The American Vandal

On a hot Summer night in Brooklyn, Matt Seybold is joined by McKenzie Wark to launch the "Intellectuals" issue of e-flux Journal. They discuss the legacy of the public intellectual (and other mythic species), the belated reception of the vectoralist hypothesis, education and other other spaces, the practice and pleasures of being vulgar. Followed by an energetic Q&A.

Cast (in order of appearance): Brian Kuan Wood, Matt Seybold, McKenzie Wark

Date Recorded: June 11, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet

The final episode recorded at the ⁠Modes of Reading Today Symposium⁠, hosted by the ⁠Townsend Center For The Humanities⁠ focuses on media, mediation, and machine-generated texts. It opens with Nicholas Baer and Pardis Debashi's "Unattainable Texts," followed by David Bates's "Reading and Writing" [20:00], Nina Beguš's "Novel Audiences in 'Finnegan's Wake'" [37:30], Hannes Bajohr's "Surface Reading LLMs" [57:00], Matt Seybold's "The Technofeudal Reader" [81:00], and a brief Q&A [100:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Yael Segalovitz, Nicholas Baer, David Bates, Nina Beguš, Hannes Bajohr, Matt Seybold, Jacob Gaboury, Deniz Göktürk, Jonathan Kramnick
Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026
Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

The second episode derived from the ⁠Modes of Reading Today Symposium⁠, hosted by the ⁠Townsend Center For The Humanities⁠ assesses what it means that "close reading is having a moment" through papers titled "What is Close Reading?" [8:00], "Finding The Right Place For Close Reading" [30:00], "The Affected Fallacy" [56:00], "On Generalizing" [77:30], and "Close Reading as Field-Making" [100:00]
Cast (in order of appearance): Yael Segalovitz, Matt Seybold, Jonathan Kramnick, Toril Moi, Joshua Gang, Dora Zhang, Farah Bakaari
Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026
Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

An episode recorded as part of the Modes of Reading Today Symposium, hosted by the Townsend Center For The Humanities begins with a discussion of John Donne's insomnia and Wilfred Bion's undigested nightmares, followed by a vigorous discussion of attention, sleep, and immersion as they relate to literature and criticism [39:00], after which the symposium's organizer (and host of the Psychoanaliterature podcast) flips the studio for some analysis of The American Vandal's creator [90:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, David Marno, Yael Segalovitz, Jonathan Kramnick, Toril Moi, Emma Lieber, Nicholas Baer, Dora Zhang, Anne-Lise François, Farah Bakaari, Sina Dell'Anno

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby, L. D. Miller

For more about this episode, please visit TheAmericanVandal.com

A discussion of the historical trajectory informing the current polycrisis reverberating from the Strait of Hormuz with two historians of Iranian Oil, authors of "Nationalising Oil & Knowledge in Iran" (Edinburgh UP, 2025) and "Machineries of Oil" (MIT Press, 2018).

Cast (in order of appearance): Matt Seybold, Katayoun Shafiee, and Mattin Biglari

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby

For more about this episode, please visit TheAmericanVandal.substack.com