Samantha Cole With Ada Calhoun: A Conversation

Ada Calhoun is the New York Times bestselling author of St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and Why We Can’t Sleep. She has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. After stumbling upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book he had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun. But the deeper she dove, the more she had to face – not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own. Her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press) weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond, and explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents yet fear what that might cost us.

Samantha Cole is a senior editor for Motherboard, Vice’s science, and technology outlet, where she covers sexuality, online culture, platforms, and the adult industry. Her decade in journalism spans from hyperlocal newspapers to national and international outlets, including Popular Science, Fast Company, and Al Jazeera. From the moment there was an “online,” there was sex online, too. Famously, software engineers developing formats like the jpeg used as a test image “Lenna,” Playboy’s November 1972 centerfold. Early bulletin boards and multi-user domains quickly came to serve their members’ sexual musings. Facebook started as a way to rate “hot or not” Harvard co-eds. Virtually every significant development that defines the internet we know and love (and hate) today – privacy issues, online payments, online banking, dating, social media, streaming technology, and mass data collection – came out of the meeting of sexuality and technology. But the internet arguably changed modern human sexuality by giving every imaginable non-heteronormative community a place to explore, fantasize, thrive, and be accepted. How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: A History (Workman Publishing) is a serious and highly entertaining look at the intertwining convergence of sex and the digital space.