At some point between the heyday of the mixtape and the infinite scroll of the app-based feed, the music playlist found its place in history, as a new form of history. With the human touch of curation, the playlist captures a moment, selecting some tracks over others, but breathing with the polymorphous possibility of continuous response. Assembling a live playlist for the audience out of samples of music and psychoanalytic theory, the kaleidoscopic writer Sasha Frere-Jones (The New Yorker, Buttondown) will riff on the “frame” of historical change, refracted through his new memoir, Earlier (2023), and in dialogue with Adam Blum, co-author (with Peter Goldberg and Michael Levin) of the recent book, Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (2023), which Frere-Jones reviewed for Parapraxis magazine. Ears up.

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