LARB Radio Hour

Episodet

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  Erin Maglaque's "Presence" 31.07.2026 47min

  Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to historian Erin Maglaque about Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which interrogates contemporary notions of how women's bodies work. The book is both a personal account as well as an excavation of the rituals, beliefs, and experiences of women from pre-modernity. It covers everything from pregnancy and child-birth to abortion, sexual desire, work, and sleep. Maglaque contrasts the idea of our bodies as separate from our minds—both optimizable and containable—with a pre-Cartesian conception of them as porous, vulnerable, and infinitely complex, inviting a consideration of some of the freedom of the deeper past and its starkly different ways of being embodied.
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  Kim Phillips-Fein on the Anti-Egalitarian Strain in American Culture and Politics 24.07.2026 43min

  Host Eric Newman and LARB Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher speak with Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. Phillips-Fein examines a powerful countertradition that has challenged our well-mythologized national ideal of equality from the United States's founding to today. Moving from accounts about John Adams and William Graham Sumner to Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Peter Thiel, she traces how these and other influential figures defended hierarchy and sought to normalize inequality as a defining and even necessary feature of the American experiment.
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  Rachel Aviv's "Strangers to Ourselves" 17.07.2026 44min

  This week we are listening back to Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv as she discuss her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. The book collects the stories of people whose mental health crises subvert our usual understanding of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. It begins with Aviv herself, who was hospitalized at the age of six for anorexia, before she even knew the term for her illness. Each chapter is then dedicated to a different person: Bapu, an Indian Brahmin woman, who shortly after giving birth dedicates herself to religious asceticism and mysticism; Naomi, a Black woman, who in her psychosis, despairs of the very real racism and generational oppression that surrounds her; and Ray Osheroff and Laura Delano whose chapters both show the ways in which psychiatry is still grappling with medication and biology. Aviv explores how mental illness can defy psychiatric explanation, requiring a broader view of the economic, social and lived realities of the people who experience it.
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  Pemi Aguda's "One Leg on Earth" 10.07.2026 50min

  Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with the Nigerian writer Pemi Aguda about her debut novel, One Leg on Earth. Set in Lagos, a young woman is at the start of a promising new architecture career working on an ultra-luxury development when she becomes pregnant after a one night stand. As she's coming to grips with what it will mean to be a mother, a rash of pregnant Lagosians suddenly are drowning themselves. As she navigates this disturbing mystery, secrets about the city's past, present, and future are revealed. Drawing on Aguda's background in architecture and land development, One Leg on Earth explores the tensions between urban expansion and historical erasure, as well as the relationship between place, the body, and agency.    One Leg on Earth is the LARB Book Club selection for summer. To become a member of the book club, and experience the other perks of supporting LARB, including a subscription to the LARB Quarterly journal and exclusive events other members and LARB staff, visit lareviewofbooks.org/membership. 
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  Forever Young 03.07.2026 45min

  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?
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  Harriet Clark's "The Hill" 26.06.2026 51min

  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.
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  Carlos Barragán's "The Yahoo Boys" 19.06.2026 47min

  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.   
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  Barry Walters' "Mighty Real" 12.06.2026 49min

  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.
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  Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Backtalker: an American Memoir" 05.06.2026 1h 17min

  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.
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  Andrew Durbin's "The Wonderful World that Almost Was" 29.05.2026 52min

  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.
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  Nose Jobs and Reality TV 22.05.2026 1h 12min

  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.
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  On Honesty 15.05.2026 48min

  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? 
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  Suzy Hansen's "From Life Itself" 08.05.2026 55min

  Kate Wolf speaks to the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Suzy Hansen about her new book, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan. It centers on Istanbul's neighborhood of Karagümrük, which Hansen first began reporting on in 2015. She writes about the influx of Syrian immigrants, the constant new construction, the conflicts between residents, and local muhtar's role in resolving them. Both a record of place and refraction of the global forces shaping Turkey today—not least the consolidation of power by president Erdogan—From Life Itself explores the ways that small lives become intruded on by the larger world. Hansen discusses her work as a foreign correspondent, Turkey's history, and its outsized role in current international conflicts from the war in Ukraine to Gaza and Iran.
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  Lucrecia Martel "Nuestra Tierra" 01.05.2026 37min

  Acclaimed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel joins Kate Wolf to discuss her documentary Nuestra Tierra, which follows a 2018 trial in Argentina over a crime in the remote northwestern region of Tucaman. In a showdown between a local landowner and the indigenous people of the area, a man named Javier Chacobar was shot and killed and two other community members were severely wounded; the crime footage was captured on video and shared widely on the internet. The trial's larger subtext was the rights of indigenous communities to their own land. Using drone shots as well as more intimate camera work and archival photographs, Martel presents a survey of this land, its people, and its history from colonialism to the present, portraying the often unspoken conflicts that have plagued Argentina since its founding and which reverberate throughout the Americas to this day.
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  A Return to the Queer 90's 24.04.2026 59min

  Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf are joined by French writer Ann Scott, whose cult novel, Superstars, was just translated into English. Superstars depicts Paris' queer techno scene—the music, the fashion, the drugs, as well as the passionate love affairs. Scott talks about that era and how she turned heartbreak into art. In the second half of our show, Eric Newman speaks with queer historian Hugh Ryan about his new memoir, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond. Eric and Hugh discuss queer representation in mainstream media and why we're all feeling nostalgic for those analog, offline times.
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  Patrick Radden Keefe's "London Falling" 17.04.2026 52min

  Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by investigative journalist and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, to discuss his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. The book begins with the 2019 death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler in London, a tragedy that soon reveals a web of deception, wealth, and hidden influence. Keefe traces Zac's life and the shadowy figures around him, drawing a larger portrait of London reshaped by global capital and restless ambition. Medaya and Eric speak with Patrick about how he first became interested in the case, how he investigated it, and the broader questions it raises about globalization, masculinity, and the pursuit of wealth at any cost.
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  Karan Mahajan's "The Complex" 10.04.2026 52min

  Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Karan Mahajan about his latest novel, The Complex. Taking its name from the collection of buildings that patriarch SP Chopra built for his family in Delhi amid the fallout of the 1947 partition crisis, the novel explores how Chopra's descendants struggle to escape the pull of an overbearing family and the long shadow cast by their storied ancestor. As they seek to wrest the lives they want from their surroundings, buried secrets and the tectonic forces of a rising Hindu nationalist movement threaten to tear them all apart. Medaya, Eric, and Karan discuss the transformation of India from the 1970s through the 1990s, the flight from family as both opportunity and wound, and what it means to live with and through buried family secrets. 
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  Reynaldo Rivera's "Propiedad Privada" 03.04.2026 48min

  Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by photographer Reynaldo Rivera, whose work is featured on the cover of the LARB's spring issue, which celebrates 15 years of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rivera discusses his latest photobook, Propiedad Privada, edited by Lauren Mackler and Hedi El Kholti. Along with essays and stories by writers such as Constance Debre, Brontez Purnell, Colm Tóibín, and Justin Torres, it showcases images from Rivera's personal collection, most of which he never intended to show publicly. The photos are intimate and erotic, full of longing, vulnerability, and hope. They capture Rivera's friends, lovers, his longtime partner Bianco, and Rivera himself, in ephemeral moments of lust and physical connection. Utilizing the close spaces of bedrooms, bars and alleys as their setting, they document private performances, intense intimacy, and moments of charged reflection. Together with Rivera's first book, Propiedad Privada offers a complex portrait of Latinx queer life in the U.S., while also taking its place in the timeless archive of desire.
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  Hyperpolitics 27.03.2026 52min

  In this special episode, Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman discuss the current political quagmire we find ourselves in through the frame of Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics. Moving from the 1990s to the present, Jäger's new book charts how the US has moved away from the mass political movements that defined the early- and mid-twentieth century. Though voter turnout reached a record in 2020, why do so many in the US feel atomized and disconnected, enmeshed in successive waves of political sentiment and agitation that never resolve? Medaya, Kate, and Eric discuss Jäger's argument, if the US's two party system offers any real choice, and if we'll ever move out of this hyperpolitical phase.
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  The War in Iran and the Limits of American Journalism 20.03.2026 50min

  Kate Wolf is joined by veteran journalist Jonathan Shainin, who has worked at The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Caravan, among other publications. Most recently, he is one of the founding editors of Equator, a new magazine covering politics, culture and art, launched as a response to what the editors see as the dominant mode of Western media: "boilerplate journalism," "facile binaries" and an "invincible ignorance of other societies and cultures." The magazine's mission feels even more urgent in light of the U.S.'s recent, overt acts of international aggression. Shainin speaks about the war in Iran and Lebanon, and how that conflict is being covered by the press.