LARB Radio Hour

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Soyica Diggs Colbert about her latest book, Freedom's Gate: Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone Live at the New York Nightclub That Shaped the Civil Rights Movement. The book traces the intersecting lives and careers of these five legendary Black artists who honed their craft and found community at the Village Gate, a New York nightclub that became an important gathering place for artistic experimentation and the political currents of the Civil Rights Movement. Colbert discusses what made the Village Gate such a unique space, how the women she profiles in the book learned from and leaned on each other, and what lessons we might take in the present from this engrossing mid-century history.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, the writer and director behind Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun discusses their debut novel, Public Access Afterworld, a propulsive blend of conspiracy theory, sci-fi, mystery, and early internet nostalgia. The book opens with two teenagers encountering a mysterious transmission coming through the TV static just after broadcast has switched from analog to digital. When one of the teens disappears and the other is suspected of murder, their lives become entangled with a range of characters across decades, all intersecting with a strange alternate dimension lurking on the other side of the TV screen. Schoenbrun discusses the creative possibilities they found in fiction, their ambivalent sense of media as both refuge and threat, liminality and nostalgia, and how they've been writing TV shows in their mind since childhood.

After watching Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's new documentary You Can See Everything, we're revisiting our chat show, "On Honesty," this week. 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?

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by the director and cinematographer, David Greaves, and his daughter, producer Liani Greaves, to speak about their new documentary, Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Originally conceived by David's father, the filmmaker William Greaves, Once Upon a Time in Harlem was shot in 1972 at a party that Willian engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. During the span of a long afternoon, this extraordinary group reflected on – and argued about – their politics, aesthetics, ambitions, and history. Greaves captured a crucial moment when the Renaissance's cultural contributions were at risk of being overshadowed. But through interviews with the artists Romare Bearden and Aaron Douglas, the writers Arna Bontemps and Richard Bruce Nugent, and the activist Regina Andrews, among many others, he offered an intimate, firsthand account of the generation that transformed American art and literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfinished at the time of Greaves death in 2014, David and Liani have since completed the film and recovered a vital chapter of American cultural history, which illuminates both the struggles and questions of the Harlem Renaissance and the way they continue to resonate today.

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by Palestinian American poet, translator and physician Fady Joudah to discuss his latest book, Exhibit G. The collection, a nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry, brings together poetry, prose, and photographs on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In this bold and illuminating work, Joudah wrestles with language, perspective, as well as the innate tensions within the writing itself: How to document a genocide in English, the language of the oppressor? How to resist what Joudah calls the "museumification" of the Palestinian people? And how can we challenge ourselves to confront immense suffering for what it is? Joudah discusses his work as a writer and a doctor, how he wants the book to be read, and the persistence of Palestinian poetry.