Good evening, current affairs listeners. I am here with a tremendously special guest. I am here

with the fine artist and writer Molly Crabapple. Molly's resume is probably too extensive for me

to even begin to start with here. She has written two books, drawing blood, a memoir, and most

recently Brothers of the Gun. Her reporting has been published pretty much

everywhere from Rolling Stone to the New York Times. You can find a lot of her work in the New York

Review of Books. She's received a pile of fellowships. She's reported from dozens of countries

around the world. And that's only the beginning. But I'm looking forward to our conversation.

And I guess the first thing is,

every time I look at your work, I looked at your summary of what you did, what you'd done in

2018. And this is on Molly's website, mollycrapoff.com. And it's rather stunning because not only

did you do murals and reporting and New York Review books articles. You have been

everywhere in the course of one year and done more in the course of one year than I think

most artists and journalists can hope to do in about a decade. And my theory of this is that

you have somewhere a kind of Jeff Coons-like factory of unpaid interns that are all collectively Molly Crabapple.

I used to have that, but they actually killed the overlord, the former Molly Crab Apple, sort of stuffed her and are using her as an animatronic puppet that is run by AI,

and now they've all retired to luxury. I actually was a former assistant myself.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is true right, in the art world, that there are a lot of times when, you know,

someone's productivity is a little bit deceptive.

Oh my God, this is the... I don't want to say it's a dirty secret,

because dirty secret implies that there's shame

and that people know enough to hide this.

But I would say, perhaps most major conceptual artists

...