Lit NYC

Hosts Amy Sohn, Harry Siegel and others sit down each week to commune with artists, writers, critics, cranks, visionaries and loons and how their work, and their lives, relate to the past, present and future of New York. The podcast is a project of The City, a nonprofit newsroom serving the people of New York.

Lit NYC is a arts podcast hosted by Harry Siegel, with 77 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Harry Siegel hosts Lit NYC, a arts show with 77 episodes published.

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  Episode #77

  Joel Feingold’s Gotham

  Aug 21, 202649 minS2

  Joel Feingold, the researcher who worked with the late historian Mike Wallace on the final two books of his epic Gotham trilogy, including the newly published Gotham at War , visits Lit NYC to talk with Harry Siegel about what went into making an epic poem of the city weaving accurate history into myth to try and tell nothing less than the story of the whole world, New York's In Uno Plures tradition — Out of One, Many — as a correction to the American motto, still printed on our money, of E Pluribus Unum , or Out of Many, One, and much more. In the spirit of the books, it's a sweeping conversation touching on everything and everyone from Martin Scorsese to Zohran Mamdani, what Robert Caro might have got wrong about Robert Moses, and much more.

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  Episode #76

  Sam Roberts´ Art of the Obit

  Aug 14, 202633 minS2

  New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts talks with Harry Siegel about his new book, Are They Dead Yet, writing about the dead on deadline, and much more.

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  Episode #75

  R Sikoryak´s Declaration/Emancipation Illustrated

  Jul 17, 202643 minS2

  For the last decade, artist, animator, illustrator and performer R Sikoryak has been putting America’s founding documents into conversation with iconic images and characters from comics and cartoons. That started with the Constitution — “there’s a document everyone says you should read and I wanted to make it readable by adding visuals” — and his new book, Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated , continues with those two documents along with the Gettysburg Address. In a wide-ranging conversation with Lit NYC host Harry Siegel, Sikoryak talks about getting to New York, cutting his teeth at Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s underground cartoon anthology Raw and its ‘Narrative Corpse,” his Masterpiece Comics like Batman’s Crime and Punishment and Charlie Brown’s Metamorphosis, and much more.

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  Episode #74

  The `Common Sense´ of Bernhard Goetz Transformed New York City

  Jul 11, 202634 minS2

  When a white man shot four Black teens inside a subway car before disappearing into a tunnel just before Christmas Eve in 1984, young reporter Jon Kalish was assigned to the story by NPR. When Bernhard Goetz turned himself on New Year's Eve, confessing that "I wanted to waste them all," what came next seemed clear to Kalish. Instead, the Manhattan district attorney struggled to even indict Goetz before a jury eventually acquitted him of all charges except for possession of an unlicensed gun. Four decades later, Kalish looks back on a shooting that left a wound that never fully healed, by a shooter who still lives in here, and how it was covered at the time — with “the celebration of a man with an illegal .38‑caliber revolver firing it again and again on a crowded train.”

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  Episode #73

  Ed Shanahan´s Metropolitan Diary

  Jul 3, 202628 minS2

  The Metropolitan Diary — the longest-running column in The New York Times — turns 50 this year. For a half century, a page that was introduced as part of a push to relieve the publication’s stuffy reputation has been the only one in the paper of record where ordinary, so to speak, inhabitants of the paper’s namesake city could read, and publish, brief stories and bits of doggerel about ordinary life here. Ed Shanahan, who’s curated the page for the last decade, joins Lit NYC host Harry Siegel for a deep dive into the diary, the online community that’s developed around a pre-internet institution and those glorious days of yore when every successful contributor was rewarded with a bottle of Moët.

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