Looking for a new podcast to check out? The New School’s digital publication, Public Seminar, has just launched a new one, called “Exiles on 12th Street.”
“Public Seminar’s lens is the point of view of intellectuals from The New School and from the Greenwich Village area,” said Ian Riedel, a freshman in the Bachelors Program for Adult and Transfer Students and the sound editor of the podcast.
“The podcast is designed right now to feature an in-depth interview with someone, a conversation between two people, and then a contribution from an artist or performer,” said Claire Potter, a professor of history, co-executive editor of Public Seminar and host of the podcast. “We’re going to take a topic and come at it from at least three different angles.”
“The hope is that we’ll be able to do things on the audio platform that simply aren’t possible in print, like the sound of someone’s voice, sound of a neighborhood, the tone of an interaction between two interesting people,” said Potter.
The first episode, “Graphic New York,” featured an interview with dedicated walker Matt Green, diving into his current goal of walking every street in the five boroughs. The episode also highlights writer Luc Sante, radical counter-cartographer Liz Green, and biographer Chris Bonanos.
Future episodes will explore civil rights, psychedelics and crime stories.
Sarah Montague, the faculty advisor of the student-run New School radio station, began collaborating with Public Seminar as a producer in late spring. She worked with the executive producer Maryam Omidi, a doctoral student at NSSR, as well as Potter, Riedel, and Molly Mintz. Mintz is a fourth-year Journalism + Design student, and Co Editor-in-Chief of the Free Press. Mintz is as a researcher and production assistant for the podcast.
“We’re all working on the interviews and finding the best way to have these astonishing people who share their ideas and passions come across in their best, come across as dynamic thinkers,” Montague said.
One of the defining characteristics of this podcast is how discussion-oriented it is.
All episodes will have the host and multiple guests talking to each other. “[Public Seminar is] trying to bring a conversation between people and not just between guest and host,” said Riedel.
“Exiles on 12th Street” joins three other podcasts currently hosted on Public Seminar, but is the first to be produced directly by Public Seminar. Potter explained that, through the provost office’s publishing initiative, several different podcasts have been created by The New School community and published on Public Seminar.
“Public Seminar is becoming a kind of arena to gather and support various projects that people are doing around the university that have to do with publication,” said Potter. “
The title “Exiles on 12th Street” aligns with the history of The New School, specifically The New School for Social Research.
“We wanted to evoke the tradition of the University in Exile, which is the intellectual cornerstone of the New School for Social Research, and the classic Bauhaus building on 12th street, designed by architect Joseph Urban, which has been the New School’s Greenwich Village hub since 1930,” wrote Potter in an email.
The podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, and through a link on Public Seminar’s webpage. It will be available on Google Play and Spotify as well, Potter said.
Riedel urged students to give it a listen.
“Go listen to this new podcast, and while you’re listening to it go to a restaurant you’ve never eaten at before. That way you’re trying two new things at once, and hopefully you like at least one of them, which is the podcast. Or both.”
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Illustration by Olivia Heller