tools opened him up artistically, what it means to see Crumb as part of tradition and not just a conceptual outlier, how his Crumb differs from the Crumb of Terry Zwigoff’s documentary, and the one detail he’s still dying to find out about Zap Comix. We also discuss Dan’s comics and art upbringing, how he found his place as a publisher then gallery & museum curator, how he was affected by the death of Crumb’s wife Aline in 2022, how his museum experience prepared him for writing about the racist and sexist aspects of Crumb’s comics, the only cartoonist biography he could tackle after Crumb, whether Crumb’s Book of Genesis succeeds as comics, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read CRUMB: A Cartoonist’s Life!

    “I’m not a believer in a lot, but I’m a real believer in art.”

    “One of the challenges of a biography like this is that a lot of the people are dead, and a lot of the people were high.”

    “The last thing I wanted to do was colonize Crumb’s life.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Dan Nadel is a writer and curator. His previous books include, It’s Life as a I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980; Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976; and Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900–1969. He has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the founder of PictureBox, a publishing and packaging company that produced over one hundred books, objects, and zines from 2000 to 2014, including the Grammy Award–winning design for Wilco’s 2004 album A Ghost Is Born. Dan is the curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Dan’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Dan by Beowulf Sheehan; photo of Aline & Robert Crumb by me. It’s on my instagram.

    2 hr 4 min
  • Episode 633 – See Hear Speak

    Virtual Memories Show 633:

    See Hear Speak

    No guest? No problem! It’s time for another impromptu monologue episode: this time, Gil sorts through family legacies of the genetic and Larkinesque variety, as occasioned by taking his dad for cataract surgery and getting a call from an old & previously deceased friend! Give it a listen!

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Gil Roth is working through some things. Here’s an About page. This is his dad:

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The monologue was recorded at Virtual Memories HQ on on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of my father young by Miriam Roth; photo of my father Beckett-like by me; photo of me by me. It’s on my instagram.

    22 min
  • Episode 632 – Peter Trachtenberg

    Virtual Memories Show 632:

    Peter Trachtenberg

    “Westbeth was designed as an egalitarian community. . . . In any community, you have to have people who are actually involved in its maintenance.”

    With his amazing new book THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Black Sparrow Press), Peter Trachtenberg explores the 50+ years of history for Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village, the role of the arts in New York City, and the ways we build & sustain community. We get into his long-term history with Westbeth, how this book’s was born from an essay about the suicide of his friend and Westbeth resident Gay Milius, how Westbeth managed to survive a series of financial crises over the decades before finding a sustainable model, and how architect Richard Meier repurposed the Bell Labs complex into affordable artists’ housing in the 1960s. We talk about Westbeth’s requirement that residents be professional artists and what that came to mean over the years (esp. when some residents’ productivity diminished), what it’s like to raise families in Westbeth, and how the community handled generational change. We also discuss how Westbeth reflects New York back on itself, how Vin Diesel’s vandalism as a kid growing up in Westbeth led to his acting career, how the Village’s Halloween parade originated there, how I stumbled across Westbeth in 2017 during — what else? — a podcast, how we build artistic communities when we don’t have geographic proximity, whether there’s a secret radioactive room left over from the Bell Labs years (!), and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA!

    (And go listen to our 2014 and lockdown conversations!)

    “This book made me understand that a lot of the categories in my mind of what is fine art and what is applied art are arbitrary, that I do not know what is going to be great.”

    “It really became a battle for New York real estate.”

    “My idea of how I was going to spend my old age was teaching at Bennington and playing with the Dog House Band a couple times a year.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Peter Trachtenberg was born and grew up in New York City and began spending time in Westbeth in the late 1970s. He lived there (illegally) from 1995 to 2006. He is the author of three earlier books of nonfiction — Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning, and 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh — and the recipient of awards that include Whiting and Guggenheim Fellowships and a Phi Beta Kappa award.

    Follow Peter on Instagram, and subscribe to his newsletter. And go listen to our 2014 and lockdown conversations.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Peter’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Peter by someone; photo of Westbeth courtyard by me. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 30 min
  • Episode 631 – David Shields

    Virtual Memories Show 631:

    David Shields

    “I’m not a sociologist, I’m not a political scientist, I’m not a historian; I’m just a writer and half a thinker.”

    Author David Shields returns to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the province of left-wing academia, was weaponized by right-wing authoritarians for political aims. We talk about how much blame he bears for all this with his 2010 book Reality Hunger, how it feels to be a radical with deep skepticism of radicals’ language, his affinity for Werner Herzog’s notion of the ecstatic truth in documentary films, what he learned from interviewing nonfiction writers about the nature of truth, and how he feels about going to his first WWE event. We also discuss nonlinear warfare and the endless deconstruction of reality, how writing can “build a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness” (per DFW), what he’s learned from the collaboration of making documentaries, his fixation on hamartia (the tragic flaw), Walter Benjamin’s notion of pursuing the truth even if we’ll never reach it, bringing the public, social and personal worlds together in his writing, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally!

    (And go listen to our 2019a, 2019b, and 2020 conversations.)

    “‘How did we get here?’ is the precondition for the question, ‘How do we get out of here?'”

    “Exploring my own weaknesses is my thing.”

    “The New York Times is an interesting tracer dye for what the Overton Window of discourse can accept.”

    “The president fascinates me as a personal essayist gone wrong.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, LitHub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

    The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published essays and stories in New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, HuffPost, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

    The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now as a DVD on Prime). Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (streaming on Prime, Peacock, AMC, Sundance, Apple, and several other platforms).

    Go listen to our 2019a, 2019b, and 2020 conversations.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a hotel room in Brooklyn on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of David by Tom Collicott. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 38 min
  • Episode 630 – Meeting Across The River

    Virtual Memories Show 630:

    Meeting Across The River

    Uh-oh! Gil doesn’t have a guest this week, so he recorded a monologue from a hotel room in Weehawken, NJ during a business conference for his day job! He talks mental health, oblique mythology, Charles Crumb, comics and pharma friends, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and more! Give it a listen!

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Gil Roth is just zis guy, you know?

    Okay, fine, here’s an About page.

    Here’s a pic I try to take every year when I attend this conference in midtown. The store went under during the pandemic, but the plaque/sign is still up.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The monologue was recorded at the Envue hotel in Weehawken, NJ on a Blue enCORE 200 microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me by me. It’s on my instagram.

    18 min
  • Episode 629 – Elon Green

    Virtual Memories Show 629:

    Elon Green

    “The Wikipedia entry was so interesting that I assumed there were already two or three books written about the case, and I was frankly shocked that nobody had gone back in the intervening 40 years to revisit it.”

    With THE MAN NOBODY KILLED: Life, Death, and Art In Michael Stewart’s New York (Celadon Books), author Elon Green brings us an investigation into a terrible episode of police brutality and its aftermath in mid-’80s NYC. We talk about what drew him to the story of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old black artist-model-DJ who died at the hands of transit police in 1983, his amazement that no one else had written this book, and how his early assumptions about a coverup gave way to a different coverup. We get into how he so wonderfully evokes the gritty NYC of that era, spreading out a canvas that takes in the arts scene — think Haring, Basquiat, Madonna — and the awful crimes and police behavior — think Bumpurs, Goetz — of that era. We discuss the art of interviewing people 40+ years after an event without reopening old wounds, the judge on the case who talked with him for 3 hours and shared how his conclusions on the verdict changed, what he sees in Stewart’s art, how he tries to build the entire environment of the world he’s writing about in his books, why he considers himself a history writer (& despises the “true crime” label & genre), why being a good journalist means having a sense of decency, bringing his first book to life as an HBO series, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MAN NOBODY KILLED!

    “When I began the story, I assumed the idea of a coverup in the chief medical examiner’s office was true. . . . That didn’t turn out to be real. Everything he did was explicable, with reasoning to it.”

    “You always have to be careful about who you’re quoting, and with Murray Kempton, the only danger is wanting to quote too much.”

    “The challenge of being an outsider writing about a community is that you have to do far, far more work and it has to be immersive.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Elon Green has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Columbia Journalism Review, and appears in Unspeakable Acts, Sarah Weinman’s anthology of true crime. Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York was his first book and won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. He was an executive producer on the HBO series adapted from Last Call. His new book is The Man Nobody Killed.

    Follow Elon on Bluesky and Instagram.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Elon Musk by Natalie Sparaccio. Not sure who the Michael Stewart photo is by. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 4 min
  • Episode 628 – Vanda Krefft

    Virtual Memories Show 628:

    Vanda Krefft

    “Katharine Gibbs was not against marriage or family, but her main idea was that women cannot — must not — for their own wellbeing, depend entirely on a man.”

    Biographer Vanda Krefft returns to the show to celebrate her wonderful & illuminating new book: EXPECT GREAT THINGS!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women (Algonquin Books). We talk about the turn of the (20th) century origins of Katharine Gibbs & her school, the legacy of her executive secretarial course for generations of women, “Gibbs Girls'” descendants’ desire to honor their family members, the incredible quality of faculty Gibbs was able to recruit, the risks women had to take to enter the professional workforce, and the Trojan Horse campaign of teaching women to learn how businesses work until they’re able to run them themselves. We get into Vanda’s desire to write about people who were overlooked in history, how this book veered away from her initial idea, how it required a different mode than her biography of William Fox, the challenges of century-old research into women’s lives, what she had to learn about the history of women in America, the myth that the 1920s were liberating for women, and her interest in mid-century America. We also discuss how the Gibbs school declined when the family finally sold it in the late ’60s, what she’d like her next book to be about, her experience living in Santa Monica during the LA fires, a lengthy aside about publishing and the changes I’ve seen, getting inspired by Howard Fishman‘s book on Connie Converse, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read EXPECT GREAT THINGS!

    (And listen to our 2017 conversation!)

    “Family members were wonderful, because they were thrilled that somebody was interested in their mother, their aunt, their grandmother, who had led a really significant life but in her lifetime nobody cared very much.”

    “I like people who have been overlooked by history.”

    “In order to understand the choices someone makes, you have to understand the context in which they’re operating: the historical, cultural, social context that is the background of their choices.”

    Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

    Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

    About our Guest

    Vanda Krefft has written about women’s issues and popular culture for leading national magazines, including Elle, Redbook, Woman’s Day, and Woman’s World, as well as newspapers worldwide through syndication. She is the author of The Man Who Made the Movies, the first in-depth biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox. Her new book is EXPECT GREAT THINGS!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women.

    Follow Vanda on Instagram and listen to our 2017 conversation.

    Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Vanda by Mikel Healey. It’s on my instagram.

    1 hr 22 min

About Virtual Memories Show

From the publisher's feed

A weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order