Lit NYC

Episode 50: Stanley Greenberg’s Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York

August 22nd, 2025  |  48 mins 31 secs

The photographer sits down with Lizzie Walsh and Harry Siegel to talk his decades shooting the city’s incredible, almost invisible water system, how the Department of Environmental Protection tried to stop his first edition of Waterworks from being published after 9/11, how COVID helped lead him to create a totally new second edition, and much more.

Episode 49: J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop

July 29th, 2025  |  39 mins 41 secs

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.

Episode 48: Jay and Eli Neugeboren’s Whatever Happened to Frankie King

March 12th, 2025  |  50 mins 29 secs

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.

Episode 47: Elon Green’s The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

March 5th, 2025  |  46 mins 28 secs

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.

Episode 46: Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel

February 15th, 2025  |  54 mins 2 secs

Episode 45: Amy Sohn’s The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age

December 20th, 2024  |  58 mins 21 secs

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.

Episode 44: Joel Kokin’s Urban Supremacy Suspicions

November 23rd, 2024  |  39 mins 23 secs

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

Episode 43: Ross Perlin’s Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

August 17th, 2024  |  43 mins 56 secs

Ross Perlin 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.

Episode 42: Jill Gill’s Site Lines: Lost New York 1954-2002

July 5th, 2024  |  32 mins 15 secs

“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.

Episode 41: Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995

June 22nd, 2024  |  40 mins 23 secs

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.”

Episode 40: Julie Satow's When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion

June 1st, 2024  |  46 mins 8 secs

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

Episode 39: Talking Pictures in Harvey Wang’s New York

May 26th, 2024  |  47 mins 15 secs

Episode 38: Steve Fishman’s The Burden

April 13th, 2024  |  52 mins 26 secs

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 will joke, too good to check.

Episode 37: Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

March 29th, 2024  |  1 hr 1 min

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.

Episode 35: Kai Wright and Lizzie Ratner’s The Plague in the Shadows

February 11th, 2024  |  50 mins 48 secs

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" — and the individuals and communities who stepped up and stepped in where institutions failed.

Episode 36: Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Come Out To Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture

February 11th, 2024  |  38 mins 30 secs

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.