Dec 17, 2025
This week, I talk with author Lili Anolik about her book on two writers whose lives overlapped in ways that were both unlikely and (in retrospect) inevitable. One is Eve Babitz, the exuberant chronicler of 1970s Hollywood. The other is Joan Didion, whose notoriously “cool,” exacting style defined a particular vision...
Dec 1, 2025
Writer and editor Thomas Beller joins me to discuss his new essay collection Degas at the Gas Station. The essays trace his experience of fatherhood through the landscapes of his own childhood, including the early death of his psychoanalyst father and Tom’s later return—wife and children in tow—to the...
Nov 24, 2025
Thanksgiving has come early! A year after bidding
farewell to our much-loved/occasionally-
Nov 11, 2025
Why is it so difficult to find meaningful help for the severely
mentally ill, including those exhibiting patterns of violence? And
why has this question become politicized?
Nov 10, 2025
This week, Ben Appel joins me to talk about his new book, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, a memoir about leaving one kind of cult only to stumble into another. Raised in a rigid Christian community, Ben found refuge in the gay rights movement and, later, the Ivy League—until “allyship” started to...