Lit NYC

Hoberman talks with Alyssa Katz about an era when ‘the cheap rents were essential. And the fact that there were areas of the city, of Manhattan, which had been in a way deserted because various light industries had left and there were spaces that artists were willing to colonize,” “a sense of community that the city kind of fostered in its indifference,” and much more.

Writer Jay Neugeboren and his son, illustrator Eli Neugeboren, talk with Harry Siegel about a Brookltyn Basketball legend who withdrew from public life while remaining in and of the city — writing pornography for the mob to pay the rent, ambitious novels in his own voice and then a million-book-selling “cozy cat” series under the pen name Alice Nestleton.

Elon Green talks with Rachel Holiday Smith and Harry Siegel about the direct line from the Transit Police beating Michael Stewart to death in front of horrified art students in 1983 to Eric Adams being elected mayor in 2021 — one that intersects with Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Spike Lee and Tucker Carlson.

Lethem talks with Brian Berger and Harry Siegel about his excellent and almost undefinable Brooklyn Crime Novel, and how COVID led him to again excavate the Brooklyn of his youth, two decades after novelizing it in The Fortress of Solitude.

Amy Sohn talks with Harry Siegel about how the American government's original anti-sex law, suppressing as obscene information about birth control, created the mechanisms used to this day to suppress unpopular thoughts.

Joel Kotkin discusses Americans’ demonstrated preference for suburban life, the waning of “urban supremacy,” and much more with Alyssa Katz,

Ross Pellin sat down with Haidee Chu and Harry Siegel to discuss his work mapping the languages spoken here in what may be the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world, why our melting pot is also a threat to many of those languages, and much more.

“They all disappear. That's the thing. It's extremely ephemeral” — Jill Gill, the 91-year-old author of Site Lines: Lost New York 1954-2022, talks with host Harry Siegel about her decades painting watercolors of her city.

Stank Mack talks with Alyssa Katz about his two decades listening to New Yorkers and documenting their sayings and subcultures in cartoon form, with “all dialogue guaranteed verbatim.”

Julie Satow talks with Sarah Shears about the women behind the business of fashion.

The book’s namesake talks with host Harry Siegel about chornicling the hold-outs in trades and businesses that were vanishing in the 1980s and early 1990s, old New Yorks past and present, and much more.

Steve Fishman talks with Harry Siegel about his his new podcast, The Burden, where he speaks with and digs into the history of former NYPD super-cop Louis Scarcella, the detective who locked up New York’s baddest guys back in the city’s “bad old days” — and with the convicted murderers turned jailhouse law firm who won their freedom by digging into police work that sometimes seemed, as journalists...

The writer returns to the pod for an depth-conversation with Alex Brook Lynn and Harry Siegel about her new memoir, and her gender transition.

Tricia Romano talks with Alyssa Katz about the pre-internet world where the Village Voice was a newspaper like no other: a haven for writers about avant garde arts, Black politics, queer identity and a million things more — and that's after the pages devoted to exposing the seamy side of New York City politics.

Journalists Kai Wright and Lizzy Ratner talk with The City editor-in-chief Richard Kim about their Blindspot podcast digging into the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and focusing on overlooked populations including intravenous drug users, incarcerated people, and the pediatric patients separated from their families "who lived and died their entire lives on the ward of Harlem Hospital&quo...

Author and cartographer Jake Berman talks with Alyssa Katz about how the great and not-so-great mass transit systems of the U.S. and Canada. the art of mapmaking, the secrets to the success of the few cities where riding the subway is the norm instead of the exception, and the future of New York City’s subways.

In the third and final installment of the pod's year-end mini-series of stories about a "New York minute," you'll hear from Michael Gartland and Ellen Moynihan of the Daily News, telling yarns about found beef, cops and lost cats. They’re followed by Justin Miller of New York Magazine on hearing an unsolicited tale of massages and romances. Finally, Mark Jacobson, the journalis...

In the second of three year-end episodes featuring stories about "a New York minute," natives Katie Honan and David Ray Martinez talk soap operas and families before transplants J.T. Price and Adam Levy talk about courteous robbers and courting wives.

Four about four New York minutes, with a pair about the drug business told by Cliff Michel and Steve Lynn, and a pair about gloom, glamor and gunmption told by Huge Perez and Flo Ankah.

Mark Chiusano, author of "The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos," talks with Azi Paybarah of the Washington Post about this character in the aftermath of the brutal new House ethics report about him.

Sean Howe talks with Harry Siegel about his sprawling history of an American crack-up.

Zippy creator Bill Griffith talks with Harry Siegel about his new graphic novel, "Three Rocks," about Ernie Bushmiller, the cartoonist who created the iconic strip, and goes deep into some New York City newspaper history in the process.

Photographer Stephen Yang joins Alex Brook Lynn and Harry Siegel for a conversation about capturing private moments in public settings, the differences between photojournalism and street photography, why tabloids have traditionally frowned on high-contrast shots (spoiler: those require too much black ink to print) and much more.

Ben Smith talks with Azi Paybarah about Silicon Alley, the internet of the early 2000s, and why local politics is less scalable than it used to be.

Years before the NYPD targeted Muslims, Black radicals and other groups with specialized and sometimes undercover operations, the Italian Squad prompted pushback for its aggressive tactics, and from Italian-American leaders concerned about their community’s public image as immigrants sought to assimilate. Paul Moses, author of “The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the...