Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde. It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era's cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman compiles the work of various musicians, painters, filmmakers and poets who gave birth to everything from Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Protest Folk, Black Arts, and Underground Film, and more often than not, faced censorship and legal consequences for their innovations. The book reifies the link between artistic vanguardism and progressive politics, exploring the web of connection between artists and fate of the city—and country— at a time of ruthless redevelopment, labor strikes, atomic bomb scares, and emerging civil rights battles.

Eric and Alejandro dive into the cultural discourse around polyamory—why it seems to be more visible in recent years and what's driving the backlash to it–as well as how capitalism shapes modern love. They also discuss the challenges of thinking and writing through heartbreak, and how grief and love can make us unreliable narrators.

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to the photographer and writer Sally Mann about her new book, Art Work: On the Creative Life. In describing her path to becoming an artist, Mann provides prospective artists with insights on how to weather everything from rejection and poverty, to failure, fallow periods, and the millions of things that can come between you and your work. The book includes selections from Mann’s rich archive of photographic work prints, explaining some of the ideas that have gone into her pictures, as well early diary entries that portray a fierce determination alongside equally fierce self-doubt. She also includes excerpts from her long correspondence with a fellow photographer named Ted Orland. Mann’s advice is to write letters, keep your receipts, make lots of lists, and remember that being an artist isn't necessarily such a big deal, it’s a job like any other: you have to work at it.