The New York Public Library Podcast features your favorite writers, artists, and thinkers in smart talks and provocative conversations. Listen to some of our most engaging programs, discover new ideas, and celebrate the best of today’s culture.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Google Play

Fake news—it just won’t get out of the news. But it’s not exactly new. The traditions of hoaxes and cons, of plagiarists and forgers, have a special legacy in this country.  Kevin Young, the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker,  traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon in his most recent nonfiction book,  Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News . Young demonstrates that the contemporary smorgasbord of deception and fakery that refuses to get out of the headlines is part of a legacy of mendacity that goes back at least as far as the  humbugs of the nineteenth century's great con artist and showman, P. T. Barnum. Stopping along the way to examine the story of Nasdijj the invented Native American, the lying memoirs of Margaret Seltzer, and the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal, Young also makes the compelling case that the greatest and most insidious American hoax of them all is race.

Young was joined in conversation by Garnette Cadogan, a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.

How to listen to The New York Public Library Podcast

Subscribing to The NYPL Podcast on your mobile device is the easiest way to make sure you never miss an episode. Episodes will automatically download to your device, and be ready for listening every Tuesday morning

On your iPhone or iPad:
Open the purple “Podcasts” app that’s preloaded on your phone. If you’re reading this on your device, tap this link to go straight to the show and click “Subscribe.” You can also tap the magnifying glass in the app and search for “The New York Public Library Podcast.”

On your Android phone or tablet:
Open the orange “Play Music” app that’s preloaded on your device. If you’re reading this on your device, click this link to go straight to the show and click “Subscribe.” You can also tap the magnifying glass icon and search for “The New York Public Library Podcast.” 

Or if you have another preferred podcast player, you can find “The New York Public Library Podcast” there. (Here’s the RSS feed.)

From a desktop or laptop:
Click the “play” button above to start the show. Make sure to keep that window open on your browser if you’re doing other things, or else the audio will stop. You can always find the latest episode at nypl.org/podcast.