LARB Radio Hour

Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman come together for a special episode about aging. In the past decade, medical miracles and technological innovations have given us the chance to cheat or at least elude death longer. But what social and cultural changes are necessary to sustain a world in which many of us are living to be older than before? What is the difference between growing older and aging, and how do we mark those differences? When, if ever, is a good time to die?

Harriet Clark joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut novel, The Hill, which mirrors Clark's own life story. It follows a young girl named Suzanna whose mother is a political radical and was incarcerated for a bank robbery gone wrong when her daughter was only a year old. Suzanna is eight as the novel opens and is being raised by her grandparents. But after the death of her grandfather, her grandmother, a former radical herself, refuses to bring her to visit her mother, and she must find other ways to see her. The book charts Suzanna's intertwined desire to both remain near her mother for the rest of her life while also honoring her autonomy, her family history, and her own future.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by journalist Carlos Barragán, whose new book is called The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers. After his own mother is targeted by a scammer pretending to be an American soldier, reporter and researcher Barragán made his way down to Lagos, Nigeria to investigate the so-called "Yahoo Boys," young men who catfish millions out of lonely victims. Barragán immerses himself in the group, exploring how scamming has been shaped by the global economy, how it has become a local industry and how these young men are finding agency, experiencing loss, and navigating their lives online and off.

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.