I’m starting a podcast about the upcoming mayoral primary election with a few friends. You can follow us on Instagram here, on Spotify here, on YouTube here, and on your Apple podcast app here. We’re calling it “Primary School,” and I want to be clear that while I am the host, I see myself as a student in that school, not a teacher. Luckily, we’ve lined up some amazing guests who know much more about this election than I do, and I can’t wait to learn from all of them.
People in my life have been telling me that I should start a podcast for about as long as podcasts have been a thing. Nine times out of then, what they mean by this is “you talk too much for way too long about stuff no one asked you about.” It’s similar to how everyone told me I should be a lawyer when I was eight, because I annoyed them all by arguing with everything all the time. Despite the pejorative connotations, I have to admit that the former idea has always secretly appealed to me. I listen to multiple hours of podcasts a day, a healthy mix of heady interviews with academics about decarbonization and housing policy, wonderfully insane pop music and film over-analysis, and a murderers row of dudes talking about sports. “Why shouldn’t I join the ranks of these yappers?” I’ve secretly thought to myself from time to time. “I can yap.”
Thankfully, my ego and delusion have up to this point been held in check by my incompetence with editing software, and lack of audio equipment. My friend and I once tried to record a reaction podcast over a video call the night we both saw Tar, but thankfully for everyone involved, the sound quality was abysmal on both ends and we never got around to fixing it.
But this all changed last month when some friends of friends reached out to me with a compelling pitch. They were starting a podcast about New York City politics and the election, they told me, and they both read my Cuomo blog, liked it (I guess), and wanted to know if I’d be interested in hosting. They’d do all the production and administrative stuff, they assured me. All I had to do was talk. I was suspicious by how perfectly this offer aligned with my wishes, but ultimately was too tempted to question it too much, and it’s been super fun so far.
Our first guest is Ross Barkan. You all probably know Ross from his excellent coverage of New York politics, both in outlets like the New York Times, New York Magazine, Gothamist, the Village Voice, and his personal Substack Political Currents, which boasts more than 18,000 subscribers. What you may not know about him is that he was one of the very first of the… let’s say “less than 18,000” of you to subscribe to Ghost Runner. Back in the spring of 2023, when I had a twenty-page screed on ghosts and Anthony Volpe, and was looking for a place to publish it, I sent it to him on a whim, and asked if he had any advice. He responded immediately, told me that he had enjoyed reading my haunted ramblings, and that I should start my own Substack and publish the whole thing there, rather than try to find a publication that would only run a fragment of it. It was incredibly generous of him to read it and respond, and such a nice thing for him to say to me at that time, and it’s a big reason that this silly blog exists at all. So when you get a 2500-word stream-of-consciousness in the middle of your workday about how much better the Yankees would be if they could do time-travel, that’s Ross Barkan’s fault!
You can listen to our conversation here, or at any of the links above. I’m really happy with how it came out, in large part thanks to some heroic editing from producers Sean, Jonathan, and Oliver. Our target audience in theory is “students and young people,” and hopefully we will reach them thanks to Lucy’s social media wizardry. For now, though, the target audience is “people who know me who have an hour to kill.” If you fall into that demographic, I hope you’ll consider checking “Primary School” out!