LARB Radio Hour

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to journalist and music critic Barry Walters about Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000. Spanning three decades of pop, disco, rock, funk, folk, and much more, Mighty Real looks at the power of popular music to challenge sexual norms and gender categories in ways both coded and overt. Covering headliners such as David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Motown, Nirvana and Judas Priest, to more obscure players like Lavender Country and the lesbian label, Olivia Records, Walters shows how queerness is encoded in the very DNA of some of our most beloved songs and albums. Mighty Real also testifies to how music both reflects the reality of gay culture and, subversively, brings it into the mainstream.

Eric Newman interviews Kimberlé Crenshaw about her memoir Backtalker: An American Memoir. One of the most influential legal scholars of the past half century, Crenshaw is widely known for developing the analytical framework of intersectionality and pioneering the field of critical race theory. In Backtalker, she reflects on the personal experiences, intellectual influences, and era-defining cultural events that shaped her thinking about prejudice, power, and the law. In this conversation, Crenshaw talks about her family, traces the conflicts and inequalities that continue to define public life and the law in the United States, and considers how we might face the racial, sexual, and gendered retrenchment in the present.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Andrew Durbin about his new biography, The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. A joint portrait of two influential yet under-sung American artists, the book follows Thek and Hujar's romance and deep friendship as it  parallels their artistic formation. Both New York natives, the two men met in the 1950s, became lovers in the early 1960s, and sustained a complicated relationship until they succumbed to AIDS in the late 1980s. Uncompromising about their work, they have received growing critical interest in recent years: Hujar for his photographs of downtown artists and intellectuals and Thek for his sculptures and installations. But the core of Durbin's book traces a shaky period where each struggled to move forward as an artist while also experiencing aesthetic breakthroughs, travel, and sexual liberation.

A double header show on beauty, class, surgical intervention, media manipulation, and assimilation American style. First Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with debut novelist Sarah Wang about her book, New Skin, a mother-daughter story rendered in the hallucinatory glare of Los Angeles and its unrepentant standard for perfection. It follows Linli Feng, who returns home to the San Gabriel Valley to help her mother, Fanny, after yet another botched plastic surgery. Linli ends up trapped, supporting Fanny as she accepts a role on the reality show, America's Beauty Extreme. Next Kate Wolf is joined by MJ Corey to discuss the real-life reality empire of America's most famous family. Corey's book, Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto unpacks almost two decades of the Kardashian clan via postmodern theory, examining how they have transformed not only television and the internet, but American culture at large.

In this special episode, Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss the "honesty crisis" facing contemporary culture. Using a recent book by the philosopher Christian Miller for reference, the hosts examine the internet as an engine for dishonesty, fueling everything from deepfakes to infidelity, AI cheating, political manipulation, and influencer peddling. Is dishonesty just part of the human condition, and perhaps even the social contract? What would a culture of radical honesty — or radical transparency — look like, and is that what we want?