Wake Island

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Zap, You’re Pregnant, That’s Witchcraft with Jarett Kobek

October 07, 2026

In the early years of Wake Island, around 2020 and 2021, we talked constantly about portals. The pandemic felt like an exit from one era and an entry into another. Eventually we stopped talking about them. Maybe because nothing had changed as completely as we imagined or maybe because we’d already passed through the portal and forgotten there was ever a door.Lately, I’ve started to feel another one opening. For thirty years we rebuilt huge parts of society around the assumption that everythin...

American Triage: From 9/11 to Fahrenheit 451

September 11, 2026

This week on Wake Island, we spoke with Adam Axler, author of American Triage: From 9/11 to Fahrenheit 451, a memoir about more than two decades inside American emergency medicine. Adam was a paramedic at Ground Zero and went on to spend years working in emergency rooms before walking away from healthcare and into another life, selling and collecting vintage science fiction books.What’s strange is that I’m moving in the opposite direction, a choice I’m still not sure is a smart one to be maki...

Falling Out of the Frame with Gideon Jacobs

August 18, 2026

Our guest today is Gideon Jacobs, a writer, performer and artist. I actually met Gideon over ten years ago when he was the creative director at Magnum and I was a photo editor at TIME. We were both working inside institutions built around photography and the idea that images, however complicated and subjective, had some direct claim on reality.It’s surreal to reconnect now, at a moment when that whole photographic relationship is imploding.Gideon recently wrote an essay for Spike, “All Images...