Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

New York Review Podcasts

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick.  Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

  1. Matthew Aucoin on Opera, Music Criticism, and Poetry

    2d ago

    Matthew Aucoin on Opera, Music Criticism, and Poetry

    In this episode of Private Life, Matthew Aucoin joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss the state of music criticism, the work of music composition, and the life and writing of Aucoin’s former professor and mentor, the poetry critic Helen Vendler. The two also talk about “Inside the Music,” Aucoin’s essay from the Review’s November 6, 2025, issue about the decline of music reviews in mainstream media, as well as “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” Vendler’s review, from our May 11, 1995, issue, of o James Merill’s final book of poetry, A Scattering of Salts.(1995). Aucoin is a composer, conductor, and writer. His operatic song cycle Music for New Bodies, inspired by the poetry of Jorie Graham, premiered in 2024 and was staged at the Lincoln Center in the summer of 2025. He is the author of the book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (2021), and he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2018. Also in 2018 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known most for writing about contemporary poetry. Over a six-decade career she taught English and poetics at Cornell, Boston University, and Harvard, where she retired as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English. Vendler was also a longtime contributor to the Review, beginning in 1975 with an essay on William Carlos Willaims.  Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

    1h 9m
  2. Lili Anolik on Eve Babitz, Her Legacy, and Unsent Letters

    May 27

    Lili Anolik on Eve Babitz, Her Legacy, and Unsent Letters

    In this episode of Private Life, Lili Anolik joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about the life and legacy of Eve Babitz, in honor of the publication of New York Review Books’s Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) (2026), a collection of Babitz’s correspondence. Earnest and Anolik discuss Babitz’s captivating persona and the strange course of her life, from New York to Los Angeles and from riotous success to anonymity. Anolik, who has spent over a decade researching and writing about Babitz, talks about the notorious photo of a nude Babitz, age twenty-one, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp; her relationship with Joan Didion, and her artistic legacy captured through letter writing.     Anolik is a writer and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She is the author of both Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) and the dual biography Didion & Babitz (2024). She is a writer at large for Air Mail, and her work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among other publications.    Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She is best known for the essay collections Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), both reissued by NYRB Classics, and the novel Sex and Rage (1979). NYRB alsopublished I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction. In addition to her writing, Babitz was a visual artist and created collages for a number of album covers, including LPs by Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt.     Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) will be published on June 23, 2026, and will be available at NYRB.com or at a local bookseller.

    58 min
  3. “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio“ by Ingrid D. Rowland

    May 20

    “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio“ by Ingrid D. Rowland

    In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ingrid D. Rowland wrote “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” a look at the tempestuous life and brilliant art of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For this episode of Private Life, Rowland’s essay is read by the artist Lisa Yuskavage. Yuskavage has shown her paintings in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. Through June 26, her show “Lisa Yuskavage” will be on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Rowland in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest. Read “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

    35 min
  4. Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael, and Disegno

    May 13

    Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael, and Disegno

    In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives and work of some of the Italian Renaissance’s most significant figures: Raphael; Caravaggio; Giorgi Vasari, a sixteenth-century artist and writer from Florence; and Agostini Chigi, a banker and art patron.     Rowland is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750 (2024). In 2017, she cowrote the biography The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1994, writing extensively on art, art history, architecture, and theater. Her debut in our pages was “Character Witnesses,” an essay about Renaissance portrait medals. Other articles have included “Caravaggio Lost and Found,” about two rediscovered Caravaggio paintings, “Roman Rivalries,” about Michelangelo and Sebastiano, and “The Virtuoso,” a rapturous review of a 2020 Raphael exhibition in Rome.   Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

    55 min
  5. Private Life x Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

    May 6 ·  Bonus

    Private Life x Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

    Private Life presents a bonus episode from our friends at Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast. Produced by the eponymous art gallery, Dialogues brings together artists, creatives, and intellectuals in conversation about what it means to make things today.     In this episode, host Helen Molesworth is joined by the art historian Lisa Saltzman to discuss Walter Benjamin’s final days. Molesworth and Saltzman discuss philosophy, World War II Europe, and the network of intellectuals who saved Benjamin’s most prized possessions, including Angelus Novelus, the Paul Klee drawing that helped inspired one of his most well-known texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History.     Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer ’55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. She is currently working on a book, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, that explores how one passage from Benjamin’s posthumously published writingscame to transform Klee’s etching of an angel into the “angel of history,” a postwar icon of our seemingly impotent witness to historical catastrophe.    You can find Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.     This Spring, The New York Review of Books announced a new column, “At the Galleries”, featuring sharp, timely reviews of a wide variety of exhibitions, with a particular focus on contemporary art. The column debuted in the magazine’s May 2026 Art Issue.   Read “At the Galleries” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

    37 min
  6. “Ghosts in the House” by Martin Filler

    Apr 29

    “Ghosts in the House” by Martin Filler

    In the October 21, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler wrote “Ghosts in the House,” about Frank Gehry’s life and work at the turn of the century, including the architect’s own house in Santa Monica, his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In this episode of Private Life, Filler’s essay is read by Maya Lin. Best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. while she was still an undergraduate student, Lin’s forty-year career has also included the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and the landscape architecture project Wave Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.   This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Filler in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest. Read “Ghosts in the House” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

    42 min
  7. Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture

    Apr 22

    Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture

    In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.  Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first article for the Review, “Tall Stories,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 issue. In the forty years since, Filler has written about, among many other subjects, Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, and the lost beauty and significance of department stores, alongside the opening of the new Printemps New York. Filler also frequently wrote about Frank Gehry—his Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—and eulogized “his boldly original approach…the architectural equivalent of punk rock” when Gehry died this past December. (This episode was recorded prior to Gehry’s death.) Three volumes of Filler’s collected essays, Makers of Modern Architecture, have been published by New York Review Books.   Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

    1h 11m
  8. “The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell

    Apr 15

    “The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell

    In March 2019 Namwali Serpell wrote for the NYR Online about a choose-your-own-adventure-style episode of the television show Black Mirror, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hannah Arendt, and Violet Allen’s story “The Venus Effect,” among other subjects, in an expansive essay on about narrative empathy. In this episode of Private Life, “The Banality of Empathy” is read by the writer Lovia Gyarkye, whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and Aperture. Gyarkye is also an editor at Hammer & Hope magazine and was previously a critic for The Hollywood Reporter.   This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring a conversation with Serpell. Read “The Banality of Empathy” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

    29 min
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About

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick.  Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

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