- Writer Jonathan Lethem joined THE CITY’s Harry Siegel and guest host Brian Berger to talk about time travel, his uncategorizable Brooklyn Crime Novel and why he returned decades later to writing about the gentrifying, racially charged borough of his youth and its collective, traumatized street myths.
- Picking up on some of those themes, journalist Elon Green joined Harry and THE CITY’s Managing Editor, Rachel Holiday Smith, to explain the bloody line from horrified new art students witnessing Transit Police beating Michael Stewart into a coma in 1983 ito Eric Adams being elected mayor — one that intersects with Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Spike Lee and Tucker Carlson.
- Whatever happened to Frankie King? Years after a Brooklyn high-school hardcourt hero walked away from the game and the public eye, he was reading, writing, smoking and drinking his way across New York — writing pornography for the mob to pay the rent, ambitious novels in his own voice and a million-book-selling “cozy cat” series under the pen name Alice Nestleton. Father-and-son writer and illustrator Jay and Eli Neugeboren talked with Harry about their graphic novel chronicling the great wound’ of a self-exiled Brooklyn basketball legend.
- Novelist and city hall speechwriter Radha Vatsal sat down with THE CITY’s Katie Honan to talk about her new book based on the true story of the the city taking away the six-year-old adopted daughter of notorious Chinatown gangster Sai Wing Mock, AKA Mock Duck, and “a past that was not as black and white as we make it out to be today.”
- Legendary critic J. Hoberman sat down with THE CITY’s executive editor, Alyssa Katz, to dig into his account of the 1960s avant garde here, why cheap rents were essential for “a sense of community that the city fostered kind of in its indifference” — and “the real culture war” at a time when the government was busting comedians and banning films.
- A simpler time? In the late 1980s, the city had three tabloids with seven-figure circulations that were a powerful, paradoxical force: “On the one hand, they were totally polarizing, turning the world into heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys — like comic books for adults. On the other hand, everyone is reading the Post and the News and Newsday, and they were unifying all of New York around these storylines.” Journalist Jonathan Mahler sat down with Harry and Amy to dig into his sweeping new book on The Gods of New York — many of them, still dominating the news decades later.
- Legendary illustrator Drew Friedman, “The Vermeer of the Borscht Belt,” talked with Harry and Amy about his obscure subjects, his famous friends and family and how growing up in the city shaped his life and work.
- Ben Fractenberg, visuals editor for THE CITY, talked with Harry and Amy about the kismet and the anxiety of street photography and capturing “the almost absurd, tense moments that happen all the time that are wonderful. These moments that you never think would happen in a million years but seem like they’re perfectly aligned.”
- Fifty years ago, New York City was hours from going bust as “really terrible things happened all at once.” Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost, the co-creators of the acclaimed new documentary about Gotham’s close brush with bankruptcy in 1975, “Drop Dead City,” sat down with Harry and Amy to detail their documentary full of film footage you haven’t seen before, how New York’s near collapse led to the city of today, and how Michael’s father Felix helped pulled it back from the brink.
- Henry H. Sapoznik, the author of The Tourist’s Guide To Lost Yiddish New York City and a Grammy-nominated musician and producer, joined Harry and Amy for an epic conversation about how “my quest to be more American than Americans assimilation” led him as the son of Holocaust survivors from Hillbilly music to Klezmer, the difference between faux music and folk music, the overlaps between kosher, halal and Chinese foods, and much more.
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