Stay ConnectedA podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form interviews with curious and courageous people about their life and work through the lens of time. Host Spencer Bailey speaks with leading minds on how they think about time broadly and how specific moments in time have shaped who they are today.
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Copyright: © 2019 The Slowdown
Perhaps best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009)—or, more recently, Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023)—the author, essayist, and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem could be considered the ultimate modern-day Brooklyn bard, even if today he lives in California, where he’s a professor of English and creative writing at Pomona College. His most celebrated books take place in Brooklyn, or in the case of Chronic City, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and across his genre-spanning works of fiction, his narratives capture a profound sense of the rich chaos and wonder to be found in an urban existence. Lethem is also the author of several essay collections, including the newly published Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture (ZE Books), which compiles much of his art writing from over the years written in response to—and often in exchange for—artworks by friends, including Gregory Crewdson, Nan Goldin, and Raymond Pettibon.
On the episode, Lethem discusses his passion for book dedications; the time he spent with James Brown and Bob Dylan, respectively, when profiling them for Rolling Stone in the mid-aughts; how his work is, in part, a way of dealing with and healing from his mother’s death in 1978, at age 36; and why he views his writing as “fundamentally commemorative.”
Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[5:35] Cellophane Bricks
[5:35] High School of Music and Art
[5:35] Motherless Brooklyn
[5:35] The Fortress of Solitude
[5:35] The Disappointment Artist
[7:15] Carmen Fariña
[9:08] The Great Gatsby
[9:08] Brooklyn Crime Novel
[10:59] Lynn Nottage
[13:08] Bennington College
[23:41] The Collapsing Frontier
[23:41] Italo Calvino
[27:37] Dada movement
[27:37] Dissident Gardens
[31:21] Nan Goldin
[34:33] “The Ecstasy of Influence”
[42:32] “Being James Brown: Inside the Private World of the Baddest Man Who Ever Lived”
[42:32] “The Genius and Modern Times of Bob Dylan”
[51:00] Chronic City
[1:06:26] Jorge Luis Borges
To the lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, light is at once ubiquitous and precious, quotidian yet miraculous; it can be easily overlooked or taken for granted, but it also has the potential to become transformative or even otherworldly. Through her craft-forward approach, Adelman creates pieces that defy strict labels and explore the tensions between organic and industrial forms and materials, combining hand-blown glass with industrial and machine-milled components. Since launching her eponymous company in 2006, she has built a formidable business, perhaps becoming best known for her Branching Bubble chandeliers, a series that consists of glass “bubbles” elegantly mounted on the ends of brass, bronze, or nickel “branches.” Adelman also runs an experimental space called LaLAB as a means of exploring and meditating on illumination through the creation of one-off and limited-edition pieces, as well as private commissions.
On the episode, she discusses her recent decision to shift her company away from a large-scale production operation and toward a smaller, more intimate “studio” model; the great surprise of having one of her designs installed in Vice President Kamala Harris’s Washington, D.C., home; and her love of hosting.
Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[6:05] Ingo Maurer
[6:05] Gaetano Pesce
[7:55] Burst Chandelier
[12:22] “A Realm of Light”
[14:55] Isamu Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures
[17:20] Yosemite National Park
[18:41] James Turrell
[18:41] House of Light
[20:47] Noguchi’s “Lunar Infant”
[24:40] Writings by Agnes Martin
[26:52] Hiroshi Sugimoto
[27:46] David Lynch
[29:08] “Paul McCarthy: WS”
[29:08] Matthew Barney
[30:54] Haruki Murakami
[33:14] “A Cacao Ceremony That Brought Close Friends Even Closer”
[48:13] Branching Bubble chandelier
[48:13] Buckminster Fuller
[52:01] Adelman’s open-source D.I.Y. light project
[52:30] David Weeks
[52:30] Lunette
[52:46] “The Lighting Designer From Everyone’s Dream Brooklyn Brownstone”
[52:46] Rich People Problems
[52:46] Gwyneth Paltrow
In the eyes of the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a building is a living, breathing thing, a structure that can have a spirit and even, at its best, a soul. It’s this optimistic perspective that has given Goldberger’s writing a certain ineffable, captivating quality across his prolific career—first at The New York Times, where he served as the paper’s longtime architecture critic, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1984; then as the architecture critic at The New Yorker from 1997 to 2011; and now, as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Goldberger is the author of several books, including Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry (2015), Why Architecture Matters (2009), and Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture (2009). He is also the chair of the advisory board of the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, where we recorded this episode, our third “site-specific” interview on Time Sensitive.
On the episode, Goldberger discusses the Glass House’s staying power as it turns 75, the evolution of architecture over the past century, what he’s learned from writing architects’ obituaries, and the Oreo cookie from a design perspective.
Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[05:17] Glass House
[05:17] Philip Johnson
[07:06] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
[07:06] Farnsworth House
[08:42] Brick House
[12:37] Gordon Bunshaft
[12:37] Lever House
[12:37] Frank Lloyd Wright
[12:37] Guggenheim Museum
[13:18] TWA Flight Center
[13:18] Kevin Roche
[13:18] Ford Foundation building
[13:18] CBS Building
[15:17] Noyes House
[16:17] U.N. Headquarters
[17:50] Centre Pompidou
[17:50] I.M. Pei
[17:50] Louvre Pyramid
[17:50] Frank Gehry
[17:50] Guggenheim Bilbao
[20:00] Walt Disney Concert Hall
[23:20] Stuyvesant Town
[24:24] “Oreo, at 75, the World’s Favorite Cookie; Machine Imagery, Homey Decoration”
[25:46] “Quick! Before It Crumbles!: An architecture critic looks at cookie architecture”
[25:46] Nora Ephron
[26:18] “Design Notebook; Commonplace Things Can Be Great Designs”
[27:16] Bauhaus
[29:10] Fallingwater
[29:10] Richard Neutra
[29:10] Lovell House
[29:10] Gehry House
[29:10] Louis Kahn
[32:38] “Philip Johnson, Architecture’s Restless Intellect, Dies at 98”
[32:38] “Louis I. Kahn Dies; Architect Was 73”
[35:30] Paul Rudolph
[36:50] Zaha Hadid
[37:22] “New Police Building”
[38:19] Henry Geldzahler
[41:31] Why Architecture Matters
[43:21] Chrysler Building
[47:28] Vincent Scully
[48:18] Lewis Mumford
[1:00:47] The City Observed: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan
[1:00:47] World Trade Center
[1:02:49] “Here Is New York” by E.B. White
[1:05:33] Design: The Leading Hotels of the World
[1:07:25] Ritz Paris
[1:07:25] The Dylan Amsterdam
[1:09:01] “Why Buildings Grow On Us”
The artist Francesco Clemente may have been born and raised in Naples, but—having lived and worked around the world, including in Rome, India, New York City, and New Mexico—he considers himself a citizen of no place. Widely known for his work across mediums, from drawings and frescoes to mosaics, oils, and sculptures, Clemente makes art that evokes his mystical perspective, with his paintings often featuring spiritual subjects or dreamlike symbols. Beyond exhibiting in galleries and museums, over the years Clemente has also made works for a variety of other venues, including a nightclub, a hotel, a Hollywood film, and the Metropolitan Opera. This fall, his work (and name) will be central to his latest unusual project: the soon-to-open Clemente Bar at chef Daniel Humm’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park.
On the episode, Clemente discusses his collaboration with Humm, frescoes as the most luminous artistic medium, his deep affinity with India, and the certain timeworn quality to his art.
Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[3:55] Clemente Bar
[3:55] Eleven Madison Park
[3:55] Daniel Humm
[3:55] Alba Clemente
[7:50] Murals for the Palladium nightclub
[7:50] Hudson Hotel
[7:50] Ian Schrager
[8:43] Arata Isozaki
[8:43] Philippe Starck
[8:43] Kenny Scharf
[8:43] Keith Haring
[8:43] Jean-Michel Basquiat
[8:43] Steve Rubell
[9:43] Works for Great Expectations (1998)
[9:43] “The Sopranos” series
[9:43] Portrait of Fran Lebowitz
[11:37] Portrait of Toni Morrison
[23:12] Jiddu Krishnamurti
[23:12] Theosophical Society
[24:49] Álvaro Siza
[24:49] Museo Madre
[32:48] Cy Twombly
[32:48] Joseph Beuys’s exhibition “We Are the Revolution” (1972)
[35:30] Rudolf Steiner
[36:56] Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
[37:57] Swami Vivekananda
[39:20] Salman Rushdie
[41:31] Nisargadatta Maharaj
[46:51] Andy Warhol
[46:51] Allen Ginsberg
[48:13] William Blake
[48:54] Raymond Foye
[48:54] Hanuman Books
[50:04] “The Four Corners” (1985)
[53:36] Saint Francis
In her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the historian and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis unpacks a major part of United States history that until now wasn’t just brushed over, but was intentionally buried: how the Caucasian War and the end of the Civil War were conflated by P.T. Barnum, former President Woodrow Wilson, and others to shape how we see race in America. Long overdue, The Unseen Truth is a watershed book about photography and visuality that calls to mind works by history-shaping authors such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks. Lewis is also the founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, which strives to educate the public about the importance of art and culture for equity and justice in the U.S., and is launching a new publishing venture with Aperture this fall.
On the episode, she discusses the tension between pedagogy and propaganda; the deep influence of Frederick Douglass’s 1861 “Pictures and Progress” lecture on her work; how a near-death car crash altered the course of her life and The Unseen Truth; and the special ability of certain photographs to stop time.
Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[04:01] The Unseen Truth
[05:24] Woodrow Wilson
[05:24] Frederick Douglass
[05:24] P.T. Barnum
[06:51] Toni Morrison
[06:51] Angela Davis
[06:51] Mathew Brady
[51:14] Vision & Justice
[11:35] Caucasus
[14:02] Imam Shamil
[17:38] Caucasian War
[19:31] MFA Boston
[19:31] The Metropolitan Museum
[22:30] “Pictures and Progress”
[28:41] “A Circassian”
[28:41] “Slave Ship”
[28:41] “The Gulf Stream”
[35:13] Frances Benjamin Johnston
[39:20] Jarvis Givens
[39:20] Fugitive Pedagogy
[44:05] The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search of Mastery
[49:08] Montserrat
[49:08] Under the Volcano
[51:36] Aperture
[52:26] Maurice Berger
[52:26] Coreen Simpson
[52:26] Doug Harris
[52:26] Deborah Willis
[52:26] Leigh Raiford
[52:57] Hal Foster
[56:01] Hank Willis Thomas
[56:01] Theaster Gates
[56:01] Mark Bradford
[56:01] Amy Sherald
[57:58] Wynton Marsalis
[57:58] Charles Black, Jr.
[57:58] Louis Armstrong
[57:58] Brown v. Board of Education
For Rita Sodi, cooking isn’t so much an art or a science, but rather an intuitive way for her to channel her Tuscan roots and provide a profound sense of home. Following a 15-year career in the world of fashion as a self-described “denim guru” for Calvin Klein Jeans, Sodi transitioned into the realm of restaurants in 2008, when she moved to New York City from Bagno a Ripoli, Italy, and opened the West Village establishment I Sodi. Soon after, Sodi serendipitously met her life and work partner, Jody Williams—the chef-owner of the French bistro Buvette—and the two went on to found the restaurant group Officina 1397. Now, in addition to I Sodi and Buvette, they also operate Via Carota, The Commerce Inn, and Bar Pisellino. Across all of Sodi’s undertakings, her motive is clear: to create dishes she loves with great care and rigor, and, at least in the cases of I Sodi and Via Carota, to share an abiding passion for Tuscan cooking.
On the episode, Sodi discusses learning to cook from her mother, her atypical journey from fashion to food, and some of the stringent rules she follows in the kitchen and in life.
Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[25:50] Tuscany
[4:50] West Village
[5:58] I Sodi
[6:47] Calvin Klein Jeans
[8:31] Jody Williams
[8:31] Via Carota
[8:31] Officina 1397
[8:31] Bar Pisellino
[8:31] The Commerce Inn
[8:31] Buvette
[20:29] Pete Wells
[23:22] “An Ode to I Sodi”
[23:22] “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City 2024”
[23:22] “When I Want to Be Alone, I Eat Dinner at the Bar at I Sodi”
[25:50] Bagno a Ripoli
[29:35] “The Laws of Tuscan Eating at I Sodi in the West Village”
[48:26] Emilia-Romagna
[53:53] Jeff Gordinier
To the landscape designer Edwina von Gal, gardening is much more than just seeding, planting, weeding, and watering; it’s her life calling. Since starting her namesake firm in 1984 in East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island, she has worked with, for, and/or alongside the likes of Calvin Klein, Larry Gagosian, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Annabelle Selldorf, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman, creating gardens that center on native species and engage in other nature-based land-care solutions. In 2008, von Gal founded the Azuero Earth Project in Panama to promote chemical-free reforestation with native trees on the Azuero Peninsula. Stemming out of this initiative, in 2013, she then founded the Perfect Earth Project to promote chemical-free, non-agricultural land management in the U.S. Her most recent effort, Two Thirds for the Birds, is a call-to-action to plant more native plants and eliminate pesticides, thus creating a greater food supply for birds.
On the episode, she discusses the meditative qualities of gardening; reframing landscaping as “land care”; and why she sees herself not as a steward of land, but rather as a collaborator with it.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[15:32] William Cronon
[15:32] Changes in the Land
[15:32] Tiokasin Ghosthorse
[24:04] Carl Sagan
[24:04] The Demon-Haunted World
[26:07] Perfect Earth Project
[40:37] Two Thirds for the Birds
[42:41] John Fitzpatrick
[42:41] Cornell Lab of Ornithology
[42:41] Merlin Bird ID
[47:01] Garden Club of America
[50:21] Diana Vreeland
[51:09] Peter Sharp
[51:09] Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center
[54:46] Frank Gehry
[54:46] Biomuseo
[54:46] Bruce Mau
[56:32] Azuero Earth Project
[1:00:37] Doug Tallamy
[1:02:01] Nature’s Best Hope
[1:05:12] The High Line
[1:05:12] Brooklyn Bridge Park
[1:05:12] The Battery Conservancy
[1:05:12] Brooklyn Museum
While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-esque abstractions of the ocean that he has taken at roughly 250 locations around the world. In more recent years, Sugimoto has also built a flourishing architectural practice, designing everything from a café in Tokyo to the currently-under-construction Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. As with his subtly profound work, Sugimoto bears tremendous wisdom and is regarded by many as one of the most deeply perceptive minds and practitioners at the intersection of time and art-making.
On the episode, he discusses his pictures as fossilizations of time; seascapes as the least spoiled places on Earth; and why, for him, the “target of completion” for a building is 5,000 years from now.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[5:10] Pre-Photography Time-Recording Devices
[39:05] “Theaters”
[15:06] “Seascapes”
[32:31] “Diorama”
[17:16] Caspar David Friedrich
[25:14] Odawara
[28:52] “Aujourd’hui le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive]”
[44:19] “Abandoned Theaters”
[44:19] “Opera Houses”
[44:19] “Drive-In Theaters”
[49:52] “Architecture”
[51:12] Le Corbusier
[51:12] Mies van der Rohe
[55:30] New Material Research Laboratory
[55:30] Tomoyuki Sakakida
[59:23] Enoura Observatory
[59:23] Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden
[1:00:48] Katsura Imperial Villa
[1:01:05] Bruno Taut
[1:02:14] Donald Judd
[1:02:14] “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Five Elements in Optical Glass”
[1:06:47] Mingei
[1:06:47] Isamu Noguchi
[1:06:47] Dan Flavin
[1:09:15] Sugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
[1:09:15] At the Hawk's Well
[1:09:15] W.B. Yeats
Soon to celebrate his 50th birthday by journeying from Paris to Tokyo by car along the Southern Silk Road, the French Moroccan creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami says he’s “thirsty for life like it’s just the beginning,” and it shows. Among his 17 (yes, 17) companies are the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, which he and his wife co-founded in 2014 and sold to LVMH in 2021; the Paris-based creative agency Art Recherche Industrie, whose clients include Christofle, Moynat, and Gohar World; and Hotel Drei Berge, which he opened in the Swiss Alps last year. With each of his enterprises, Touhami has proven, time and again, how much craft matters—that there’s a real demand for it in a streamlined world that prioritizes efficiency, and that it’s not necessarily at odds with turning a profit.
On the episode, Touhami talks about the parallels between Japan and Switzerland, business as a religion, and the healing power of mountains.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[5:29] Hotel Drei Berge Hotel
[5:29] Élisée Reclus
[8:36] Angelo Mangiarotti
[8:36] Tobia Scarpa
[8:36] Dieter Rams
[5:29] “Ramdane Touhami’s Peak Performance”
[17:12] Mos Def
[20:28] Henry David Thoreau
[28:16] Officine Universelle Buly 1803
[28:16] Cire Trudon
[1:00:35] Aman
[27:06] Ignacio Mattos
[28:16] LVMH
[34:54] An Atlas of Natural Beauty
[34:33] Bernard Arnault
[34:54] Izumi Aki
[41:54] Société Helvétique d’Impression Typographique
[43:54] Émile Shahidi
[44:30] Radical Media
[44:59] Tricontinental magazine
[57:24] “A Parisian Designer Builds His Dream House in a Former Brothel”
[1:00:35] Southern Silk Road
At age 4, following the fall of Saigon, in 1975, Viet Thanh Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam and came to the U.S. as refugees. Throughout the turmoil and its aftermath, neither he nor his family could have imagined that he would go on to not only become an internationally renowned novelist—winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015)—but also to serve as an executive producer of an HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, and become a widely respected voice on matters including anti-Asian hate, refugees and immigrants, war and genocide, and memory and memorials. In addition to The Sympathizer, Nguyen has written, among other books, the new memoir A Man of Two Faces (2023); The Sympathizer’s sequel, The Committed (2021); and the nonfiction title Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016).
On the episode, Nguyen talks about turning The Sympathizer into an HBO miniseries, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” and jokes as a form of truth-telling.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[3:43] “An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine”
[3:43] Min Jin Lee
[5:48] F. Scott Fitzgerald
[7:11] The Sympathizer
[7:11] The Sympathizer HBO series
[7:11] Robert Downey Jr.
[7:11] Sandra Oh
[8:41] A Man of Two Faces
[8:41] Casualties of War
[8:41] Apocalypse Now
[8:41] Platoon
[8:41] The Deer Hunter
[11:48] Arundhati Roy
[14:18] 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
[21:33] Fall of Saigon
[33:34] The Great Gatsby
[37:26] Portnoy’s Complaint
[40:28] Great America amusement park
[47:24] Maxine Hong Kingston
[51:06] Chicken of the Sea
[51:06] Simone
[56:19] Operation Petticoat
[56:19] I Was a Male War Bride
[56:19] Catch 22
[56:19] Richard Pryor
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley has a deep and enduring obsession with wood. In his late 20s, he began to use the material for art, carving sculptures in his basement studio, and with his sculpture-making now spanning 70 years, his enduring dedication to his craft is practically unparalleled. Represented by Karma gallery since 2019, Mosley has only now, in the past decade or so, begun to receive the international recognition and attention he has long deserved. In his hands, wood sings; he shapes and carves trees into striking abstract forms that often appear as if they’re levitating while honoring and preserving their organic, natural character. As with the work of his two main influences, Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi, Mosley, too, strives to make sculptures that, in his words, beyond today, “will be interesting in a hundred tomorrows.”
On the episode, he talks about the language that poetry, music, and sculpture all share; his early years as a sports writer for a local newspaper; and his life-transforming relationship with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[4:13] Sam Gilliam
[17:24] Carnegie Museum
[21:08] Carnegie International
[21:08] Leon Arkus
[21:08] “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest”
[21:08] “Inheritance”
[24:20] Isamu Noguchi
[27:53] Constantin Brâncuși
[28:28] University of Pittsburgh
[28:28] Martha Graham
[46:15] Floyd Bennett Field
[46:23] Ebony magazine
[46:23] Sepia magazine
[46:23] Jet magazine
[46:23] Pittsburgh Courier
[54:34] John Coltrane
[51:37] Li Bo
[51:37] Dylan Thomas
[56:21] Bernard Leach
[57:45] Langston Hughes
[57:45] Countee Cullen
[57:45] Harriet Tubman
[57:45] Fannie Lou Hamer
[57:45] “The Long-Legged Bait”
[57:45] “Air Step - for Fayard and Harold Nicholas”
[57:45] The Nicholas Brothers
Most widely recognized for his paintings that rigorously combine spray paint, stenciled geometric forms, and brushstrokes, the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton is also known for his “Black Dada” framework, an ever-evolving philosophy that investigates various relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Many will recognize Pendleton’s work from “Who Is Queen?,” his 2021 solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which he has said was his way of “trying to overwhelm the museum.” This is a natural position for him: His works in and of themselves are often overwhelming. At once political and spiritual, they provoke deep introspection and consideration, practically demanding viewers to look, and then look again.
On this episode, he discusses the elusive, multifarious nature of “Black Dada”; “An Abstraction,” his upcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York (on view from May 3–August 16); painting as a kind of technology; and why, for him, jazz is indefinable.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[05:00] Joan Retallack
[05:00] Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths
[05:22] “Becoming Imperceptible”
[07:41] Ishmael Houston-Jones
[07:41] Joan Jonas
[07:41] Lorraine O’Grady
[07:41] Yvonne Rainer
[07:41] Jack Halberstam
[14:26] Fred Moten
[05:22] “Who Is Queen?”
[23:50] Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto
[23:50] Amiri Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus”
[31:14] Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
[31:14] “System of Display”
[31:14] “Reading Dante”
[34:40] “Adam Pendleton” at Pace Gallery
[34:40] “An Abstraction” at Pace Gallery
[34:40] Arlene Shechet
[34:40] “Adam Pendleton x Arlene Shechet”
[40:30] “Blackness, White, and Light” at MUMOK
[45:07] “Twenty-One Love Poems” by Audrienne Rich
[50:40] “Occupy Time” by Jason Adams
[56:04] “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” by Toni Cade Bambara
[57:13] “Some Thoughts on a Constellation of Things Seen and Felt” by Adrienne Edwards
The cheeky, happy-go-lucky spirit of the British fashion designer Paul Smith can be felt across everything he does, from his own clothing designs to his multifarious collaborations—Maharam textiles, Mini cars, Burton snowboards, and a suite at the Brown’s Hotel in London among them. Though Smith may run a business with expert tailoring and a mastery of color at its core, everything he creates seems to suggest, with a wink, “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” Beyond designing clothes, Smith also serves as a mentor to the next generation of designers. In 2020, he launched Paul Smith’s Foundation, through which he helps guide young creatives as they develop their careers. Fifty-four years into his business, which opened its first store in Nottingham, England, in 1970, Smith now operates shops in more than 70 countries around the world, from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and Hong Kong.
On this episode, he discusses his deep, 40-plus-year engagement with the country of Japan; his long-view approach to building a business that transcends time; his ever-growing collection of rabbit ephemera; and the metamorphic impact of music and humor on his life and work.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[3:31] Paul Smith
[6:33] Rei Kawakubo
[12:55] Elle Decor Japan
[21:41] Deyan Sudjic
[21:41] John Hegarty
[23:48] Paul Smith’s Foundation
[24:00] Studio Smithfield Fashion Residency
[24:00] John Galliano
[24:00] Alexander McQueen
[24:22] Jony Ive
[31:30] Bauhaus
[34:50] Beeston Road Club
[40:30] The Mini Strip
[48:24] Paul Smith Nottingham Store
[53:30] Maharam collaboration
[53:30] Burton collaboration
[53:30] The Rolling Stones
[54:19] Brown’s Hotel Sir Paul Smith Suite
[54:39] David Bowie
[54:39] Patti Smith
[54:39] Eric Clapton
[54:39] Jimmy Page
[1:01:57] Jean-Luc Godard
Three years ago, at age 66, the Belgium-born writer and critic Lucy Sante—known for her award-winning essays, criticism, and books, including Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991)—announced to a few dozen close friends that she was transitioning to womanhood. This news came following nearly four decades of publishing her work under the byline Luc Sante. In her new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Penguin Press), which she discusses at length on this episode of Time Sensitive, Sante writes about the first six months of her recent transition, the decades-long silence that preceded it, and various piercing moments from her life that led up to it. She is also the author of books such as Nineteen Reservoirs (2022), The Other Paris (2015), and Folk Photography (2009), and her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Artforum, and Vanity Fair. Across all of her work, Sante brings a searing, no-nonsense clarity and a photographic eye for detail.
Also on this episode, Sante talks about why she thinks of the 1960s as “a kind of magic time,” her life-transforming literary journey, and her decision to open the floodgates of her womanhood.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[3:49] Lucy Sante
[3:49] I Heard Her Call My Name
[3:49] The Factory of Facts
[6:27] Nineteen Reservoirs
[6:27] Low Life
[9:28] Histories of the Transgender Child
[9:28] Jules Gill-Peterson
[22:11] Tintin
[24:07] Terry Southern
[24:07] Writers in Revolt
[24:07] Alexander Trocchi’s Caine’s Book
[24:07] Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
[24:07] Peter Orlovsky
[24:07] William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch
[24:07] Curzio Malapart’s Kaputt
[29:05] The New York Review of Books
[34:23] Folk Photography
[36:55] The Other Paris
[38:04] Walker Evans
[38:04] Robert Frank
[46:10] Maybe People Would Be the Times
[49:52] “The Invention of the Blues”
[51:41] The Velvet Underground
[51:41] Lou Reed
[51:41] Andrew Wylie
To the cult British interior and furniture designer Ilse Crawford, interiors too often take a backseat to architecture. Through her humanistic, systems-thinking, “Frame for Life” approach, however, Crawford has shown how interiors and architecture should instead be viewed on the same plane and, as she puts it on this episode of Time Sensitive, “walk hand in hand.”
Widely known for creating indoor spaces that are notable in their tactility, warmth, and comfort—environments that incorporate, to use her phrase, “visceral materiality”—Crawford oversees her namesake London-based design studio, Studioilse, which she launched in 2003, and whose projects include the first Soho House members’ club in New York, the Ett Hem hotel in Stockholm, and the Cathay Pacific lounges in Hong Kong. Crawford is also the founder of the department of Man and Wellbeing at the Design Academy Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, which she headed for two decades. Prior to her career as a designer, she was the celebrated founding editor of Elle Decoration U.K.
On this episode, Crawford discusses her approach to crafting beautiful, highly original spaces that push against today’s speedy, copy-paste, Instagram-moment world; her early career in media; and her personal definition of the word “slow.”
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[5:09] StudioIlse
[7:25] A Frame for Life
[58:32] Design Academy Eindhoven
[7:25] Svenkst Tenn
[7:25] Ett Hem
[16:36] Jeanette Mix
[1:02:51] Cathay Pacific
[47:42] Elle Decoration
[29:11] The Eyes of the Skin
[33:52] Alvar Aalto
[33:52] Paimio Sanatorium
[33:52] Christopher Alexander
[31:35] Sensual Home
[35:24] Leonard Koren
[35:46] Frida Escobedo
[47:42] Architect’s Journal
[47:42] The World of Interiors
[47:42] Min Hogg
[52:48] Donna Karan
[54:04] Soho House
[54:04] Babington House
[1:00:08] Home Is Where the Heart Is?
The Italian chef Massimo Bottura may be a big dreamer, but he’s also a firmly grounded-in-the-earth operator. Based in Modena, Italy, Bottura is famous for his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Osteria Francescana, which has twice held the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. He also runs Food for Soul, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting social awareness about food waste and world hunger. With its first Refettorio opened in 2015, Food for Soul now runs a network of 13 Refettorios around the world—from Paris to San Francisco to Naples—designed to serve people in need via food-recovery programs. In 2019, with his wife, Lara Gilmore, he also opened Casa Maria Luigia, a hospitality concept in the Emilian countryside that became the jumping-off point for their new recipes-slash-interiors book, Slow Food, Fast Cars (Phaidon). In everything he does, Bottura keeps the tradition of the Emilia-Romagna region alive while constantly imagining and executing new possibilities.
On this episode, Bottura discusses the art of aging balsamic vinegar; his vast collection of thousands upon thousands of vinyl records; his deep love of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis; and how he thinks about the role of time, both literally and philosophically, in and out of the kitchen.
Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[03:27] Food for Soul
[03:27] Refettorio Harlem
[03:27] Refettorio Ambrosiano
[03:46] Universal Exposition in Milan
[15:36] Carlo Petrini
[10:40] Gastromotiva
[12:30] “Chef Massimo Bottura on Why the Future of Food is in Our Trash”
[15:22] Slow Food, Fast Cars
[15:36] Trattoria del Campazzo
[56:07] Casa Maria Luigia
[58:50] Osteria Francescana
[41:32] Cavallino
[41:32] Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia
[43:30] Joseph Beuys
[43:30] Lara Gilmore
[1:01:42] Tortellante
To Helen Molesworth, curating is much more than carefully selecting and positioning noteworthy artworks and objects alongside one another within a space; it’s also about telling stories through them and about them, and in turn, communicating particular, often potent messages. Her probing writing takes a similar approach to her curatorial work, as can be seen in her new book, Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (Phaidon), which culls together 24 of her essays written across three decades. For nearly 20 of those years, Molesworth served in various curatorial roles at museums and arts institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and most recently, as the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). In the five years since her departure from MOCA, Molesworth has built a thriving practice as an independent curator, writer, and podcaster, notably as the host of the six-part podcast Death of an Artist, which was named a best podcast of 2022 by both The Economist and The Atlantic.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Molesworth discusses her lifelong engagement with the work of Marcel Duchamp; the transformative power of a great conversation; and the personal and professional freedom she has found in recent years as a roving, independent voice in the art world.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:25] Helen Molesworth
[03:50] Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art
[04:02] Marcel Duchamp
[04:09] “At Home with Marcel Duchamp: The Readymade and Domesticity”
[11:33] “The Creative Act”
[12:09] Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”
[17:22] Frank Stella
[17:28] John Baldessari
[21:56] Paul Lafargue
[22:32] Doris Salcedo
[29:50] Josiah McElheny
[35:23] Al Hirschfeld
[36:41] State University of New York at Albany
[36:43] Whitney Museum Independent Study Program
[36:48] Cornell University
[42:33] “One Day at a Time”
[46:57] Kerry James Marshall
[47:00] “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s”
[47:02] “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957”
[47:41] Death of an Artist
[47:46] Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
[47:48] Recording Artists
[54:53] Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
[54:51] Carl Andre
[59:45] WBLS: The Quiet Storm
In another life, the German-born architect Annabelle Selldorf might have been a painter or a profile writer. In this one, she expresses her proclivity for portraiture as the principal of the New York–based firm Selldorf Architects, which she founded in 1988. Renowned for its work in the art world—from galleries such as David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth to cultural institutions including The Frick Collection in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.—Selldorf’s firm has also designed a wide variety of residential projects and civic buildings. Many of these designs serve as architectural depictions of their respective clients, revealing each one’s inner nature and underlying ethos.
On this episode, Selldorf discusses the links she sees between Slow Food and her architecture, the intuitive aspects of form-making, and why she considers architecture “the mother of all arts.”
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:31] Selldorf Architects
[08:19] The Frick Collection
[10:42] Lucian Freud
[17:45] Dia Beacon
[18:43] Art Gallery of Ontario expansion
[18:54] Two Row
[18:57] Diamond Schmitt
[26:08] Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility
[30:03] CSO Red Hook
[30:05] CSO Owls Head
[34:31] National Gallery, London
[35:17] One Domino Park
[37:15] John Russell Pope
[37:28] Thomas Hastings
[43:13] I.M. Pei
[55:38] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
[58:54] Neue Galerie
To the landscape architect Walter Hood, “place” is a nebulous concept made meaningful only through the illumination of its history and the people who have inhabited it. Hood has dedicated his career to this very perspective through his roles as creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California, and as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, where he has taught since 1990. His projects include a series of conceptual gardens at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina; the grounds of the campus of the tech company Nvidia in Santa Clara, California; and the landscape of San Francisco’s de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Currently, he’s at work on the wayfinding for the Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago; a new park in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina; and twin memorials for Emory University’s campuses in Oxford and Atlanta, Georgia.
On this episode, Hood discusses the intersection of social justice and landscape architecture, his arguments against what we traditionally deem “memorials” or “monuments,” and the power of language to literally shape the world around us.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[03:34] Black Landscapes Matter
[03:39] The World They Made Together
[08:18] American Academy in Rome
[08:27] Carthage
[08:55] Loma Prieta Earthquake
[13:48] Monticello
[13:50] National Memorial for Peace and Justice
[13:53] Gadsden’s Wharf
[14:28] Lorraine Motel
[16:07] Montgomery County Justice Center
[18:40] Double Sights
[24:37] Macon Yards
[25:32] The Power of Place
[28:59] Confederate Obelisk
[29:55] Splash Pad Park
[30:16] Lafayette Square Park
[38:21] International African American Museum
[38:25] “Native(s)”
[39:54] Water Table
[40:51] McColl Park
[42:28] Twin Memorials
[47:11] Octagon House
[48:43] de Young Museum
[51:13] The Broad
[54:14] The Future of Nostalgia
[54:53] Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations
[58:01] Solar Strand
[01:06:02] Art Institute of Chicago
Min Jin Lee could be considered an exemplar of the old adage “slow and steady wins the race.” The author’s bestselling 2017 novel Pachinko—a National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller that was adapted into a television series for Apple TV+ in 2022—took 30 years to write from its inception as a short story. Her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), took five years. These extensive periods of time become understandable, or even seem scant, within the sprawling, multigenerational contexts of her novels—Pachinko spans almost a century—into which she pours deep anthropological, sociological, and journalistic research. Lee is also the editor of the just-published The Best American Short Stories 2023 (Mariner Books) anthology, and she’s currently at work on American Hagwon, the third novel in her diasporic trilogy.
On this episode, she talks about the complex role of time in Pachinko, her miraculous recovery from chronic liver disease, and why she likens short-story writing to polishing diamonds.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:25] Min Jin Lee
[03:39] Viet Thanh Nguyen
[06:08] Free Food for Millionaires
[06:10] Pachinko
[06:19] The Best American Short Stories 2023
[08:08] Amy Tan
[08:09] Salman Rushdie
[09:36] “Bread and Butter”
[09:37] “Motherland”
[09:38] “The Best Girls”
[10:04] William Trevor
[10:06] Alice Munro
[12:45] Yale University
[17:23] Harvard Business School
[17:34] Fashion Institute of Technology
[47:37] Queens Public Library in Elmhurst
[49:21] The Bronx High School of Science
[49:32] The Hotchkiss School
[49:33] Phillips Exeter Academy
[58:46] American Hagwon
[01:03:33] Stoner by John Williams
In art and design circles, the name George Nakashima is synonymous with expert woodworking, exquisite furniture, and high-quality craftsmanship. Over the past 30-plus years, his daughter, the architect and furniture maker Mira Nakashima, has not only artfully built upon his techniques and time-honored traditions, further cementing his legacy, but also stepped outside of his shadow and carved a name for herself. Having worked full-time at George Nakashima Woodworkers since 1970, Mira took over as its president and creative director upon her father’s death in 1990. Since then, she has carried on his unfinished projects, continued producing dozens of his designs, and also developed many of her own creations, including her Keisho and Shoki furniture lines. Through it all, Mira has remained as humble as ever and maintained a deep reverence for her father, his boundless creativity, and his exacting vision.
On this episode, Nakashima talks about her family’s time spent in a Japanese internment camp during World War II; the enduring “karma yoga” influence of the Indian philosopher and spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo, whom her father once studied under and worked for as an architect; and why her father considered his work “an antidote to the modern world.”
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[01:15] George Nakashima Woodworkers
[03:39] Nakashima Foundation for Peace
[03:43] George Nakashima
[03:52] Altar for Peace at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine
[04:08] Altar for Peace at the Russian Academy of Arts
[04:14] Altar for Peace in Auroville, India
[08:42] Hague Appeal for Peace
[13:52] Sri Aurobindo
[15:36] Bnai Keshet
[15:45] St. Martin of Tours
[15:50] Monastery of Christ in the Desert
[15:58] Queen of Peace Chapel
[17:14] Ivan Wyschnegradsky
[17:22] Antonin Raymond
[17:36] Golconde
[21:00] George Nakashima Woodworker
[23:07] Katsura Imperial Villa
[23:26] Junzō Yoshimura
[30:11] Udar Pinto
[31:27] The Soul of a Tree
[42:07] Nature Form & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima
[45:22] The Krosnicks’ furniture collection
[49:54] Keisho collection
[54:14] Shoki collection
Behind every unforgettable space and every extraordinary experience is a certain je ne sais quoi. If anyone has an idea of what exactly that is, it’s the hospitality impresario and Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager. For more than four decades, Schrager has been a defining cultural catalyst and beacon across industries, from hotels and nightlife, to art and architecture, to fashion and food, and beyond. Since the early 1980s, Schrager has devised and developed more than 20 ahead-of-the-curve hospitality properties, including the Public hotel (2017) in New York City and the Edition line of hotels, as well as, going further back, the Morgans (1982), the Paramount (1990), the Hudson (2000), and the Gramercy Park Hotel (2006) in New York; the Mondrian (1996) in Los Angeles; the Delano (1995) in Miami; St. Martins Lane and the Sanderson (both 1998) in London; and the Clift (2000) in San Francisco. Beyond designing for mere aesthetic appreciation, Schrager cultivates places with a soul and spirit all their own.
On this episode—our 100th—Schrager discusses his tried-and-true design philosophies and definition of luxury today; his admiration for the visionary thinking of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Walt Disney; and the enduring aura of Studio 54.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:33] Ian Schrager
[02:54] Morgans Hotel
[02:59] Studio 54
[03:02] Steve Rubell
[06:26] Edition Hotels
[06:33] Arne Sorenson
[12:44] Public Hotels
[13:03] Paramount Hotel
[13:29] The Royalton
[14:45] Hudson Hotel
[24:37] John Pawson
[26:04] The Palladium
[26:05] Arata Isozaki
[33:24] “Studio 54” Documentary
[42:41] Enchanted Garden
[50:48] Bianca Jagger
[50:51] Truman Capote
[50:51] Andy Warhol
[50:56] Issey Miyake
[53:33] Paul Goldberger
[01:03:01] Paperless Post
To Sanford Biggers, the past, present, and future are intertwined and all part of one big, long now. Over the past three decades, the Harlem-based artist has woven various threads of place and time—in ways not dissimilar to a hip-hop D.J. or a quilter—to create clever, deeply metaphorical, darkly humorous, and often beautiful work across a vast array of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, photography, music, and performance. Among his standout works are “Oracle” (2021), a 25-foot-tall cast bronze sculpture that combines a Greco-Roman form with an African mask; his “BAM” series (2015) of gunshot statuettes; and his ongoing “Codex” series of quilts, which have, over his past decade of making them, become an especially potent and ritualistic part of his art-making.
On this episode, Biggers talks about the influence that musicians such as Mahalia Jackson, Ray Charles, and Stevie Wonder have had on his art; why he thinks of himself as a “material polyglot”; and why religious and spiritual works like reliquaries, shrines, and “power objects” are the bedrock of his practice.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:26] Sanford Biggers
[03:55] “Sanford Biggers with Yasi Alipour”
[07:14] “The Playful, Political Art of Sanford Biggers”
[12:34] Moon Medicin
[13:36] Mahalia Jackson
[13:39] Ray Charles
[13:40] Charles Mingus
[13:41] Thelonious Monk
[15:32] Stevie Wonder
[16:06] Prince
[18:00] Dick Gregory
[18:01] Richard Pryor
[18:02] Redd Foxx
[18:47] “BAM” series
[27:17] “re:mancipation”
[29:05] Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture
[30:08] John Biggers
[31:41] “Codeswitch” at the California African American Museum
[33:28] Dr. Leslie King-Hammond
[33:30] Maryland Institute College of Art
[37:47] University High School
[38:23] Morehouse College
[38:33] Art Institute of Chicago
[47:34] Isamu Noguchi
[47:36] Martin Puryear
[49:06] “Lotus”
[50:31] “Orin”
[55:52] “Meet Me on the Equinox”
[55:52] “Back to the Stars”
The London-based artist, master potter, and author Edmund de Waal has an astoundingly astute sense for the inner lives of objects. Each of his works, whether in clay or stone, is imbued with a certain alchemy, embodying traces of far-away or long-ago ancestors, ideas, and histories. This fall, two exhibitions featuring his artworks are on view at Gagosian in New York (through October 28): “to light, and then return,” which pairs his pieces with tintypes and platinum prints by Sally Mann, and “this must be the place,” a solo presentation displaying his porcelain vessels poetically arranged in vitrines, as well as stone benches carved from marble. As respected for his writing as he is for his pots, de Waal is the author of 20th Century Ceramics (2003), The Pot Book (2011), The White Road (2015), Letters to Camondo (2021), and, perhaps most notably, the New York Times bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010). All that de Waal does is part of one long continuum: He views his pots and texts as a single, rigorously sculpted body of work and ongoing conversation across time.
On this episode, de Waal talks about his infatuation with Japan, his affinity for the life and work of the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), and the roles of rhythm and breath in his work.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:28] Edmund de Waal
[03:43] Paul Celan
[08:12] 2023 Isamu Noguchi Award
[08:17] Gagosian
[08:20] “this must be the place”
[08:22] “to light, and then return”
[09:09] Twentieth-Century Ceramics
[09:20] The Pot Book
[18:23] “Letters to Camondo” Exhibition
[20:32] Sally Mann
[20:48] The Hare with Amber Eyes
[28:00] “The Hare with Amber Eyes” Exhibition
[30:56] “Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto” Exhibition
[40:24] Dr. Sen no Sōshitsu
[52:48] The White Road
[52:49] Letters to Camondo
The artist and photographer Trent Davis Bailey (our host, Spencer Bailey’s, identical twin brother) continually seeks to unearth the tangled roots of his identity through his intensely personal and place-based work. This summer, his first-ever solo museum exhibition, “Personal Geographies” (on view through February 11, 2024)—a photographic exploration of memory, family, and place—opened at the Denver Art Museum, and this fall, he will release the corresponding project, “The North Fork,” in book form. Bailey is also currently at work on “Son Pictures,” an ongoing series of photographs piecing together fragments of his family’s past and present, some of which were recently published alongside a New York Times op-ed titled “What a Motherless Son Knows About Fatherhood.” Leading him to take deep-dives into newspaper and family photo archives, and from Colorado to Iowa to the Adirondacks, “Son Pictures” unpacks the loss of his mother, who died in a plane crash in 1989 when he was 3; his family’s attendant trauma and grief; and his present life, at 38, as a husband and parent of two toddlers.
On this episode—his and Spencer’s first formal “twinterview,” recorded last month on their 38th birthday—Bailey talks about what it was like to grow up as an identical twin, his unusual and decidedly dysfunctional upbringing, and photography as a device for commemoration.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:28] Trent Davis Bailey
[09:58] “The North Fork”
[10:02] “Personal Geographies” at the Denver Art Museum
[10:12] “What a Motherless Son Knows About Fatherhood”
[10:18] “Son Pictures”
[11:54] Paonia, Colorado
[20:10] California College of the Arts
[20:22] Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize
[20:28] Robert Koch Gallery
[22:34] The Sublime
[23:52] The Hotchkiss Crawford Historical Museum/Society
[26:42] Robert Frank
[26:53] Stephen Shore
[26:55] Joel Sternfeld
[28:27] “A Kingdom From Dust”
[28:32] The California Sunday Magazine
[36:40] Rebecca Solnit
[45:43] United Airlines Flight 232
[45:46] Spencer Bailey Reflects on the Crash-Landing of United Airlines Flight 232
[45:56] Sioux City, Iowa
[46:02] Frances Lockwood Bailey
[56:42] International Center of Photography
[56:57] Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
[59:55] Robert Frank “The Americans” Exhibition at the Met
[01:08:10] Lake Placid, New York
[01:14:24] Brooklyn Darkroom
For each and every performance the theater director, playwright, choreographer, and sound and lighting designer Robert Wilson creates, time isn’t just of the essence—it is the essence. Perhaps best known as the director of the four-act opera Einstein on the Beach, which he composed with Philip Glass and debuted in 1976, Wilson now has nearly 200 stage productions to his name. These include Dorian, which premiered last year in Düsseldorf, and The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, which opened at the Manchester International Festival in 2011. What stands out about Wilson’s work, among many things, is its rare ability to disorient viewers while also enchanting them. Duration is often another part of the equation: Some of the performances on Wilson’s résumé have ranged from seven hours to an astonishing seven days. Many critics, writers, and scholars have agreed that Wilson has completely reshaped the landscape of theater, vastly expanding its vocabularies and horizons.
On this episode, Wilson talks about his personal philosophies around silence and sound, the intersections of architecture and theater, and his enduring vision for the Watermill Center.
Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[04:31] The King of Spain
[04:32] The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud
[04:34] Deafman Glance
[04:59] John Cage
[09:02] Madama Butterfly
[13:51] “Time to Think”
[14:34] Marina Abramović
[16:37] The Ring
[16:39] King Lear
[16:41] Einstein on the Beach
[16:43] Philip Glass
[18:14] Parsifal
[18:50] The Watermill Center
[28:55] Dorian
[32:09] Time Rocker
[32:15] Lou Reed
[34:27] Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace
[39:28] Festival of Autumn in Paris
[40:38] The Golden Windows
[41:04] Pratt Institute
[43:45] Medea
[44:48] Edison
[44:58] Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights
[45:00] Relative Calm
[46:32] H-100 Seconds to Midnight
[52:27] The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin
[52:40] A Letter for Queen Victoria
Through his abstract paintings, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá explores themes ranging from memory, gesture, and layering, to movement, dance, and hip-hop culture, to codes, mapping, and mark-making. Coming up in Miami in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Parlá spent his adolescence and young adult years steeped in hip-hop culture and an underground scene that involved break dancing, writing rhymes, and making aerosol art. The art form still manifests, in wholly original ways, in his abstract works, which, while decidedly of the 21st century, extend in meaning and method back to ancient wall writings and cave drawings.
On the episode, Parlá talks about his recent near-death experience with Covid-19; his activism with the collective Wide Awakes; and how his large-scale murals at locations including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barclays Center, and One World Trade Center trace back to his early days of painting elaborate wall works with aerosol.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[07:37] Rey Parlá
[11:45] Ciclos: Blooms of Mold
[12:19] Augustin Parlá
[13:13] Curtiss School of Aviation
[14:05] José Martí
[16:20] “Phosphene” series
[18:27] “Polarities” series
[18:32] “Breathing” series
[23:25] Wide Awakes
[23:26] For Freedoms
[23:29] Hank Willis Thomas
[23:31] J.R.
[23:35] Wildcat Ebony Brown
[24:28] “The Awakening”
[32:04] “It’s Yours”
[34:17] Snøhetta
[34:45] Ghetto Gastro
[36:50] Craig Dykers
[36:55] José Parlá’s Studio
[38:20] James B. Hunt Jr. Library
[38:22] “Nature of Language”
[38:47] Far Rockaway Writer’s Library
[56:56] “Brothers Back to Back”
[59:51] “Parlá Frères”
[01:00:03] Hurricane Andrew
[01:00:12] Savannah College of Art and Design
[01:01:32] New World School of the Arts
[01:01:51] Mel Alexenberg
[01:02:29] “Combine” by Robert Rauschenberg
[01:06:29] “Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture” at BAM
[01:06:30] Barclays Center mural
[01:06:32] “One: Union of the Senses” at One World Trade Center
[01:06:33] “Amistad América” at the University of Texas at Austin
[01:12:08] Gordon Parks fellowship
The renegade British designer Tom Dixon has long had a roving obsession with raw materials—everything from cast iron, steel, and copper; to clay, glass, and stone; to felt, plastic, and marble; to, more recently, cork and aluminum. Entirely self-trained and without any formal design education, Dixon emerged in the design sphere in the 1980s by creating unusual welded salvage furniture that was at once antique, experimental, beautiful, and punk in spirit. Never short of bold, forward-looking ideas, Dixon works from a materials-first perspective. Over the years, he has created an industrial chair with upholstery inspired by the rubber inner tubing of car tires, furniture made of flame-cut steel, and even conceptual pieces grown underwater and built of Biorock. Central to all that he does is a quest for longevity and, in turn, sustainability; he has even, in the past, toyed with the idea of a thousand-year guarantee.
On the episode, Dixon talks about how two motorbike accidents transformed his life, his days in the early 1980s as a bass player in the disco-funk band Funkapolitan, why he considers cork a “wonder material,” and the parallels he sees between his design creations and those of a baker.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:56] Tom Dixon
[07:02] Flame-Cut Furniture
[11:27] Design Miami
[12:06] Craig Robins
[13:50] Wolf Hilbertz
[31:14] S-Chair
[34:41] Giulio Cappellini
[35:12] Marc Newson
[35:15] Jasper Morrison
[38:56] Isamu Noguchi
[38:56] Akari Light Sculptures
[39:57] Constantin Brâncuși
[40:33] Dixonary
[46:34] Funkapolitan
[49:16] Funkapolitan’s “If Only”
[49:17] Funkapolitan’s “In the Crime of Life”
[50:17] August Darnell
[53:56] Guy Pratt
[53:58] Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt
[54:50] Creative Salvage
[01:01:06] IKEA
[01:03:37] Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
[01:03:50] Enzo Mari
[01:03:51] Achille Castiglioni
[01:03:52] Verner Panton
Dr. Jessica B. Harris is renowned as the grande dame of African American cookbooks. One of the world’s foremost historians, scholars, writers, and thinkers when it comes to food—and African American cooking in particular—she has, over the past 40 years, published 12 books documenting the foods and foodways of the African diaspora, including Hot Stuff (1985), Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons (1989), Sky Juice and Flying Fish (1991), The Welcome Table (1995), The Africa Cookbook (1998), and High on the Hog (2011)—the latter of which became a Netflix docuseries and, in turn, a New York Times bestseller. Through her cookbooks, her work, and her very being, Harris is a living testament to the polyvocal, far-reaching traditions and histories of African American food and culture.
On the episode, Harris talks about her love of West African markets, her disregard for recipes despite being the author of numerous cookbooks, and the widely unrecognized yet critical differences between yams and sweet potatoes.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[00:49] Dr. Jessica B. Harris
[05:28] Harris’s “French-Speaking Theater in Senegal” N.Y.U. Doctoral Dissertation
[05:49] Carrie Sembène
[07:45] Souvenirs du Sénégal by J. Gérard Bosio and Michel Renaudeau
[10:17] R.A.W.
[21:06] Hot Stuff (1985)
[21:43] The Welcome Table (1995)
[22:01] Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons (1989)
[22:05] Sky Juice and Flying Fish (1991)
[22:06] Tasting Brazil (1992)
[23:12] The Africa Cookbook (1998)
[23:15] Beyond Gumbo (2003)
[23:28] Rum Drinks (2010)
[23:56] Vintage Postcards From the African World (2020)
[24:46] High on the Hog (2011)
[25:46] High on the Hog Netflix Series
[33:53] “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table” Exhibition
[33:57] Ebony Test Kitchen
[34:00] Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
[34:29] New York Botanical Garden
[35:41] Stephen Satterfield
[01:05:00] My Soul Looks Back (2018)
[01:05:14] Maya Angelou
[01:05:15] James Baldwin
[01:05:16] Toni Morrison
[01:05:17] Nina Simone
[01:07:46] Yahdon Israel
[01:09:29] Nancy Harmon Jenkins
The term “polymath” is unquestionably overused, and often just plain wrong, but it suits the multi-hyphenate British designer, creative director, and artist Samuel Ross, whose hard-to-pin-down practice spans high fashion, streetwear, painting, sculpture, installation, stage design, sound design, product and furniture design, experimental film, and street art. Best known for founding the Brutalism-tinged fashion label A-Cold-Wall, which sits at the nexus of streetwear and high fashion, and for his work, earlier in his career, with the late Virgil Abloh, Ross also runs the industrial design studio SR_A and has collaborated with brands including Nike, Converse, and Timberland. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, he talks about notions of ritual, essence, and alchemy; how his work straddles the line between the organic and the synthetic; and why he always thinks in threes.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Show notes:
[03:59] “Samuel Ross: Coarse” at Friedman Brenda
[06:41] Glenn Adamson
[22:48] Hettie Judah’s Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones
[27:45] Vitsoe 606 Shelving System
[30:46] Virgil Abloh
[37:02] “Samuel Ross: Land” at White Cube
[42:05] Rhea Dillon
[46:24] Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On
[46:43] Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake
[46:46] Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
[50:30] Steve McQueen’s Small Axe
[52:41] John Berger
[58:19] 2wnt4
[58:53] Pyrex Vision
[58:55] Kanye West
[58:56] Donda
[01:04:09] A-Cold-Wall
[01:05:46] Jerry Lorenzo
[01:09:25] Black British Artist Grants
[01:12:22] SR_A
[01:12:50] “Fashion Design: Samuel Ross/A-Cold-Wall” at the V&A Museum
[01:13:22] Grace Wales Bonner
[01:13:54] Mac Collins
[01:13:59] Nifemi Marcus-Bello
[01:20:44] David Drake
To Jelani Cobb, reading, writing, and education are inherently acts of empowerment, and sometimes even ones of defiance. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015 and recently appointed the dean of Columbia Journalism School, where he has been on the faculty since 2016, Cobb has written on subjects ranging from the power of Dave Chappelle’s comedy, to the vital lessons of Martin Luther King Jr., to Donald Trump as a rapper. Cobb is also the author of the books The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (2010) and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (2007). Given the precarious moment we’re in when it comes to truth and the future of not just journalism, but democracy itself, he is unquestionably one of the most essential writers, historians, and thinkers of our time. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, Cobb talks about timing and flow in hip-hop, why being a “first Black” leader in any high-profile profession is like “doing a high-wire act without a net,” and his belief that the future of journalism will include greater transparency around how a story gets made.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[03:39] DJ Kool Herc
[03:49] “Hip-Hop at Fifty: An Elegy”
[03:56] To the Break of Dawn
[08:05] August Wilson
[09:13] Skip James
[27:10] Run-D.M.C.
[27:16] LL Cool J
[27:24] Q-Tip
[27:25] Phife Dawg
[27:27] Salt-N-Pepa
[27:41] Kool G Rap
[27:45] Pharoahe Monch
[37:17] Queens Public Library
[39:27] Adell Patton
[41:18] Elizabeth Clark-Lewis
[43:06] David Carr
[43:23] Ta-Nehisi Coates
[49:58] The Devil and Dave Chappelle: And Other Essays
[53:21] “Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope”
[59:14] “Postscript: Rodney King, 1965-2012”
[59:46] “Alvin Bragg, Donald Trump, and the Pursuit of Low-Level Crimes”
[01:02:21] Between the World and Me
[01:03:51] Columbia Journalism School
Over the past 50 or so years, Marilyn Minter has been on a roving exploration of feminist, sex-positive thinking. In her art-making, she harnesses the power of sexual imagery—a realm long controlled by men—and presents it through the lens of female desire. Among her most acclaimed works are her “Bathers” series, which reimagines classic female bathers; her “Bush” series, originally a Playboy commission; and a group of new portraits, currently on view at the New York gallery LGDR (through June 3), featuring impactful cultural figures she admires, such as Roxane Gay, Gloria Steinem, Lizzo, and Monica Lewinsky. On the episode, Minter talks about the unrealistic societal and body-image standards young women continue to face, the importance of embracing complexity and multiplicity in artwork, and the hope she has in the next generation to fight social injustice.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[00:49] Marilyn Minter
[04:02] Bettie Page
[06:10] Susie Bright
[24:31] “The Joys (and Challenges) of Sex After 70”
[27:31] HBO’s The Deuce
[33:37] Pamela Anderson for Parkett
[40:33] LGDR
[46:30] Minter’s “Coral Ridge Towers” Series
[52:19] Linda Yablonsky
[53:23] Diane Arbus
[55:24] James Harithas
[56:35] Sylvia Mangold
[56:59] Kenneth Snelson
[58:16] Christof Kohlhöfer
[01:04:15] Neville Wakefield
[01:07:32] Planned Parenthood
[01:07:45] ADLAR AR App
As the co-host of NPR’s flagship news program All Things Considered, Ari Shapiro is a go-to source for tens of millions of Americans for essential deep-dives into some of the most critical stories unfolding across the globe. At NPR for more than two decades now, Shapiro has made it his mission to serve as an informational and emotional conduit—or even a translator of sorts—between the subject and the listener. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, he talks about his new memoir, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories From a Life Spent Listening; why he considers hosting All Things Considered like inheriting an heirloom; embracing one’s identity as a journalistic asset; and the parallels between reading fiction, cooking, and reporting the news.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
[01:14] Ari Shapiro
[03:48] “The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening”
[04:09] Mary Louise Kelly
[04:10] NPR’s All Things Considered
[07:23] Susan Stamberg
[08:51] Noah Adams
[09:44] Audie Cornish
[17:27] “A Second, Chance Interview With Subject of Controversial First Lady Remarks”
[20:46] “Ari Shapiro On Covering the Pulse Shooting”
[22:07] Billy Manes
[24:50] “‘Dr. No’ Becomes Diplomat, Continues a Family Story”
[24:54] Norm Eisen
[27:29] “For Two Sarajevo Women, a Chance Friendship Forged in the Ashes of War”
[31:40] “One Man's Moment With Martin Luther King Jr.”
[38:48] Cascade AIDS Project
[43:21] Nina Totenberg
[52:59] Amitav Ghosh
[53:02] “Journey To The Sundarbans: The ‘Beautiful Forest’ of Mangroves”
[53:05] Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”
[54:30] “Meet Bonbibi: The Indian Forest Goddess Worshiped Across Religions”
[54:32] “Experts Fear Climate Change Will Lead to More Tiger Attacks in the Sundarbans”
[54:53] “Amitav Ghosh: ‘The World of Fact Is Outrunning the World of Fiction’”
[55:00] Ghosh’s “Gun Island”
[55:49] Pink Martini
[55:53] Alan Cumming
[57:50] Kim Hastreiter
[59:23] Och and Oy
[01:02:11] Ernesto Lecuona
Over his 25 years as CEO of the Danish textile company Kvadrat, Anders Byriel has turned what was once a small, fairly dusty family design business into a global giant. Perhaps just as notably, he’s taken a radical, and even artistic, approach to building and cultivating the brand’s culture, partnering with designers such as Raf Simons, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Peter Saville; arts institutions like the New Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark; and brands including Adidas Originals, Bang & Olufsen, and Jaguar Land Rover. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, Byriel talks about why the best design has an artistic edge, the importance of making space for emotion within a corporate environment, and his deep and lifelong passions of poetry and photography.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor,
L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Anders Byriel [01:04]
Annie Ernaux [04:25]
“Vermeer” at the Rijksmuseum [06:04]
Kvadrat [06:56]
Raf Simons [12:05]
Peter Saville [13:24]
David Adjaye [14:05]
Thomas Demand [14:14]
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art [14:17]
Rosemarie Troeckel [14:20]
Olafur Eliasson [14:27]
Jean Nouvel [14:40]
Massimiliano Gioni [18:06]
Pipilotti Rist [18:39]
Wu Tsang [19:07]
“The Triple Folly” [19:33]
Danh Vo [24:20]
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec [27:09]
Giulio Ridolfo [30:41]
“Materializing Color” [30:43]
Adidas Originals x Kvadrat Stan Smith [39:03]
Konstantin Grcic [43:06]
Verner Panton [49:29]
“Pop Art Design” exhibition at Vitra Design Museum [50:20]
Robert Adams [01:03:08]
Henrik Nordbrandt [01:03:52]
Nan Goldin [01:10:39]
Ocean Vuong [01:04:54]
Ocean Vuong’s “Time Is a Mother” book of poems [01:05:01]
“Your Brain on Art” book [01:05:09]
Hiroshi Sugimoto [01:11:37]
“Ai Weiwei In the Elevator When Taken Into Custody by the Police” (2009) [01:12:00]
Ansel Adams [01:12:44]
Robert Adams’s “Around the House” book [01:13:01]
Robert Adams’s "A Road Through Shore Pine" book [01:13:30]
Across her 40-year-long career, the photographer Tina Barney has become internationally renowned for capturing her particular milieus—family, friends, and neighbors in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, most notably, but also in New York and Sun Valley, Idaho. On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, she talks about her new book, The Beginning (Radius Books), and corresponding Kasmin gallery show (on view through April 22), which bring together some of her earliest images, taken between 1976 and 1980; what she views as the underlying sources of nostalgia; the fascinating natures of ritual and tradition; and the small miracles that can exist within a single photograph.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive—our first of Season 7—Chicago-based artist Nick Cave talks about his career-spanning retrospective, “Forothermore,” currently on view at the Guggenheim (through April 10), which takes over three floors and features installation, video works, and sculpture, including recent iterations of his famous Soundsuits; his improvisational approach to work and life; how his art seeks to find brightness in darkness; and what the world might be like if everyone sat in silence for an hour each day.
Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
From the archive: The late artist, jewelry-maker, and metalsmith Daniel Brush, who died on Nov. 26, 2022, at age 75, talks about memory (and interpretations of memory); his deep, monkish engagement with a wide variety of materials; and some of his most valuable tools—breathing, language, and light.
For the American-born chef and restaurateur Ruth Rogers, owner of the Michelin-starred River Cafe on the north bank of the Thames in London’s Hammersmith neighborhood, food is a portal: to memories and cultures. To conversations. To meaningful connections.
Since Rogers, who goes by Ruthie, co-founded the celebrated Italian restaurant with Rose Gray in 1987, it has become a well-trod stomping ground for a bevy of artists, filmmakers, writers, actors, architects, and other movers and shakers—many of whom have appeared on her podcast, Ruthie’s Table 4, including the director Steve McQueen, British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, and the artist Tracey Emin. Similarly, many highly regarded chefs have come up through the River Cafe’s kitchen, including Jamie Oliver, April Bloomfield, and Jess Shadbolt and Clare de Boer of the New York restaurants King and Jupiter. Rogers’s latest project, The River Cafe Look Book (Phaidon), captures her true spirit; that of the restaurant as a whole; and that of her late husband, the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Rogers, to whom the book is dedicated. A book as much about looking as eating, it encourages, in Rogers’s wonderfully joyful way, engaging the full body and mind as a cook.
On this episode, Rogers talks with Spencer about her journey in food and cooking; her 35 years at the helm of the River Cafe; and the rigorous culture of kindness and openness, paired with toughness, that she has built at the restaurant, both in and out of the kitchen.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
One small step for Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, one giant leap for mankind. So goes the story of several of the entrepreneur, philanthropist, and humanitarian’s pursuits over the past three decades. At present the founder and CEO of Sceye, a company building stratospheric platforms to help prevent human trafficking and monitor climate change, Vestergaard has a long history in developing catalytic products that have quite literally revolutionized the humanitarian and public health landscapes. Through his eponymous material science company Vestergaard, he developed PermaNet, a screen designed to kill mosquitoes by contact, which has more than halved the global prevalence of malaria, and ZeroFly, a storage bag that protects agricultural commodities against insect infestation, mold growth, oxidation, and rancidity. With LifeStraw, he created a product that filters contaminated water, which has eradicated Guinea worm disease from South Asia and all but eradicated it from Sub-Saharan Africa. Imbuing a values-driven approach into everything he does, Vestergaard is driven by the desire to close the gap between those who have and those who don’t.
On the episode, Vestergaard talks with Andrew about the values of equity he was raised with in Scandinavia, the importance of maintaining rigor and commitment over time, and why doing good and doing business aren’t mutually exclusive.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
The artist Hank Willis Thomas is a voracious reader, not only of books, but of the world around us—and particularly, of images. Through his practice, Thomas interrogates and investigates, probes and prods, and ultimately helps make sense of various strands of visual culture—advertising, photographs, videos, clothing and ephemera, monuments—to tell necessary stories and shape new forms of meaning and memory. While Thomas’s roots are in the medium of photography, his work also extends far into other realms, including sculpture and memorialization. A prime example of this and a collaboration with MASS Design Group is “The Embrace,” a memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, that will be unveiled in the Boston Common in January 2023. Another is the Gun Violence Memorial Project, organized with the prevention organizations Purpose Over Pain and Everytown for Gun Safety, and also with MASS.
Central to Thomas’s art are the subjects of truth and reality (best illustrated by his traveling “Truth Booth” installation, which toured all 50 states in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election), how they’re shaped, and by whom. Many of Thomas’s more conceptual projects also tend to be collective. Most notable among these is For Freedoms, an artist-run coalition he co-founded in 2016 as a super PAC that serves as a platform for artists of all kinds to meaningfully contribute to public discourse and help raise political awareness in the United States.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Thomas speaks with Spencer about identity as a figment of our imaginations, race as the “most successful advertising campaign” ever, and quilt-stitching as a metaphor for all that he does.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
The Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based designer Tina Roth Eisenberg has, over the past 15 years or so, built a cult following of creatives around the world who, like her, constantly seek to connect, reflect, and grow together—and who view her as an inspirational curator and guide. In 2008, Eisenberg founded Creative Mornings, an egalitarian platform that hosts free talks and events, with chapters currently in 225 cities and 67 countries. A serial entrepreneur and the creator of the widely followed Swissmiss design blog, Eisenberg also founded that same year Studiomates in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood; a predecessor to WeWork, it was the borough’s first co-working space. (Eisenberg now operates the co-working space Friends Work Here in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood.) Also over the past decade-plus, she has founded and launched the aptly named to-do list app Teux Deux and the temporary tattoo company Tattly, the latter of which she sold to Bic Group earlier this year.
On this episode, Eisenberg talks with Spencer about why she views the idea of time as a farce, her spiritual belief that everything is vibration and energy, and her mantra of leading with a sense of gentleness and what she calls “an extra layer of love.”
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Across his four-decade-long career in graphic design, Michael Bierut has amassed an impressively robust tally of bold-faced clients. From The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the Robin Hood Foundation to Mastercard, the New York Jets, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bierut and his team at the multidisciplinary design firm Pentagram—which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a two-volume book from the publisher Unit Editions, and where he has been a partner since 1990—have crafted some of the most unforgettable, standout identities and graphics around. Perhaps most notable in recent years, Bierut devised the unequivocal “H” logo used throughout Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Consistently fueled by the sheer delight he finds in design, Bierut is also a co-founder of the website Design Observer, launched in 2003 and among the first online platforms dedicated entirely to design. With everything he creates, Bierut whittles each of his concepts down to its most essential core, ultimately arriving at something that feels both rigorously thought through and inevitable in its simplicity.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Bierut talks with Andrew about the integral practice of keeping notebooks throughout his life; the deep groundedness of his nearly lifelong relationship with his wife and high-school sweetheart, Dorothy Kresz; and why the “why” of design is far more important to him than the “how.”
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
As the New York restaurant Le Bernardin celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, chef Eric Ripert humbly reflects on his three-plus decades there. Over this time, he has brought his artistic vision fully to life, subtly evolving it season to season and year to year, creating an exquisite experience for those guests lucky enough to sit in the dining room of a restaurant that has managed to maintain its four-star rating from The New York Times since shortly after its stateside opening in 1987 (it started in Paris, in 1972). Le Bernardin has also kept up its three-Michelin-star status. This year, Ripert himself was honored by Michelin with its mentor chef award.
The author of a best-selling memoir and of several cookbooks, Ripert has also been a guest judge on Top Chef, appeared on several episodes of the late Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Parts Unknown (the two were very close friends), and was the host of his own show, Avec Eric, on PBS. Careful to nourish a particular style in the kitchen that emphasizes a fastidious attention to detail, sharing knowledge, and leading in a compassionate way, Ripert credits his practice of Buddhism for helping shape his open-armed approach to life and work.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Ripert talks with Spencer about his cool-headed leadership style, his meticulous ways of managing time and technique in the kitchen, and the enduring influence of his mother’s culinary wonders.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
The architect Brad Cloepfil views his work as less of a job and more of a calling. Sites speak to him. He listens with his eyes. When embarking on a project, Cloepfil slowly feels out the place, studying its particularities closely in order to understand its truest, deepest nature. He and his Portland, Oregon- and Brooklyn-based firm, Allied Works, craft buildings as much as they design them. His are finely tuned, well-wrought structures, elegantly proportioned, and unforgettable in their tactility, visual wonder, and reverence for their sites and surroundings.
From the Portland, Oregon, headquarters of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy (2000); to Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum (2011); to, more recently, the U.S. embassy in Mozambique (2021), Allied Works sculpts spaces of meaning and feeling that also serve pragmatic functions. Not surprisingly, the firm has become renowned for its designs of museums and arts institutions, including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2003).
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Cloepfil talks with Spencer about his multisensorial approach to design and making; how reading, writing, and poetry have shaped his perspectives on the built world; and why all of his buildings are on some level about “amplifying and elevating the idea of service.”
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor,
L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
To Annie-B Parson, choreography isn’t confined to the studio and the stage; rather, practically everything around us abounds with movement that’s worth paying attention to. In her new, aptly titled book, The Choreography of Everyday Life, an inventive, observant, and witty ode to her relationship with dance and movement over the course of her lifetime, she delves into exactly that belief.
Across the past 30-plus years with Big Dance Theater, which she co-founded in 1991, her work has amounted to more than 20 choreographed and co-created works. As a whole, her inventive oeuvre extends in seemingly infinite directions: opera, pop music, television, movies, ballet, marching bands, symphonies. A frequent and close collaborator with the legendary David Byrne, Parson has choreographed two of his world tours, and most recently, his highly acclaimed Broadway hit American Utopia. The eclecticness of Parson’s body of work is rivaled only by that of her choreographic style, which finds inspiration in everything from traditional ballet, to Russian folk dances, to pedestrians on the sidewalk. A meticulous attentiveness and a whimsical ingenuity are the hallmarks of everything she does.
On this episode, Parson speaks with Andrew about how the pandemic has altered our understanding of the ways our bodies relate to one another, why she considers TikTok a new kind of folk dance, and choreography as a means of controlling and testing time.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
If there were a bard for our bewildering times, Saeed Jones would be a fitting choice. In his newly released collection of poems, Alive at the End of the World, Jones dances through grief, rage, and trauma—collective and personal—with acerbic clarity and sharp-edged wit. It is a book that gets to the heart of this confounding, erratic era, by turns reflecting on the tremendous amount of loss that has come with Covid-19; more broadly, the staggering, startling nature of living through a pandemic; the unignorable realities of climate disaster; the ongoing dangers of being Black and queer in the face of systemic racism, homophobia, and white supremacy; and, individually, the 2011 death of his mother and the past decade he has spent wallowing, mourning, mending, processing, and growing in the aftermath. Following his two previous books—the 2019 coming-of-age memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and the 2014 poetry collection Prelude to Bruise—Alive at the End of the World is only sort of a hyperbolic, if coy, title. “This human era we’re in is wild,” Jones says on this episode of Time Sensitive. “I am not here to tell people, ‘Oh, it has always been this calamitous.’ No! We are in an era of instability, destability. It’s bad, and I think we need to be real about that.”
There’s a blunt, let’s-not-beat-around-the-bush quality to Jones’s work—he intentionally and directly addresses harsh, gut-punching realities that many of us would rather ignore. But he does so in ways that are alluring, and that draw readers in. Wading through the tough stuff, slowly, thoughtfully, and with good humor, Jones gets to higher truths and finds meaningful connection points.
Also on this episode, Jones talks with Spencer about growing up Black and queer in the suburban city of Lewisville, Texas; how the murders of James Byrd, Jr., and Matthew Shepard haunted him throughout his teenage years and still do; and why, “in our culture right now, everything’s a proxy war, everything’s one-upmanship.”
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Peter Saville is a man of the moment—and has been, again and again, throughout the past five decades. Raised in Manchester, England, in the sixties—in tandem with the growing prominence of counterculture, the rise of anti-war sentiments, and the birth of pop—Saville developed early on a keen eye and ear for the zeitgeist, or what he terms “nowness.” In his adolescence, he took up a fervent interest in music and in record covers in particular, and went on to art school to study graphic design. In his final year, he was commissioned to design the very first posters for the punk music venue The Factory, which would soon morph into the legendary independent record label Factory Records.
Across his prolific, nearly 50-year-long career in graphic design and art direction, Saville has created album covers for Joy Division and New Order (most iconically, the one for Joy Division’s debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures); branding for clients including Ferragamo, Burberry, and Aston Martin; and more recently, even Kvadrat fabric designs—each drawing inspiration from the spirit of their times—that can be called nothing short of era-defining. Woven across all of his work are provocative dialogues between past, present, and future.
On this episode, Saville speaks with Andrew about coming of age in the punk and post-punk worlds, the increasing impossibility of tracking “nowness,” and creating literal signs of the times.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Roxane Gay describes her wild trajectory as a multihyphenate writer-editor-publisher-professor-social commentator as “fairly bewildering.” And she’s not wrong: Over the past decade—and with long odds stacked up against her as a queer Black woman of size—Gay has had a meteoric rise in the media and publishing stratosphere, achieving rare heights. She has written a best-selling memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017); a book of essays, Bad Feminist (2014); and two collections of short stories, Ayiti (2001) and Difficult Women (2017). She publishes a weekly newsletter called The Audacity and hosts The Roxane Gay Agenda podcast. Gay is also a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. This spring, she launched the Roxane Gay Books imprint with the publisher Grove Atlantic, and this fall, she begins her rarified position as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her next book, the astutely titled How to Be Heard, comes out in the spring.
Across all of her work, Gay addresses topics related to feminism, women’s rights, rape culture, sexual violence, weight and body image, trauma, race, and friendship. Gay, it is safe to say, is one of the most essential writers of our time, someone hyperattuned to the moment we’re in and who fights like hell for the issues and causes she deeply believes in. Now in a well-earned position of power, she uses the influence she has to elevate the voices of other writers she feels are being or have been overlooked.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Gay talks with Spencer about her nomadic childhood across America as the daughter of Roman Catholic Haitian immigrant parents, her fluid and flexible approach to time, and her open-armed joy of cooking.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
For the past five decades, the British-born, New York–based artist Jamie Nares has been capturing the passage of time, the physics of motion, and the essence of self through a wide variety of mediums, including film, painting, music, photography, and performance. Many of Nares’s films, such as Pendulum (1976) and Street (2011), play with rhythm and speed as they distill the streets of New York City and the movements of its inhabitants. Nares’s vast body of work shares a common theme: the recording of a specific moment in time that gives the viewer an intimate look into a human experience. Her famous brushstroke paintings are both powerful and delicate, capturing the mere seconds of a single, continuous bodily motion using a repeated swooping gesture. One of her recent projects, “Monuments,” pays homage to the workmen who, centuries ago, chiseled marks in the huge granite blocks of downtown Manhattan. As life speeds up following the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, Nares’s work serves as a beautiful reminder to slow down, and to more deeply explore the many movements around us.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Nares talks with Andrew about her decades of work exploring time, rhythm, and movement; her journey transitioning to womanhood at age 65; and why her daughters and the next generation give her hope for the future.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Xiye Bastida was quite literally born into environmentalism. Throughout her upbringing in San Pedro Tultepec, Mexico, and later in New York City, Bastida’s Indigenous community leader father, of the Otomi-Toltec people, and Chilean ethno-ecologist mother taught her the importance of ancestral wisdom, respecting nature, and protecting the planet. A lead organizer of the Fridays for Future youth climate strike movement, Bastida is also the co-founder of the Re-Earth Initiative, whose aim is to make the climate movement more inclusive and accessible. She has quickly become one of the world’s most visible and vocal youth leader’s in the climate conversation: Last year, she spoke at the U.N. Leadership Summit on Climate, hosted by the Biden administration, and gave the closing speech at the World Leaders Summit at COP26. She was recently on the cover of Vogue México, and in May, she attended the Met Gala upon the invitation of fashion designer Gabriela Hearst. All this while attending the University of Pennsylvania, where she’s an undergraduate majoring in environmental studies with a concentration in policy.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Bastida speaks with Spencer about effective strategies for climate activism, the deep meaning and value of Indigenous wisdom and ancestral knowledge, and what’s next for the climate movement.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Fashion designer Rachel Comey has always done things in a tightly focused way—and on her own terms. For more than two decades, she has followed an independent, wholly original approach to clothing design and retail that has resulted in her eponymous brand’s staying power. From novelty underwear with pockets, to a hand-painted shirt that musician David Bowie once wore on the Late Show with David Letterman, to her trademark high-waisted, wide-legged Legion pants, Comey’s designs stand out for their artful craft, distinctive aesthetic, and no-fuss sensibility. Beautiful as they are, they’re also, in a sense, utilitarian: Comey spends her time imagining her wearers’ needs as they go about their days and designs around that. There is something about the entire Rachel Comey universe that comes across as effortlessly cool.
On this episode, Comey talks with Andrew about her 20-plus years in the fashion industry experimenting while staying true to herself, childhood memories that have helped shape her enduring designs, and her attention toward creating joy through clothing.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
For Céline Semaan, the founder of Slow Factory, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing climate justice and social equity, no obstacle is too big—or too conceptual—to surmount. Underlying all of Slow Factory’s efforts is the notion of “fashion activism,” a term that’s been credited to Semaan herself. The organization’s past projects include “Landfills as Museums,” which served as a meditation on what “trash” really is, and among its upcoming efforts is “Garment-to-Garment,” an initiative that will teach designers to make clothes from existing apparel instead of from rolls of raw fabric. Semaan is also currently developing the new Slow Factory Institute in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which will serve the dual roles of a factory for waste-led production as well as a Bauhaus-style school for climate justice.
On this episode, Semaan speaks with Spencer about fashion as a political act, the importance of finding ease with contradiction, and what a post-trash world could look like.
Special thanks to our Season 6 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
For writer, comedian, and cultural critic Baratunde Thurston, host of the How to Citizen podcast, humility is a tool to connect with people—and to bring them together around some collective sense of truth. Through his work, Thurston serves as an ambassador to his audiences, always considering what they’re going through and the questions they might ask. A Harvard graduate, he has advised the Obama White House and worked as a producer on The Daily Show, and is author of the best-selling memoir How To Be Black.
A dogged dedication to transparency shines through all that Thurston does. Across his projects, he takes on nuanced discussions about race, technology, and democracy—and in the hopes of galvanizing his readers, listeners, and viewers, uses compassion and humor to make these subjects more approachable. Whether writing about Will Smith’s Oscars slap or the metaverse for the media company Puck (of which he is a founding partner) or hosting the new PBS travel series America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston, he navigates everything with great self-awareness, curiosity, and an open mind.
On this episode, Thurston speaks with Andrew about storytelling as a collaborative process, the value of open-source technology, and the word “citizen” as a verb.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Author and translator Jhumpa Lahiri grew up in what she has called “a linguistic exile.” Born in London to Bengali immigrants who moved to the United States when she was 3, Lahiri experienced a profound sense of alienation as a child and a longing for somewhere that felt like home. Then, during a 1994 trip to Florence, Italy, she fell in love with the Italian language, which she came to see as a gateway to exploring her life and identity further—or to, in other words, get beyond any imposed self. For the last decade, she has written almost exclusively in Italian, and has translated most of her Italian writing into English herself. A visceral energy rises up from her translated sentences, reflective of the strong emotional tenor she feels when engaging with the Italian language.
Some warned Lahiri against her decision to embrace Italian, practically considering it career suicide. But she remained unmoved. Despite her many triumphs until that point—including winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and having her popular novel The Namesake (2003) turned into a Hollywood film—the pivot brought about a new flood of creativity. Since 2015, Lahiri has produced more books than there have been years, including her most recent, Translating Myself and Others (Princeton University Press), which was published in May. Her first book of Italian short stories, Racconti Italiani, or Roman Stories, will debut in the fall.
On this episode, Lahiri speaks with Spencer about translation as a political act, the vocabulary of architecture, and language as a portal to understanding one’s place in the world.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Jancis Robinson wrote the book on wine. Literally. The author of the first four editions of the definitive Oxford Companion to Wine, she has also published some 20 books on the subject and more than 1,500 articles for the Financial Times, for which she has been the wine correspondent since 1989. A member of the royal family’s wine committee, she also helps select wines for Queen Elizabeth II. A trailblazer and a nimble scholar, Robinson—who, in addition to her work at the FT, pours her expertise into her jancisrobinson.com website—was the first wine writer ever to become an M.W., or Master of Wine, a rare distinction.
With nearly five decades in the trade, Robinson has an acute awareness of the forces behind the field’s constant evolution, and gives her readers context so that they can understand what it all means. Her primary interests lie not just in the flavors of wine, but rather in the stories that wines tell about where they came from, how they’re made, and what they reveal about the world. A supporter of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, a nonprofit working to improve soil health, she also helps amplify the many ways in which the climate crisis is impacting the wine industry, such as harvest dates and “smoke taint.” By her account, the wine world is in more flux today than ever before.
On this episode, Robinson speaks with Spencer about the power of old vines, the trials of translating taste and smell into language, and why some of today’s most thoughtful producers are packaging great wines in cardboard boxes and cans.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza believes that music can unite people across cultures and has spent the past 45 years showing audiences how it can be done. One of his latest projects exemplifies this philosophy: Beginning in October, once a month during the Friday Kabbalat Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, Broza will present tracks from Tefila, a new album that recasts the service’s traditional prayers and hymns as a blend of folk, jazz, pop, and classical songs. Performed by Broza, who sings in Hebrew and plays guitar alongside a global band of strings, horns, and gospel singers, the effort is a culmination of a lifetime spent honing his craft, which is rooted in the idea of music as a potent tool for facilitating dialogue and social change.
Themes of building bridges and breaking barriers run throughout Broza’s vast catalog. Among his 40-plus albums, many of which are multi-platinum, with English, Hebrew, and Spanish lyrics, several put American and Spanish poems to melody. His first song, “Yihye Tov,” or “Things Will Get Better,” from 1975, became and remains a soul-stirring peace anthem for Israel; his 2014 album, East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem, features both Israeli and Palestinian musicians. Whether playing for three people (as he once did, in the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, as it was being shelled by rockets) or thousands, Broza takes great care to convey a sense of empathy and hope into his dynamic compositions.
On this episode, Broza talks with Andrew about music as a connective tissue, how dialogue can lead to respect, and why feeling trumps thinking almost every time.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
If life is a garden, the writer, editor, and craftsperson Deborah Needleman certainly knows how to dig and cultivate it. Early in her career, she followed a nonlinear path in the media industry that was, for the better part of a decade, slow and steady—and then, upon launching the home design bible Domino in 2004, meteoric. Over the next dozen years, Needleman rose to become one of the magazine world’s most in-demand editors, serving as the editor-in-chief of both WSJ. Magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Across this work, her deep appreciation for beauty, craft, gardening and nature, and unfussy, richly layered interiors shined through. By the end of 2016, though, Needleman decided that she had had enough of the whirlwind hustle of the magazine business. She sought a way to work with her hands, not just her head.
So she slowed down—way down—and turned to the meditative acts of gardening and craft. She headed to the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, where she took an introductory broom-making course. Soon, she began producing a limited-edition “Garden Tea” of herbs such as chamomile, lemon balm, and mint. And she kept writing: Throughout 2017 and 2018, Needleman traveled the world, studying local crafts for the T column “Material Culture.” In time, she began to work more consistently with her hands, establishing a humble craft practice, primarily focused around basketry, that she continues to build upon today.
On this episode, Needleman talks with Spencer about the pleasures of producing objects from modest materials, what her current craft endeavors have in common with magazine-making, and the deep inherent value of a patina.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Bethann Hardison has, with great finesse, risen to become among the most vital voices in fashion. A self-described “advocate” who currently serves as Gucci’s executive advisor for global equity and cultural engagement, the former model and agent is a powerhouse figure who has not only reshaped conversations around diversity and anti-racism industry-wide, but has actively pushed for and, in turn, made change in terms of representation, from advertising campaigns to editorial shoots to runway shows.
Hardison brings a nuanced, lived approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion, one that is wholly her own, and one that she has practiced from a young age. With subtle (and sometimes, not-so-subtle) force—and through projects such as the Black Girls Coalition, which she co-founded in 1988 with her friend the model Iman, and the Diversity Coalition, which she started in 2013 by calling out certain brands for not using any models of color in their runway shows—Hardison has stepped up again and again, speaking truth to power, against what was, and in some respects remains, a long, ongoing lack of representation. This work has earned her a matriarchal place in the upper echelons of the fashion world, with recognitions such as the 2014 CFDA Founder’s Award. Hardison is currently at work on a memoir about her life, and a documentary about her path to fashion and diversity work by the filmmaker and director Frédéric Tcheng is also underway.
On this episode, she talks with Spencer about her “queen-ager” energy, her glass-half-full philosophies around death and dying, her efforts to call out fashion industry racism, and her rational, deep-seated concerns for the future.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
There is perhaps no one on the planet with a bigger-picture view on the impact of design—in all of its manifestations—than Paola Antonelli. As the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of architecture and design as well as its director of R&D, Antonelli consistently expands notions and definitions of what might be considered “design,” and shows how, in no uncertain terms, design connects to practically everything we see, touch, hear, taste, smell, and do. With great passion and energy, she is the ultimate clear-eyed booster of this wide-ranging realm she holds dear.
Antonelli’s most recent output—the book Design Emergency: Building a Better Future (Phaidon)—is not only an outgrowth of her prolific 28-year career at MoMA (during which she has worked on related projects including the 2005 exhibition “Safe: Design Takes on Risk,” the 2015 book Design and Violence, and the 2019 Triennale di Milano exhibition “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival”), but also a result of the pandemic. During lockdown in spring 2020, Antonelli, together with the British design critic and writer Alice Rawsthorn, conceived and launched @designemergency on Instagram, a still-ongoing feed that highlights voices central to key global issues, all of them related to improving the world through design. The effort is yet another example of Antonelli’s talent for synthesizing a vast array of provocative projects, designers, products, and ideas; bringing them to the forefront; and giving them much-needed attention.
On this episode, Antonelli talks with Spencer about time as a frustration, the myth of speed, the importance of going with the flow, and the many design emergencies constantly taking place all around us.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Alfredo Jaar illuminates truths that often escape popular consciousness. Through his work, the artist and filmmaker raises awareness about sociopolitical issues that have been forgotten, suppressed, or ignored, including genocide and the displacement of refugees. Simultaneously, he informs and engages viewers, urging them to be present for those who need their attention most. With all that he makes, Jaar maintains a heightened sensitivity to the limits and ethics of representation. His aim? To provide viewers with a different perspective on the world and reveal their connections to its many crises—and to be moved to act.
Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956, during a time of intense media censorship, Jaar early on developed an understanding of how to discuss injustices through a different kind of language. He immerses himself deeply in the subjects he documents, which have included Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine and the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While Jaar’s work focuses on specific events, there’s a haunting sense of timelessness to it. Take his landmark “A Logo for America” project, which points out that when we say “America” and mean “the U.S.,” we’re claiming a region that is only partially our own. Shown around the world, it has gained multiple new meanings since its 1987 debut. Currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its 2022 Biennial (through Sept. 5) is a video by Jaar, amplified with special effects, of the 2020 police attacks on demonstrators in Washington, D.C.
On this episode, Jaar speaks with Andrew about how tragedies reveal inequities, gathering multiple perspectives to understand global issues, and slowing people down so that they can see.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Dan Barber is on a mission to quite literally plant seeds for a better future. Around a decade ago, after learning that the nation’s largest food companies rarely breed food for flavor—and instead select for self-serving characteristics, such as the ability to produce high yields or endure long-distance travel—Barber, a chef and the co-owner of the restaurants Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, New York, turned his attention to seeds. From there, he collaborated with a vegetable breeder to make the honeynut squash, a sweeter, healthier version of the butternut variety, and has since used his cooking to raise awareness about the vital roles seeds can play in our food system. A co-founder of the seed company Row 7, he is not only concerned with the beneficial impacts seeds can have on taste buds, but also on communities and the planet.
Rethinking what people eat has played a constant role in Barber’s practice. His cooking style, honed at restaurants including Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, favors minimal ingredients as a way of celebrating their distinctive tastes. His upstate restaurant sits on a property shared with the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, a nonprofit operation that includes a regenerative farm and robust educational programming; there, his Blue Hill kitchen staff works with the Stone Barns teams to develop new ideas around food and farming. Barber regularly hosts educational programs, too, such as WastED, a 2015 pop-up that served delicious dishes made from ingredients most of us would consider trash.
On this episode, Barber talks with Andrew about the distinctive role that restaurants can play in supporting social movements, food scraps as part of a chef’s DNA, and why producing more food won’t solve food insecurity.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
John Hoke, Nike’s chief design officer, intimately understands how to move design from an object to a feeling. At the company over the past three decades, he has refined his approach to center around creating designs that serve wearers in practical yet unexpected ways, and that often redefine what sportswear can look like and do. Hoke often tells his team that “the goal is goosebumps”—to develop ideas so great that they can be physically felt.
Hoke’s role in Nike’s legacy of innovation runs deep. He joined the Beaverton, Oregon–based company in 1992, at age 28, after studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and working as a model-maker for the late architect Michael Graves. Hoke, who is dyslexic, considers drawing his first language, his way of articulating the reactions he has to the things he sees. Connecting images with emotions is his portal to new ideas, which he has realized across many forward-thinking projects, ranging from singlets made from recycled polyester and water bottles, produced for the 2000 Summer Olympics; to Space Hippie, a footwear collection inspired by life on Mars; to the 2020 Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT%, a shoe with a carbon-fiber plate that literally propels wearers forward. Even as Nike marks its 50th anniversary this year, Hoke has his sights set on the future, refusing to settle for what has worked in the past. Design, he believes, is a continual, iterative process of improvement.
On this episode, Hoke talks with Andrew about how physical movement amplifies the senses, design as an act of optimism, and why perfection is a trap.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Claudia Rankine cuts to the chase. She does not mince her words. The poet, essayist, playwright, and educator—whose recent body of work analyzes white supremacy in America—looks closely at its subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations, personal and systemic. Her forthright attention to the unspoken runs across three plays and six collections of poetry, in which Rankine works through subjects of tragedy and despair, maternity and motherhood, selfhood and individualism, and everyday instances of racial discrimination in ways that shrewdly illuminate the inner workings of American society. Never prescriptive, she leaves room for audiences to consider their own prejudices and privileges, and to understand more intimately where they come from and the systems in which they participate and belong.
Often, Rankine seems more interested in questions than answers, and in unpacking the thought processes implied by a given response. These inquiries are at the center of her 2019 New York Times Magazine essay “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked,” which details her experiences of talking with white men about race in airports and on airplanes. Some of these dialogues arise in Rankine’s play Help, too, which recently finished a monthlong run at The Shed in New York City. Her inquisitiveness also lies at the center of The Racial Imaginary Institute, an organization she co-founded in 2016 that prompts artists and institutions to consider their racialized positioning. For Rankine, too much is at stake to not have these kinds of conversations.
On this episode, Rankine talks with Spencer about why Americans tend to avoid talking about whiteness and white supremacy, racism in professional tennis, and what liminal spaces can reveal about white privilege.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Kenny Schachter has an insatiable appetite for all things art. The polymathic art dealer, curator, teacher, writer, critic, collector, and self-taught artist brings a Tasmanian Devil–level energy to all that he does, but always with great, arms-open passion and, even within his whirlwind of ideas and projects, deep focus. For good reason, he has become a sort of enfant terrible in the art world, someone who’s not afraid to speak his mind, and who doesn’t care about ruffling feathers or messing with the establishment. He pushes against the status quo, and happily so. Schachter is a believer in high culture as much as low, and brings little pretension to his craft, no matter the medium, even if considerable rigor underlies it. Often, he’s decidedly coy.
Schachter’s love of art is bona fide and lifelong. Not only did art prove a helpful outlet for him during a difficult childhood, but it has also blossomed into a way of growing closer to his family (particularly with his children, with whom he has mounted a series of inventive exhibitions). Schachter especially appreciates art for its ability to help him depict the time he’s living in. For him, art also serves as a form of cultural and personal commentary and as a mode of humor, often the self-deprecating variety. Schachter has become something of an NFT oracle, too, and will present his latest efforts in this space at next month’s Independent Art Fair (May 5–8) in New York, with Greece’s Allouche Benias gallery.
On this episode, Schachter talks with Andrew about art as a form of sense-making, the benefits of being an outsider, and why he employs humor in so much of his work.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
For Reginald Dwayne Betts—a poet, lawyer, and activist who supports and contributes to prison decarceration efforts—reading and writing have a mind-expanding power that never wanes. The author of three books of poetry and a memoir, his prose is intimate and raw. Even when he’s not writing about himself, Betts finds ways to build personal connections with his subjects for his award-winning work in The New York Times Magazine—subjects that have included the rapper Tariq Trotter of The Roots, the late actor Michael K. Williams, and Vice President Kamala Harris. He also brings a literary bent to his activism: In 2020, he founded Freedom Reads, a nonprofit that aims to build libraries inside 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across the country. The program recently installed its first sets of bookshelves at MCI-Norfolk, the Massachusetts prison where Malcolm X was incarcerated, and last month, in a public event at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., it presented the 500 titles that comprise each collection.
Betts, a graduate of Yale Law School (where he’s currently in a Ph.D. program), became an advocate for respecting the rights and dignity of the people who are in or who have gone through the American carceral system after experiencing it firsthand himself. Instead of resigning himself to the violence and dehumanizing conditions of incarceration, he turned his focus to books—many by Black writers and poets—that showed him the depth and richness of self-reflection, and that got him thinking about the stories he himself had to tell.
On this episode, Betts speaks with Spencer about the long-term impacts of his time behind bars, the current renaissance of prison writing, and the transformative act of giving people who are incarcerated access to literature and books.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Maggie Doyne, who co-founded the BlinkNow Foundation nonprofit at age 19, discusses how, over the past 13 years, she has developed a school, children’s home, health clinic, and women’s center in Surkhet, Nepal.
Michael Murphy believes in architecture that promotes connectivity, collectivity, and health, in the broadest sense of the term. As the founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group, a 14-year-old nonprofit architecture and design collective with main offices in Boston and Kigali, Rwanda, he creates buildings with the aim of aiding individuals and communities, and addressing complex issues—particularly ones exacerbated by politics and time.
In addition to hospitals and health centers around the world, MASS has created schools, public and private housing, farms, campuses, and other projects centered around healing and hope. This focus shines in some of the firm’s recent efforts, including MASS’s Restorative Design Justice Lab, which seeks to design decarceration, and its Covid-19 Design Response team, which provides resources to vulnerable populations, such as Indigenous communities and those in senior housing. “Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics,” an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt (on view through February 20, 2023) that MASS curated and designed, highlights how architecture can serve people in moments of crisis.
MASS’s work on memorials further illustrates the firm’s dedication to creating affecting architecture. The practice’s designs for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018) in Montgomery, Alabama; the Gun Violence Memorial Project (2019); and “The Embrace,” a sculpture created with artist Hank Willis Thomas that will rise from the Boston Common this year, offer visceral, multisensory experiences.
On this episode, Murphy talks with Spencer about creating a “Slow Space” movement, architecture as a storytelling device, and why the most successful memorials are those that offer tools for collective engagement.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
David Wallace-Wells, author of the best-selling book The Uninhabitable Earth and New York magazine’s editor-at-large, wields vivid language that makes people pay attention. But his writing isn’t hyperbole. Wallace-Wells’s clear-eyed, cinematic storytelling provides coherence and context around some of today’s most complex issues, from California wildfires to Covid-19. His writing demonstrates his special knack for synthesizing information and rare ability to draw conclusions in ways that offer viscerally felt, nuanced insights.
A large part of Wallace-Wells’s appeal stems from how he straddles two dimensions at once. He unpacks pressing topics by offering of-the-moment analysis while also considering the long-term consequences of such data. Late last year, for example, he wrote frequently about the Omicron variant’s impact—but also compared it to other pandemic data, and detailed unsettling projections about the variant’s protracted effects. In 2019, his New York piece on the wildfires in California traced their devastating toll; he also contextualized it, within the climate crisis, as a once-manageable occurrence that has evolved into a continual threat.
On this episode, Wallace-Wells talks with Andrew about society’s troubling capacity for normalization, drama as a means to stir people to climate action, and why—despite all of the above—he’s feeling optimistic for the future.
Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:
Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), is a man bursting with endless energy. Throughout his four-decade career, he has never seemed to run out of steam. He signed his first recording contract at 22, and has gone on to release more than 100 jazz and classical recordings, win nine Grammy Awards, author six books, and earn more than 40 honorary degrees. In 1987, Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center, which, following the initiative’s success, made it a formal part of the performing arts institution in 1996. The following year, his album Blood on the Fields, an oratorio about slavery, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Not even the pandemic could stop Marsalis from using music as a vessel for knowledge and expression. As New York went into lockdown last March, he accelerated JALC’s digital programming with initiatives including a weekly YouTube conversation series and a virtual edition of JALC’s high school jazz band competition. In August 2020, he released The Ever Fonky Lowdown, a horn-powered survey of the forces that divide people and a vision of how we might rise above them. Through it all, Marsalis has remained passionate about the power of his work. “Music is important,” he says, “because music, and all art, is reenactment. The reenactments exist to let you understand the meaning of things across time.”
On this episode, Marsalis speaks with Andrew about jazz as a metaphor for democracy, communicating through instruments, and how understanding music lends itself to understanding life.
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When Siri Hustvedt was 12 years old, she began reading 19th-century novels by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain that were given to her by her Norwegian mother, and soon developed a passion for literature. She found great satisfaction in how these stories expanded her mind with new ideas and realms beyond. At 13, precociously enough, she decided she wanted to become a writer. Her interest in developing what she calls a “flexibility of mind” led her to eventually reading and studying works in a wide range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. Through her essays, poems, fiction, and nonfiction over the past five decades, Hustvedt’s aim has become clear: to bring together perspectives that might help her—and those who read her work—see the world differently.
Hustvedt’s efforts to break down barriers and build a diversity of knowledge have steered her toward an array of topics. Upon moving from her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, to New York City in 1978 to attend Columbia University, from which she earned her Ph.D. in English literature, she worked as a waitress, a researcher for a medical historian, a model, and an artist’s assistant. She went on to write seven novels, including the international bestseller What I Loved (2004) and The Blazing World (2014), the latter of which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2014. Since 1995, Hustvedt has written extensively about art and what comes from looking deeply at it, unpacking works ranging from Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (1662–1664) to the photorealistic paintings of Gerhard Richter.
Often, Hustvedt’s subject matter comes to her because it hits close to home. In her 2010 book The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, she investigated the violent tremors that she first experienced in 2006 while delivering her father’s eulogy. Hustvedt (who with her husband, the novelist Paul Auster, has a daughter, the singer-songwriter Sophie Auster) has also long been interested in the peculiarities of motherhood, and more recently, the placenta, a subject she plans to explore at length in a future book.
On this episode, Hustvedt talks with Spencer about the mysteries and misunderstandings around gestation, maternity, and being a mother; books as friends; and the problems with putting up walls between disciplines.
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Throughout his life, Daniel Humm has constantly pushed himself to the edge. So when Covid-19 arrived, he understood the importance of a quick pivot. Forced to close Eleven Madison Park—his three-Michelin-star Manhattan restaurant, named No. 1 in the world in 2017—he had to lay off all of his staff. Facing bankruptcy, Humm reflected on the many food-related issues that the pandemic was heightening, including meat-production carbon emissions, food insecurity, and broken supply chains. The extremity of the situation gave him the courage to boldly transition Eleven Madison Park to an entirely plant-based menu when the restaurant reopened earlier this year, in June. It’s one of several ways that Humm is using food to shift perspectives, in the hopes that his approach will lead to environmental and health impacts far outside of the restaurant world.
Dogged determination and an inescapable internal call to follow his instincts are chief components of Humm’s successful three-decade-long career. After earning a Michelin star in his first executive chef position at age 24, for an inn in the Swiss Alps called Gasthaus zum Gupf, he helmed the kitchen at Campton Place in San Francisco, where he relocated to in 2003, and proceeded to hone his artful and intentional cooking style. Three years later, at the invitation of restaurateur Danny Meyer, Humm moved to New York to become the executive chef of Eleven Madison Park, which he now owns.
Recently, Humm has modified his cooking for a higher purpose. With Eleven Madison Park’s new dishes, for example, he has created a circular ecosystem in which the purchase of each dinner funds meals for New Yorkers in need. Earlier this year, he launched Eleven Madison Truck, which serves meals to food-insecure areas of New York in partnership with Rethink Food—a nonprofit, for which Humm serves as a co-founder, dedicated to creating more equitable food systems.
On this episode, Humm speaks with Spencer about cooking and hospitality as performance, why time is his most luxurious ingredient, and what he would say to New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, who recently wrote a cantankerous review of Eleven Madison Park’s updated menu.
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The poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, views her work as an urgent political act. Following in the footsteps of her father, who was a civil rights advisor and special counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Alexander has witnessed the sometimes exasperatingly slow pace of progress, particularly when it comes to racial equality, and the resoluteness required for the vital work of pressing on. She approaches each day as an opportunity to do as much as she can, with all she has.
Through her teaching, scholarship, and poetry, Alexander built the foundation for her role as a philanthropic leader. She has held professorships at the University of Chicago; Smith College; Yale University, where she worked for 15 years and chaired the African American studies department; and Columbia University. From 2015 to 2018, she served as director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, and last year, launched the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, a $250 million initiative that aims to rethink and transform America’s commemorative landscape.
Alexander’s consciousness and compassion are especially apparent in her writing, which often weaves together biography, history, and memory to potent effect. In articles for publications such as Time and The New Yorker, she has reflected, with great acuity, on racist violence in America. Her collection American Sublime (2005) and memoir, The Light of the World (2015), were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. At President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, she recited her optimistic, clear-eyed poem “Praise Song for the Day.”
On this episode, Alexander discusses the vast possibilities of social justice, talking with Spencer about using language to promote change, how monuments and memorials shape collective memory, and the profundity of grounding oneself in the present.
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Artist and designer Debbie Millman has been fascinated by the power of branding for most of her life. And as the host of the Design Matters podcast (which was recently translated into a book, out next month) and chair of the School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Branding program, she constantly has branding on her mind. For Millman, part of the allure of logos, identities, and marketing stems from the exercise of clearly and confidently expressing a purpose and meaning—a challenge that she has concurrently grappled with on a personal level. The parallels between aims in her work and life are no coincidence: Millman’s professional projects are often her way of searching for answers to life’s deepest questions.
Millman has long considered how design can reveal people’s innermost desires. She has worked at several prominent New York City agencies, including Sterling Brands, for which she served as chief marketing officer and president of its design division for 20 years, and was part of teams that created identities for brands such as 7Up, Burger King, Tropicana, and Twizzlers. She even moonlighted as the first-ever creative director of the pioneering hip-hop radio station Hot 97. Over the years, her career has helped her recognize the importance of slowing down, and of trusting that she doesn’t have to approach everything—writing, teaching, special projects, love—as if it’s her last chance to experience it.
On this episode, Millman describes her quest to feel comfortable in her own skin, talking with Spencer about the benefits of being a good listener, branding and marketing as ways to manufacture meaning, and why she doesn’t want to peak until the very end of her life.
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For curator and scholar Glenn Adamson, craft isn’t a quirky hobby that sits on the outskirts of contemporary culture. Rather, it’s a vital, timeless tool for teaching us about one another, and about humanity as a whole. This belief fuels his writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, which seek to unpack the many ways in which the age-old activity shapes our lives. Adamson’s work shows that craft is bigger than any single skillfully handmade object—each of which itself can serve as an important symbol of the human capacity for honing expertise over time—and influences countless aspects of society, from the Japanese tea ceremony to farming robots devised by Google’s parent company, Alphabet X. In this way, craft acts as a lens for understanding people and places across time.
Adamson, 49, has explored the virtues of craft throughout his two-decade-long career, which has included roles at Milwaukee’s Chipstone Foundation, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. In his 2018 book Fewer, Better Things, he positions craft as a means of connecting with fundamental issues and ideas (as opposed to those that hold only momentary or superficial relevance), and explains why taking the time to appreciate handmade objects from a maker’s or a user’s perspective holds particular spiritual and psychological value. Adamson’s account of the discipline in the United States, neatly laid out in his latest book, Craft: An American History (Bloomsbury), reveals how artisans—whose trade often includes people who are disempowered by their ethnicity, gender, or both—have been consistently suppressed throughout the nation’s history, but, paradoxically, are integral to many of its greatest achievements.
His latest endeavor takes a more forward-looking approach. “Futures,” an exhibition Adamson co-curated that opens in November at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. (on view through summer 2022), considers how craft can signal where we might be headed, and why we should be optimistic about the time to come. Over and over again, Adamson demonstrates how skilled making is about more than just beautiful objects. “Craft stands in for the whole idea of what it means to be human,” he says, “and why that matters.”
On this episode, Adamson discusses the various facets of skilled making, talking with Spencer about the value of hand-formed objects, the relationship between time and craft, and the discipline’s essential, often complicated role in the history of human progress.
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Trevor Paglen aspires to see the unseen. The artist explores the act of looking through various angles—such as how artificial-intelligence systems have been trained to “see” and categorize the world, or the disquieting sense of being “watched” by a security camera—and creates scenarios that frequently implicate viewers in the experience. At other times, he’ll take pictures of places that are typically kept far out of sight, including the rarely seen headquarters of America’s National Security Agency, or the Mojave Desert, home to numerous military facilities, prisons, and a former nuclear testing site. Paglen, who has a Ph.D. in geography from University of California, Berkeley, also thinks about the relationship between space and time, and how the associations a person makes while looking at something—be it an age-old landscape or a satellite in endless orbit around the Earth—are fleeting and constantly changing. By highlighting invisible frameworks that exist in the world, Paglen invites viewers to think about life’s inconspicuous, and often unsettling, realities.
Paglen, who is 47 and has studios in New York and Berlin, draws on science, technology, and investigative journalism to make his wide-ranging work. In one of his early projects, “Recording Carceral Landscapes” (1995–2004), he wore a concealed microphone and posed as a criminology student to document the interiors of California penitentiaries. For “The Last Pictures” (2012), he collaborated with materials scientists at M.I.T. to devise an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with a collection of 100 images, and launched it into space on a communications satellite for aliens to find. More recently, his viral digital art project and app “ImageNet Roulette” (2020), which allowed users to upload photos of their faces to see how A.I. might label them, horrified many users with racist, sexist, or overtly stereotypical results, leading ImageNet, a leading image database, to remove half a million images.
Beyond his art practice, Paglen continues his preoccupation with perception. He studies martial arts, surfs, and composes music—activities that require constant, intense awareness. It all stems from a heightened consciousness of, and interest in, the concept of observation that he’s carried for nearly his entire life. “We’re all trying to learn different ways of seeing,” he says.
On this episode, Paglen discusses his deep-seated fascination with perception, talking with Spencer about the impacts of surveillance, deserts as sites of secrecy, and the value of trying to perceive forces that seem impossible to see.
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When describing experiences, New York–based artist and author Maira Kalman almost always goes for the extremes: an instance can be at once stupid and smart, miserable and hopeful, sad and delighted. A bittersweet point of view forms the throughline of her work—which spans more than 30 books for adults and children, as well as performance, opera, film, and industrial and set design—and gives each project its distinct ability to encapsulate the reality of being human. Tragedy and beauty can, and will, she believes, appear out of nowhere. In both instances, it’s what one does with it that determines how the event will impact their life.
Kalman, 71, credits this sensibility to credits this sensibility to people and places of significance in her life, specifically to the early death of her husband, the celebrated graphic designer Tibor Kalman, and to her late mother, Sara Berman, in addition to her Jewish heritage and birthplace of Tel Aviv. In tandem with her practice, Kalman makes time to indulge in seemingly mundane activities, such as taking long walks, cleaning, and reading obituaries, which she sees as activators of life. Each gesture is a means for finding clarity in the midst of chaos.
On this episode, Kalman talks with Andrew about observation as a creative act, the allure of books, the importance of not thinking, and performing daily rituals as a means for staying sane.
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Kevin Beasley thinks a lot about objects. In particular, specific objects that relate to notions of American-ness and Blackness—and ones that are often linked, subtly or not, with violence. Whether with a Cadillac Escalade, a pair of Air Jordans, or an N.F.L. helmet, Beasley finds deep connections to each item he chooses to work with, rigorously studying their multifarious contexts, meanings, and histories. Happy to let artifacts sit in his New York studio for long periods of time, the 36-year-old artist allows them to slowly gestate in his mind until he feels ready to express whatever he has deciphered out of their nature. From there, he turns them into exquisite, alchemical works of art, from tightly packed “slab” sculptures—large, flat resin blocks that embody the density of the symbolic articles that comprise them—to evocative sound installations and performances.
Beasley’s prolonged approach isn’t mere research; it’s his way of making space to reflect, to pay more attention, and to grapple with the nuances of the complex, loaded subject matter that’s embedded in many of the things that permeate our everyday lives. For Beasley, unpacking subjects charged with underlying connotations is a necessary means for transformation. “You don’t have to fully understand what it is you’re dealing with,” he says. “It takes time. It takes a revisitation. And that’s okay, because that speaks very specifically to a process of learning and understanding.”
Beasley’s work often draws from his personal history, which has included growing up in admiration of the handiwork of his mechanic father, deejaying at house parties at Yale University, and attending annual family reunions in rural Virginia. It was at one such reunion, in 2011, when Beasley came across a cotton field and picked the plant for the first time—an eerie experience that was, as he considered his ancestors and enslaved peoples who once performed the act, all at once distressing, pleasurable, haunting, and illuminating. The following year, Beasley took his fascination with cotton further—and into the deep South. After finding and purchasing a mid-20th-century cotton gin motor on eBay, he drove from New Haven, Connecticut, to a farm in rural Alabama to collect the object. Beginning as part of an M.F.A. project at Yale, the motor would later evolve into an encased artwork, whirling and surrounded by microphones, inside a pristine, clear, soundproof box at the Whitney Museum of American Art—the potent centerpiece of the artist’s breakout exhibition “A View of a Landscape” (2018–2019). (The raw, rancorous noises the motor produced were pumped into an adjacent room that served as a listening gallery.) Later this year, Beasley will extend the project further with a monograph and double LP of the same name, which features sound contributions from artists, musicians, and writers such as Kelsey Lu, Jason Moran, and Fred Moten, whose tracks sample recordings that Beasley made of the churning machine.
On this episode, Beasley talks with Spencer about contemplating these particular objects, sound as a means for greater understanding, and the role of repetition in reshaping history.
For Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, processing the past is a constant, endless journey. She’d been thinking about race and reparations long before the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum last year, as both racism and African-American ancestry exist in her family history rooted in the American South, where she was born to country music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, in 1955. Cash channeled her anguish into “The Killing Fields,” a haunting single that reckons with the United States’s legacy of lynchings, and “Crawl into the Promised Land,” a blistering yet optimistic response to the tumultuous events of 2020. Last month, she released both tracks on a seven-inch limited-edition vinyl, the sales from which will benefit the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement, a nonprofit that raises awareness about the state’s history of racial injustice.
Over the last four decades, Cash, who now lives in New York, has established herself as one of the rare voices in popular music who sings from the uncut perspective of a grown woman, fraught with opinions, mixed emotions, and battle scars. With each album she releases (there are 14 to date), she seems to gain a deeper understanding of herself. After earning 11 number one hits on Billboard’s country music chart during the 1980s, Cash released Interiors (1990), a dark, reflective album that marked a departure from her commercial work. While country radio stations and her label all but ignored the record, she’s embraced the honest, deeply personal approach used to make it as her modus operandi ever since.
Her recent work is increasingly intimate: Cash confronts her Southern roots and grapples with her life as a wife, mother, and former country star in the 2014 album The River and The Thread; her 2018 album She Remembers Everything—released against the backdrop of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings and during the rise of the #MeToo movement—tackles the plight of women in America with songs about divorce, ingrained social hierarchies, and death, including a track about a boy killed by gun violence told from the viewpoint of his mother. She has also written articles for The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New York Times about subjects that matter to her, such as the need for country music artists to speak out in support of gun control. Eschewing any self-righteousness, these efforts, whether singing, songwriting, or prose, are her way of working through the complexities of life. “I have to keep showing up for the things I believe in,” she says, noting that she often feels like a fraud. “That’s part of being an artist. You come up against that, and you still show up, because you have to. The world needs it.”
On this episode, Cash discusses what it means to reckon with history, talking with Andrew about her long-standing work as an activist, the healing power of music, and continually revisiting the past as a means for personal and artistic evolution.
Growing up in the 1950s in the only Chinese family in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Billie Tsien always felt like an outsider. She would seclude herself in the shower of her family’s home’s master bathroom, behind closed doors, escaping into books for hours before her parents, who had originally moved to America from Shanghai to study at Cornell, would find her. Through this Tsien developed a deep understanding of the value of a rich interior life—a concept she has gone on to apply to her work at the New York–based architectural practice Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Partners (TWBTA), which she co-founded with her husband, Tod Williams, in 1986.
The ethereal craft inherent in TWBTA’s structures, which include parks, libraries, museums, and other people-focused places, emanates from Billie and Tod’s belief that architecture is an act of service, and an opportunity to create quiet moments where visitors can indulge in the simple yet powerful emotions that can be stirred when encountering beauty. When Tsien, now 72, reflects on her firm’s philosophy—which entails making buildings that transcend solutions, that respect the earth, and that are measured by the lives lived within them—it’s clear that she profoundly, even poetically, shapes each project’s awe-inspiring energy.
Tsien’s deliberate, unhurried methodology is apparent in everything she does. She advocates for listening and community engagement—a central part of her firm’s high-profile, often controversial public works, such as Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation (2012), Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art (2019), and Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center, which is slated to break ground this fall. Tsien and her staff spend time with the craftspeople who create many of their materials—including Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra, whose vibrant felt paintings grace the walls of New York’s David Rubenstein Atrium (2009), and Danish brick-makers whose product features on the facade of dormitories at Pennsylvania’s Haverford College (2012)—and select them according to the emotional responses they elicit. She gives the same focused attention to the holistic experience of a building as she does the handrails that will go inside it. When it comes to the planet, Tsien thinks buildings should embrace measurable ways to minimize their environmental footprints as well as immeasurable ones, such as the meandering pathways of the LeFrak Center (2013), in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, that invite people to appreciate the natural wonders around them.
On this episode, Tsien details the origins of and rationale behind her approach to the built environment, talking with Spencer about designing structures as containers for life, why history doesn’t unfold in a straight line, and architecture as both an honor and a responsibility.
For 37 years, Eileen Fisher has faithfully followed a vision: to create simple, timeless clothes for women that make it easy to get dressed. Soft-spoken, polite, and a self-described introvert, the 70-year-old Fisher is the unlikely CEO of an approximately $500 million fashion company that bears her name. The operation is owned by 42 percent of its largely female staff, and is praised for its longtime environmentalism and progressive business model. Headquartered in Irvington, New York, the brand embodies Fisher’s view of what a contemporary clothing business should be, and acts as her way of giving back to the world.
Though Fisher prioritized natural materials in her designs from the beginning, she didn’t fully understand how making clothes affects the planet until a 2012 trip to China, where she visited the company’s factories and saw the severity of the water crisis firsthand. Upon returning home, she created an internal “Sustainable Design Team,” composed of representatives from key departments, including supply-chain management and production, with the goal of minimizing their work’s environmental impact.
Today, the brand uses organic cotton and linen almost exclusively, and between 2015 and 2018, it offset all of its carbon emissions when transporting garments between its factories and distribution center. Seventy-nine percent of its wool is responsibly sourced or recycled. The company’s initiative that buys and sells vintage Eileen Fisher pieces, called Renew, has collected more than a million and a half garments, and Waste No More, an in-house studio that uses a felting machine to transform leftover fabric into home decor, accessories, and art, nods toward Fisher’s goal of creating a circular production system. She’s constantly looking for ways to reduce the brand’s environmental footprint. “The whole industry has a very long way to go,” Fisher says of fashion’s contribution to global economic and climate crises. But solving the problem, she adds, is a “huge opportunity.”
On this episode, Fisher describes her efforts to build a clothing business that serves women and the environment, talking with Andrew about collaboration as a preferred modus operandi, solving the fashion industry’s pollution problem, and the remarkable effects of staying true to one’s vision, and to oneself.
Last year, after more than three decades of practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga, Eddie Stern found himself wondering if he should continue in the discipline. He’d amassed a considerable following through the classes of his New York yoga studios (with celebrity students such as Madonna; Gwyneth Paltrow; and Mike D, of the Beastie Boys), authored two books, launched a successful app with Moby and the alternative-medicine advocate Deepak Chopra, and lectured around the world. But issues within the industry have loomed large: The Western yoga scene—with its high-priced classes, stadium-size festivals, “rock star” yogis, and self-aggrandizing instructors—trouble him. They distort yoga from its origins, he believes, imposing false narratives onto participants. Meanwhile, in the era of #MeToo, multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against his peers—including the late Pattabhi Jois, under whom he studied for 18 years—have brought about a reckoning in the community.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Stern began giving classes over Zoom, a format he found conducive to creating the personal, noncompetitive, altruistic side of yoga that initially attracted him to the practice. He soon discovered his passion for teaching all over again.
Stern’s dedication to yoga is rooted in a desire to understand who he is, which is apparent in each step of building the life he currently leads. His ninth-grade English teacher challenged him to contemplate his identity and purpose, which he explored early on by hanging out in New York’s 1980s punk music scene, skateboarding, and taking psychedelic drugs. When a co-worker at a record store introduced him to yoga, Stern quickly saw that the practice was a direct line to the insight and self-realization he longed for. Eager to immerse himself in the discipline, he moved to India, where he spent nearly two decades, on and off, studying with Jois, who had developed and popularized the vinyasa style of yoga known as Ashtanga.
Jois also, as Stern acknowledges on this episode of Time Sensitive, abused some of his female students. But the sense of self Stern drew from being close to the guru, coupled with a fear for his own survival, caused him to remain largely silent until now. “Fear doesn’t lead toward treating people well,” Stern says. “Not just in accordance with yoga principles, but with human principles.” Today, he’s using what he’s learned from this dark experience to help inform how he approaches instructing his own students: as spiritual friends, who learn and grow together with their teacher.
On this episode, Stern describes his profound experiences with the yogi tradition, talking with Spencer about the beauty of breathing and the body’s natural rhythms, yoga as practice of selfless concern for others, the problem of fear, and how slowing down shifts our relationship with ourselves.
Simon Critchley has seen his share of accidents. In his younger years, he damaged his hands while working in manufacturing plants, and ruined his hearing by rehearsing with a punk band in spaces with subpar acoustics. At 18, he suffered significant memory loss, and most recollections from his childhood in rural England temporarily disappeared. The experience of forgetting, Critchley realized, was something he could make useful: It gave him a clean slate, and the freedom to fill in the blanks however he wanted.
So when he entered the University of Essex 1982, Critchley threw himself into his studies, and eventually discovered teaching philosophy as a means to light a fire under people, helping them strip away distractions so that they can really think, and develop a voice and structure to express what comes up in the process. It’s an approach that informs how the philosopher currently works with his students at the New School for Social Research in New York, and how he tackles his own output, nearly four decades in the making.
This slow, purposeful manner also allows Critchley, now 60 and living in Brooklyn, to continually explore the possibilities of what he is becoming, resulting in highly personal musings on subjects as varied as life itself. His first book, The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992), took a controversial stance on the forces driving the work of one of his favorite philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas. His writing on humor, devoted to its darkest and lesser-understood aspects, stems from his passion for stand-up comedy. He’s also written about the power of the shape-shifting musician David Bowie, whom he has revered since first glimpsing the artist on the British TV show Top of the Pops at age 12, and continues to dabble in song-making himself: Critchley spent part of the pandemic working on a new single, “Eat Your Funky Dasein”—a riff on a saying by the French philosopher Jacques Lacan—with his long-time collaborator John Simmons, and released it at the end of the summer. Each project is about a commitment to form. “You have to be bold and take risks,” Critchley says. “As you get older and you’ve done more of it, you can begin to let that go where it goes.” For him, finding a clarity of space from which to work is a lifelong endeavor.
On this episode, Critchley’s constant re-centering of himself to look at the world through a philosophical lens shines through. He discusses with Andrew how disappointment can serve as a source of creativity, why humor is an act of philosophical reflection, and writing as a form of improvisation.
New York–based jewelry and object designer Monique Péan sees fossils and extraterrestrial materials as portals to another time, space, and place. Pyritized dinosaur bones, woolly mammoth tooth roots, meteorites, and lunaites are among her work’s mediums. She sources these from remote locations—including the Arctic Circle, where she located fossils with Native Alaskan Inupiat and Yupik tribes, and on Easter Island, where that site’s aboriginal Polynesian inhabitants helped her hand-carve cosmic obsidian, found on local terrain—and then transforms them into striking, sculptural works of art.
Recently, Péan began working on a larger scale, expanding her practice to sculpture and furniture. One of her first pieces in this vein, a bronze vessel incorporating part of a rare meteorite, is included in “Objects: USA 2020,” a forthcoming exhibition at New York’s R & Company gallery (now opening on February 16, 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic), curated by Glenn Adamson, Abby Bangser, Evan Snyderman, and James Zemaitis. Péan wants viewers to experience the wonder she feels when holding a piece of the universe in her hands: a transportive, calming energy that signals the vastness of deep time—and illuminates her role in harnessing it.
Péan traces her draw toward these specimens to her younger sister, Vanessa, who died in a car accident at age 16. The loss prompted her, then in her mid-20s (she is now 39), to approach life with urgency and intention. She quit her job as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and, a year later, in 2006, launched her eponymous jewelry line. Each piece is, in a way, a memorial to her only sibling. They’re also a means for the designer to explore the origins of life, and to express not only herself but also gratitude toward the planet: Péan donates a portion of the proceeds from every accessory sold to Charity: Water, a nonprofit that provides clean drinking water to communities in need, and avoids using materials that require mining, opting for antique diamonds and recycled gold or platinum instead. The ancient materials she uses are found lying on the Earth’s surface, collected by simply picking them up off of the ground, and in Péan’s hands, they’re turned into wearable reminders of natural phenomena.
On this episode, Péan details how she came to understand time through geology, talking with Spencer about her fascination with fossils, rocks, and meteorites; her profound experiences working with indigenous peoples to locate age-old materials; how her Haitian-Jewish background has shaped her worldview; and the ways in which her jewelry pays tribute to her late sister.
Artist Dan Colen built Sky High Farm in the same way all his ideas are realized: intuitively, and with the faith to see it through. A 40-acre self-sustaining ecosystem in New York’s Hudson Valley, the farm helps underserved communities by donating everything it produces to local food banks. Since 2011, Colen and his team have given away more than 70 tons of organic vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat.
As the pandemic exposes the urgency of the farm’s raison d’être—spotlighting food insecurity and small-scale farming—Colen has sought new avenues to give back. This past August, he launched a Go Fund Me to double its production, scale up distribution, and increase its donation capacity by buying more food from other regional farmers. He’s also been working on a partnership with concept shop Dover Street Market—a collection of naturally tie-dyed, vintage-sourced T-shirts, hoodies, hats, and bandanas printed with the logos and slogans of the farm’s partners—and funneling the proceeds to farm beneficiaries. When the merchandise promptly sold out, Colen, a former skateboarder, realized fashion was an effective tool for spreading his message, particularly with a young, engaged audience. This fall, he unveiled the first in a yearlong series of covetable collaborations, created pro bono by 12 brands, including Awake NY, Noah, and Supreme. All profits will go toward running the farm.
Colen, who’s represented by the Gagosian and Lévy Gorvy galleries in New York, and Massimo De Carlo in Milan, bought the plot of land nearly a decade ago after moving upstate, which gave him the space, access to nature, and the sense of freedom he needed at the time: He’d just gotten sober, and cultivating the land was an opportunity to do something bigger than himself. Colen long struggled to understand his draw to the property. But after nearly a decade, as he says on this episode of Time Sensitive, he’s come to see it as an extension of his creative practice: making things to alter perceptions, or to act as a mirror. Like his art—which varies in style and often employs perishable materials such as flowers, feathers, and chewing gum—the farm is an inquiry into ephemerality and slow, constant change, a canvas for Colen to work out experiences that made him the person he is today.
On this episode, Colen recounts the circuitous journey that brought him to the farming life, speaking with Andrew about Sky High Farm’s efforts to combat food insecurity, how skateboarding introduced him to art, his profound relationship with the artists Ryan McGinley and the late Dash Snow, and the wide-ranging body of work he has created while grappling with life’s big questions.
To make her namesake womenswear line, New York–based designer Angel Chang had to forget everything she knew about fashion. Her label’s clothing is made using age-old techniques developed by China’s indigenous Miao and Dong ethnic minority tribes, whose procedures are at risk of disappearing because a younger generation has, in recent years, largely been indifferent to learning them. Chang, who was born in central Indiana to Chinese immigrants, first encountered Guizhou Province’s garment-making methods while visiting the Shanghai Museum, where she saw traditional costumes—vivid, elaborately detailed attire akin to haute couture—and spent the next 10 years developing a supply chain to make them available to a wider audience. She tracked down artisans (many of them grandmothers) in far-flung villages, learned Chinese, and even moved to the region, immersing herself in its way of life. There she discovered a distinctive relationship with time—one that depends on nature in lieu of a clock—that informs the slow, faithful process by which her clothes are constructed.
Chang never set out to run a sustainable fashion label. But the system she created, which involves waiting six months for cotton seeds to grow and a weaving process that yields barely 10 feet of fabric a day, produces zero-carbon clothing. Each piece, from “seed to button,” as she puts it, is manufactured within a 30-mile radius, without the use of electricity or chemicals. It’s too complicated for fashion companies to become “sustainable,” Chang says on this episode of Time Sensitive; they need to build new supply chains from the ground up. The one she devised serves as a model, even a noble, alternative to fast fashion.
On this episode, Chang describes the journey of patience and persistence that forged the infrastructure for her brand, talking with Spencer about persuading high fashion houses to preserve these traditional garment-making techniques; the prolonged, enlightening process of befriending Chinese artisans; harnessing wit and WeChat to build supply chains for her collection; and why indigenous knowledge is key to addressing climate change.
Asked how the coronavirus pandemic has affected his relationship with time, Daniel Boulud chokes up. The New York–based French chef—who owns 13 restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Daniel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the fast-casual café Épicerie Boulud—laments the ways that Covid-19 has uprooted his staff, suppliers, and customers, deeming it the worst experience of his five-decades-long career.
The response reveals a defining trait of the ardent chef, who cares deeply not only for his personnel, but about everything his work encompasses. At 65, Boulud continues to derive his energy from perfecting his craft: reading old French cookbooks, experimenting with his team in the test kitchen, embracing the spontaneity of making food for someone on the fly. When the coronavirus shut down New York’s restaurants this past March, Boulud turned his white-tablecloth flagship inside out, providing takeout and food service on the sidewalk of East 65th Street for patrons, and through converting Épicerie Boulud’s Bowery location into a prep kitchen for Citymeals, he's been helping feed first responders and elderly and food-insecure New Yorkers. Now, as New York officially begins its return to indoor dining, he's introducing Boulud Sur Mer, a pop-up environment designed by architect Stephanie Goto that reimagines Daniel’s interior, nodding to the South of France while elegantly incorporating safety protocols. The chef perks up when discussing Le Pavillion, the seafood restaurant he’s opening next year, a project he sees as a way to contribute to the regeneration of a city he loves after a harrowing period of downtime. His work transcends the kitchen: For Boulud, his legacy isn’t so much about what he’s accomplished, but about how he’s helping others.
His profound interest in the wide-ranging potential of food is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that Boulud is not only a chef, but a restaurateur. Work beckons constantly, as he points out in this episode of Time Sensitive, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. It’s all an extension of himself. His balanced, steady work ethic has enabled him to perpetually grow while maintaining consistency and standing the test of time.
On this episode, Boulud’s generous spirit shines through as he details his journey to culinary success. He talks with Spencer about growing up on a farm near Lyon, France, that produced everything his family put on the table; how a “grande dame” facilitated his entry into fine dining; learning about food, mentorship, and entrepreneurship from several legendary chefs; and the humbling satisfaction of seeing his life’s work come full circle.
Tom Kundig brings a refreshingly laid-back, aw-shucks, go-with-the-flow attitude to an industry that seems, on the whole, largely to lack that kind of demeanor. Architects tend to be a rather uptight, perfectionist breed. Not Kundig, an experimental, hands-on Seattle-based practitioner, who, though he appreciates details and makes incredibly immaculate, wondrously conceived designs, also has a fondness for the utilitarian, the everyday, the experimental, the imperfect. His elegant buildings, which range from headquarters to wineries to cabins in the woods, stand out for their balance of heft and lightness, material and form, nature and industry, and craft and tech wizardry.
Kundig’s background as a mountain climber no doubt has something to do with all of this: Climbing is inherently unpredictable, putting one at the mercy of the elements, often under extreme conditions. There are pragmatic tools that can be brought to both climbing and architecture, but in the end, as Kundig himself points out on this episode of Time Sensitive, it’s how one prepares for the journey—and then handles and responds to it in the moment—that ultimately results in a successful climb or construction. For him, both are adventures in problem-solving and intimate conversations with the natural world. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Kundig grew up in eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and Southern British Columbia, and it shows in both his work and his personality. Not only because that region is where a bulk of the projects of his firm, Olson Kundig, are located, but because he brings a poetic sensibility and astute understanding of climate and nature to everything he does.
On this episode, Kundig’s open-minded, wabi-sabi energy rings loud and clear. He discusses with Spencer his early years as a climber; his incredible ascent in architecture, starting with an opportunity to work in Alaska; his profound learnings from his mentor, the sculptor Harold Balazs; and his deep passions for, among other things, wine, Japanese design, and hot rods.
Over the past decade—and especially in the last year—the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has swiftly risen to become one of the most prominent African voices in art. At age 32, he has already exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney, on Cockatoo Island (his work “No Friend But the Mountains” is currently on view there through June 8, though that date may change because of the coronavirus pandemic), as well as at the 2019 Frieze Sculpture presentation at Rockefeller Center in New York and the Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He’s created large-scale public installations around the world, including in Milan (with the Trussardi Foundation, also in 2019) and Athens (during Documenta 14, in 2017). Mahama’s work has also been shown at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester (also in 2019), the Norval Foundation in Cape Town (yet again in 2019), and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2015). He is represented by the highly respected White Cube gallery. The Africa Report, a Paris-based news magazine that focuses on African politics and economics, recently named Mahama one of the 100 most influential Africans today. In addition to his art-making, he is the founder of an artist-run nonprofit cultural institution and exhibition space, the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), which opened a year ago (yes, also in 2019) in Tamale, a city in the north of Ghana.
Central to Mahama’s inspiration is a specific material: jute sacks. Working with a team of collaborators to repurpose the burlap bags, which are traditionally used to transport cocoa beans, he sews together installations that range from wall- or room-size to monumental, often draping the fabric on, around, and over prominent architectural sites. Though his pieces have often been compared to the “wrap” work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, that is not necessarily an apt analogy, or at least it’s just a surface-level one. While similar in scale and scope to Christo’s ambitious environmental artworks, Mahama’s creations, like his overall practice, are socially oriented and focused on concerns such as labor, migration, globalization, and economic exchange.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Mahama discusses with Spencer his fascination with jute sacks as a material; his views on “Ghanaian time” and Africa’s global influence; his unorthodox upbringing (he grew up among nine siblings and with a polygamous father who had four wives, and was sent to boarding at age 5); and his dreams for the SCCA.
Julia Watson is really into TEK. Not necessarily the Silicon Valley variety of tech, but rather traditional ecological knowledge. An anthropologist, environmentalist, activist, and landscape designer, Watson has become a leading researcher of indigenous communities, closely studying the vast implications of their centuries-old (in certain cases, millennia-old) innovations. In the face of today’s climate crisis, Watson’s new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (Taschen), a culmination of years of research in 18 countries around the globe, is poised to become something of a bible for a growing design movement that’s focused on harnessing nature-based technologies and better understanding how we can all live in closer harmony with the earth.
Born in Australia, Watson studied landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she focused on eco-technologies and preservation of sacred spaces. Currently, she teaches urban design at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Planning and Preservation, as well as at Harvard, and runs her own design studio that’s oriented toward the practice of “rewilding.”
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Watson speaks with Andrew about her deep research into various indigenous communities, the symbiotic relationship between culture and nature, her perspective on the recent Australian bushfires, and more.
Since establishing the Pioneer Works nonprofit cultural center in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood in 2013, artist Dustin Yellin has slowly grown the place into a powerhouse hub at the nexus of art, technology, music, and science (with literature and food sprinkled in). Like the beautifully complex glass sculptures he creates, Pioneer Works is a richly layered mishmash. Consider this spring’s lineup of programs: One night this April, there’s a performance by the Ghanaian electronic and rap artist Ata Kak; another night, there’s a “Supper Club” dinner featuring traditional Japanese home cooking by chef Emily Yuen and owner Maiko Kyogoku of the New York City restaurant Bessou; on May 2, there’s the institution's annual benefit, this year co-chaired by Austin and Gabriela Hearst, and honoring poet, essayist, playwright Claudia Rankine, as well as economist Marilyn Simons and her billionaire hedge-fund manager husband, James. Currently on display in the galleries is a performance set by artist Jaimie Warren (through April 12) and a showing of four Japanese avant-garde films from the 1960s and ’70s (through April 19). This is to say nothing of the classes, roundtables, and residencies Pioneer Works offers, or its book-publishing arm.
Pioneer Works’s eclectic, wide-ranging buffet of intellectual offerings is pure Yellin. With boundless energy, enigmatic bravado, and a collaborative spirit, he has built a multifaceted community not unlike what Andy Warhol had at The Factory from the ’60s to ’80s—only it’s somewhat more institutional and professionalized, and with a new executive director, Eric Shiner (formerly of White Cube gallery, Sotheby’s, and the Andy Warhol Museum), at the helm. As Yellin points out on this episode of Time Sensitive, maintaining a certain scale and intimacy at Pioneer Works is essential to him, with future growth potentially coming from building satellite locations in other cities. As he sees it, the institution could become the next Stanford, Harvard, or MIT Media Lab—a new outlet for education, an incubator that brings together the best and brightest minds on earth in a fresh way, a place to foster the shapers of the future.
On the episode, Andrew speaks with Yellin about everything from his wide-ranging dreams for Pioneer Works; to his ambitious plans for “The Bridge,” a large-scale monument to the end of oil; to his harrowing memories of Hurricane Sandy.
Nathan Myhrvold is no ordinary chef. With two master’s degrees (one in mathematical economics, the other in geophysics and space physics) and a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics, he is also a technologist who did postdoctoral research with Stephen Hawking. From 1986 to 1999, Myhrvold was the chief strategist and chief technology officer at Microsoft, where he worked closely with Bill Gates on future planning and developing the company’s software. (During this time, he also co-authored Gates’s 1995 best-seller, The Road Ahead; in 1999, at age 40, he retired from the company.) Now, as the CEO of the firm Intellectual Ventures, which he co-founded in 2000, he develops and licenses intellectual property. The company owns upwards of 30,000 assets, nearly 900 of which were invented by Myrhvold himself. So where does cooking come in? Long a gastronomer and foodie (before the latter term was even a thing), Myhrvold began to pursue his passion for cuisine early on. During his Microsoft years (with Gates’s blessing), he took time off to attend the La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy, and later even apprenticed part-time at Rover's restaurant in Seattle. For a time, he was the “chief gastronomic officer” of the Zagat Survey.
It wasn’t until about a decade ago, though, that things really took off for Myhrvold on the food front. In 2011, he established a full-fledged publishing platform with the release of his six-volume Modernist Cuisine, an encyclopedic whirlwind into the science of contemporary cooking. A behemoth of a book, at 2,438 pages, it took about three years to produce, with several dozen people involved. Subsequent iterations have followed: Modernist Cuisine at Home (2012), The Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013), and Modernist Bread (2017). A Modernist Pizza book is currently in the works. The series has become a cult favorite, highly respected by many of the world’s top chefs, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. Especially remarkable about the project—aside from the inventive recipes—is the hyperrealist, meticulously executed photography. Many of the pictures are made through a “cutaway” technique involving machinery to that slices pots, pans, and ovens in half to offer a literal inside look into the processes behind the dishes—a pork roast atop embers, say, or broccoli steaming in a pot. It is through these images that Myhrvold's many talents and interests in science, food, and art collide, and to potent effect.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer speaks with Myhrvold about his journey into sous vide cooking, the problems he sees with the Slow Food movement, why food photography has never been considered a high art, and more.
Since launching her eponymous label in 2015, the Uruguayan-born, New York–based designer Gabriela Hearst has become known for her sincere, forward-thinking approach to sustainability; her slow-growth business ethos; the long waiting lists for her limited-production handbags; her impeccable tailoring; and her high-quality collections that, season after season, have consistently been hailed as critics’ favorites. For her, sustainability isn’t just a buzzword or an item to tick off a list; it’s something essential and, most importantly, actionable.
Last year, Hearst presented the industry’s first-ever carbon-neutral runway show. A collaboration with Bureau Betak and EcoAct, the presentation was done completely sans blow dryers, straighteners, or curling irons, models were sourced locally, and a carbon-offset fund for the energy-related production costs was donated to the Hifadhi-Livelihoods Project in Kenya. Hearst regularly uses deadstock in her collections. She recently made all of the brand’s packaging biodegradable and compostable, and also tweaked her supply chain to ship by boat instead of by air freight. Hearst’s new eco-conscious store in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, designed by Norman Foster, includes custom furniture made from a tree that fell in a storm and herringbone oak flooring reclaimed from a military barracks. Her preferred word for sustainability? Accountability.
Raised on a ranch that has been in her family for six generations—which her father bequeathed to her in 2011 when he passed away—Hearst, early in her life, became interested in where things come from and how they’re made, and in understanding the true value of utility, namely that making well-constructed things that stand the test of time matters. Now, in the age of climate change, her less-but-better mindset has become all the more relevant and pressing. Creating timeless, long-lasting clothing, she says, is the only reasonable (and yes, sustainable) way forward. Eschewing a trend-driven outlook in favor of one that’s about creating fewer, better items that her customers will keep forever, Hearst continues to be informed by her upbringing on the farm. It’s an approach that appears to be working: The company had a turnover of between $15 and $20 million in sales revenue in 2018, and last year LVMH Luxury Ventures bought a minority stake in it (the majority is owned by Hearst and her husband and business partner, John Augustine “Austin” Hearst, a TV and film producer and media executive who is the grandson of William Randolph Hearst).
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Hearst speaks with Spencer about everything from her youth on a ranch in rural Uruguay, to her personal definitions of sustainability and luxury, to her roundabout path to becoming a fashion designer, to her mother’s Zen Buddhist teachings.
In both his work and his life, Tony Fadell constantly imagines Version 2.0 (if not 3.0, or 4.0 and beyond). On a mission to shape the future through forward-thinking design, engineering, invention, and investing, he is probably most widely recognized for both founding the smart-home products company Nest and for his instrumental involvement in developing the iPod. Through his newest venture, the appropriately coined advisory firm Future Shape, Fadell lends his expertise to promising entrepreneurs and companies, funding and advising a range of environmentally minded startups, such as the biologically produced leather-maker Modern Meadow, semiconductor company Phononic, and micro-LED developer Rohinni.
After starting his career at General Magic, an early spin-off of Apple, Fadell moved to the electronics behemoth Philips and then, eventually, to Apple, where he started in 2001 and was, from 2006 to 2008, on the executive team that created the iPhone. In 2010, he founded Nest, which Google acquired less than three years later for $3.2 billion. Having played a crucial role in helping many of the most important technological Silicon Valley innovations of the 2000s come to fruition, Fadell has since decamped for Paris, where he now runs Future Shape. Recently, he spent an entire year in Bali with his family.
Rebooting and welcoming change has been a constant thread throughout Fadell’s career, and also in his personal life. While he’s known for his extreme work ethic—early in his career, he famously had a bed in his office—Fadell recognizes the need to take time off in order to explore, and to create space for inner growth outside of the workplace. On this episode, Fadell and Andrew Zuckerman discuss his youth in Detroit; the perils of screen addiction; the external pressures of a career-oriented culture; and paving the way for a healthier society, online and off.
Suketu Mehta tells a story about pinkie fingers, dancing and kissing. It is as confounding as it sounds. And utterly heartbreaking, too. In his assertive and essential new book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto—as well as on this episode of Time Sensitive—he describes the scene: Friendship Park, a half-acre fence on the U.S.-Mexican border. A Mexican man living in the U.S., who hasn’t seen his mother in 17 years, and has been working hard to send money back to her all that time, at last reunites with her at that fateful fence. But because of its thick and rigid design, he can’t see her clearly. Through the holes in the fence, mother and son can only fit stick their pinkies, wagging them back and forth, gently touching, caressing, connecting—but only for a few moments. This small act serves as a greater metaphor about immigration, one with vast implications and consequences, and not just in America but around our world today.
Mehta, a Calcutta-born, New York–based journalist and N.Y.U. professor who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2005 novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, is full of stories like this one. (The dancing, kissing pinkies, however, may be among his most gut-wrenching and tear-inducing tales.) As a reporter and writer, Mehta is slow and methodical in his approach, and it shows in his rich and varied body of work, which spans decades and is written with the elegance and grace of a poet. A sort of modern-day Walt Whitman, he has the rare ability to home in on deeply personal human stories and craft narratives around them that reveal larger truths about culture, politics, and society.
On this episode, Mehta speaks with Spencer Bailey about his challenging high school years as an Indian immigrant growing up in Queens, his belief in how the future of democracy “rests on storytelling,” and the importance of considering historical time frames when thinking about today’s contentious immigration debates.
The Dutch-born trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort, founder of the Paris-based consultancy Trend Union, has a knack for being ahead of the curve. In fact, she kind of is the curve, the rare mind who—with her sharp eye, wide-ranging tastes, and quick wit—is able to situate herself within past, present, and future. She astutely understands historical markers of time and often predicts, with surprising precision, what the Next Big Thing is. Working for clients across a variety of industries, from fashion and textiles, to interiors and hospitality, to cars and cosmetics, to retail and food, Edelkoort travels the world studying the subtle market shifts that shape our lives. A sociocultural omnivore with a deep design knowledge, she’s the dean of the Hybrid Design Studies program at Parsons School of Design, where she’s spearheading a new M.F.A. in textile studies.
Since founding Trend Union, in 1975, Edelkoort has gained a cult following as a sustainability-minded soothsayer. For more than three decades, corporate leaders have gravitated toward her, as one would a shaman, for strategic, big-picture advice. In the late ’80s, she started giving her now-infamous trend presentations, in which she unpacks, interprets, and predicts the market movements developing before us. An archaeologist of the modern day, Edelkoort is part curator, part sociologist, digging up vast amounts of information, much of it visual, so as to infer, intuit, and map out complex explanations of the now. Her findings aren’t fanciful, even if on the surface they may appear to be high-minded. They are indeed quite often pragmatic, if not also paradigmatic. Sometimes—as was the case with her 2015 “Anti-Fashion Manifesto,” a treatise against the wastefulness and greed of the global fashion industry—they also tend to be refreshingly direct and pointed.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Edelkoort speaks with Spencer Bailey about a movement back toward the farm and nature; the notion of animism (i.e., that a soul is embedded in everything); combatting fear in a time of prolific fear-mongering; and her reasonably optimistic belief in a more collaborative future.
Craig Robins strongly believes that all good things take time. Since launching his vast real estate enterprise Dacra in 1987, at age 24, he has, with this ideology in mind, become one of Miami’s shrewdest mover-shakers. Intimately involved in the revitalization of South Beach in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Robins helped restore—and save from demolition—several now-prized Art Deco properties, including The Webster (designed in 1939 by Henry Hohauser as a hotel and now home to Laure Hériard Dubreuil’s flagship fashion boutique). From there he began to quietly shift his focus across Biscayne Bay, to the Design District neighborhood, unveiling the beginnings of his ambitious plans in 2002. A visionary thinker, tinkerer, and doer, Robins also got involved in bringing the Art Basel fair to Miami in the early aughts and in 2005 co-founded the Design Miami collectible design fair.
Thinking about things slowly and holistically, Robins—unlike so many others in his line of work—does not follow a build-it-cheap-and-fast-and-flip-it edict. His is a long-haul, less-but-better vision. Robins cares deeply about the urban fabric and the textures of the city, about architectural serendipity and surprise, about moments of wonder and beauty and joy. A finger-on-the-pulse master of cultivating culture, he has thoughtfully constructed a synergistic amalgam of art, architecture, design, dining, fashion, and urban planning within the Design District, a New Urbanism–infused neighborhood that seems to subtly morph every month, if not every week, bit by bit. While it hasn’t been without its detractors and naysayers, the Design District clearly offers an alternative, human-scale approach to city building. Now home to standouts such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (which opened in its new location in late 2017) and the Pharrell Williams–owned Swan restaurant and Bar Bevy, the Design District is beginning to show its potential not as just a luxury shopping mall—though it’s certainly that, too—but as a dynamic cultural hub.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Robins talks with Spencer Bailey about his big-picture vision, his early career helping rejuvenate South Beach, his forward-thinking approach to bolstering Miami culture and his obsession with river rafting and disconnecting in nature.
Christian Madsbjerg makes sense. Literally and figuratively, in all the definitions of the phrase. With roots in philosophy and political science, Madsbjerg brings a refreshingly human approach to his work as an author, screenwriter, professor, entrepreneur, and business advisor. In the face of some of the greatest concerns of our time—the climate crisis, technological upheaval—he challenges assumptions and advocates for reflection, deep reading, single-tasking, solitude, and yes, slowness. Though he doesn’t abide by the “digital detox” method, Madsbjerg does operate without a smartphone.
While Madsbjerg is not immune to the contemporary swell of panic and anxiety, his approach is calm, methodical, and sometimes humorous. The co-founder of ReD Associates—a strategy and consulting firm that takes an interdisciplinary approach to advising big companies through observation, social science, and problem solving—the multifaceted Madsbjerg is an astute observer of human behavior. The author of Sensemaking: What Makes Human Intelligence Essential in the Age of the Algorithm and co-author of The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Hardest Business Problem, he is in the process of writing a book called How to Pay Attention and a comedic screenplay about immigration in the U.S., tentatively titled H1B. He also teaches social science, social theory, and discourse analysis at the Parsons School of Design at The New School.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Madsbjerg speaks to Andrew Zuckerman about the importance of long-view historical research, the problematic nature of “design thinking,” the deep value of a liberal arts education, and the relevance today of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical perspectives on time and technology.
Many people turn to spiritual professionals such as astrologists and tarot card readers to help answer life’s most essential and cosmic questions. Eric Standop—international speaker, advisor, author, and facial diagnostics expert—guides people to look inward through a different method: by examining their faces. Through analyzing facial characteristics and behaviors, Standop informs his clients of their talents, emotions, personality types, and overall health.
No stranger to self-doubt and career burnout, Standop spent years seeking fulfillment through a rollercoaster career of long hours and travel in the entertainment industry. Early on, after starting out as a radio and television speaker, and then moving to a role in cinema management, Standop began to suffer from fatigue and skin irritations. He decided to take a six-month break before reentering the corporate arena, this time as a P.R. director in computer gaming. Later, he transitioned to high-pressure positions in events and marketing. The stress would again take its toll. One morning, he awoke to find that he had lost all feeling in his arms and legs. Determined to turn his health around, Standop decided to backpack through South Africa. There he encountered a face reader for the first time, and became fascinated with the practice. Standop would go on to learn from masters on three different continents.
While we all communicate through facial behavior and recognition on some level, becoming an expert face reader takes significant time and dedication, as with developing any other skill. After several years of gathering information, both about himself and about his practice, Standop set out to teach others. Now, he coaches a wide variety of clients, from business executives to law enforcement officials to even—every once in a while, and only when pressed—babies. Standop’s first book, Read The Face: Face Reading for Success in Your Career, Relationships, and Health (St. Martin’s), came out this fall.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Standop and Andrew Zuckerman go deep into the origins of face reading, the function of smell in medical diagnostics, the ups and downs of his circuitous career, and how he ultimately found inner happiness.
Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, the artist Rashid Johnson had a “mixed bag”—racially, at least—of close friends. There were, he says, “four black guys, two Asian guys, two Jewish guys, a white English guy.…” They still keep in touch today via a text chain. This perspective, combined with the one ingrained in him by his Ph.D. history professor mother, who introduced him from a young age to the works of 20th-century African American writers such as Amiri Baraka, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, and his tinkerer father, who owned a Wicker Park electronics shop, led to a deep, contextualized curiosity about the human condition: who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going.
This multicultural (and intellectual) background continues to feed Johnson—as water and light would a plant—growing his insatiable appetite for better understanding the richness, complications, and contradictions of being human, each of us with our own roots, carrying our own energies—no one necessarily a part of any “monolithic experience.” It has also naturally led him to explore the social, cultural, and political realities of being a black man in today’s world. His multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, drawing, sculpture, filmmaking, and installation art, is both biographical and collective. Underlying much of Johnson’s work is the idea of escapism—that each of us, on some level, yearns for another reality. Such a narrative is at the core of his directorial debut, HBO’s Native Son, released earlier this year and based on the 1940 Richard Wright novel of the same name (the screenplay was written by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks). It is also at the heart of “The Hikers,” a ballet film shot on the side of a mountain in Aspen, currently on view at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (through Nov. 10) and opening on Nov. 12 (through Jan. 25, 2020) at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where it will be shown alongside several other works by Johnson, including ceramic mosaics, paintings, and a large-scale sculpture.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Johnson talks with Spencer Bailey about the steep challenge of turning Wright’s famed novel into a feature film; using materials such as shea butter, black soap, and plants in his artworks; why he remains somewhat ambivalent about the idea of “wokeness”; and his ongoing fascination with the complexity and diversity of not only blackness but also whiteness.
It’s safe to say that, if it weren’t for art historian RoseLee Goldberg, performance art would not be what it is today. Not even close. The founder of the nonprofit organization Performa, which for nearly 15 years has been putting on biennials of live performance around New York City, has for decades helped shape and steer the conversation about what “performance art” even is—and what, at its best and most inventive, it’s capable of achieving. A scholar, critic, and New York University professor, Goldberg has written important texts on the subject, including Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson), and has established new modalities for organizing and presenting performances. Her astute understanding of the multidisciplinary medium is unparalleled.
With Performa, Goldberg has radically shifted the landscape of the field through collaborations with hundreds of artists, including Adam Pendleton (in what was a breakout moment for the artist), Yoko Ono, Rashid Johnson, Joan Jonas, and Julie Mehretu. Following previous overarching themes like Futurism (2009), Surrealism (2013), and Dada (2017), this year’s biennial, which runs from November 1 through 24, will explore ideas about the Bauhaus on its centenary year. Among the performances will be works by Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng-Ta, who will unpack Western “influencers” and reality TV culture; Gaetano Pesce, who, at the Salon 94 Design gallery, will create a studio atmosphere, evoking the typical conditions of a day, via his assistants molding, pouring, and crafting; and Bunny Rogers, who will turn various spaces at a public high school—including hallways, a gym, and an auditorium—into a “living installation.”
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Goldberg speaks with Spencer Bailey about her upbringing as a young dancer in Durban, South Africa, when that country was under apartheid rule; her adventurous journey into the beating heart of the art world, first in London and ultimately in New York; and her path to establishing Performa—and elevating performance art as we know it in the process.
Daniel Brush’s acute eye for detail, as well as the rigor and vigor he brings to his craft, comes through loud and clear in all of his creations. A poet of materiality, he is at once a metalworker, a jewelry-maker, a philosopher, an engineer, a blacksmith, a painter, and a sculptor. The late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a friend of Brush’s, once said that Brush’s work is “the result of years of incubation, years of isolation and complete immersion, which have produced his unique and mysterious objects—they are made objects, and yet they seem found.” Sacks was not exaggerating when he said years. Brush’s oeuvre—on full display in the new Rizzoli book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture”—is the accumulation of four-plus decades of steadfast, heads-down, solitary work in his Manhattan studio, alongside his wife and accomplice, Olivia, allowing for only select visits from his closest friends and certain patrons, scholars, and students.
Brush’s imagination has always run wild—from his beginnings as a concert pianist in his youth, through his early years as a painter, to now, he has always demonstrated a rare intensity. For those who have laid eyes on his intricate cuffs, brooches, necklaces, and other pieces, it may be somewhat surprising to hear that it wasn’t until making a wedding ring for Olivia, in 1967, whom he had known for just three days before marrying, that he became interested in jewelry-making. Now, his work—colored by influences from a life of painting and drawing as well as his astute interests in Japanese Noh theater and Asian art—centers around jewels and objects made from a vast assortment of materials, including Afghan lapis lazuli, aluminum, amethyst, gold, Madagascar sapphire, malachite, steel, tektite, topaz, and tourmaline.
Brush, not surprisingly, also has a deep appreciation for history and collecting. His own made objects, as well as a large library of books and found objects, are stowed or situated around his home and studio, serving, for him, as a record of passing time. Given that his pieces are not traded on the market and rarely available to acquire, Brush’s work decidedly has, as he puts it, “no value.” Instead, he suggests that the value he derives from his work comes from the connections he has developed with patrons and peers who show respect for the complexity of it all. For Brush, it is the most minute connection—the tiniest detail—that so often reveals the largest truth.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Brush’s use of language and storytelling approaches the poetic. He and Spencer Bailey talk about memory (and interpretations of memory); his deep, monkish engagement with a wide variety of materials; and some of his most valuable tools—breathing, language, and light.
Inge Solheim is a free spirit, a new-age explorer, and a wilderness guide-guru whose sense of freedom hinges upon not caring, at all, about what other people think of him. Leading trips to the most remote places in the world with diverse groups—ranging from scientists, to private clients, to film crews, to people with disabilities—Solheim trains those who are with him to overcome extreme physical and psychological barriers. Among his most memorable expeditions are a trip to the South Pole with Mark Pollock, who had lost his eyesight nine years prior, and a North Pole expedition with an organization called Walking With The Wounded, accompanied by Prince Harry and a team of English wounded soldiers.
Born in Norway, he grew up in a rather dysfunctional family that left him mostly to his own devices. From a young age, he turned to nature, learning to appreciate solitude—and to be self-sufficient. At 14, Solheim started working at a pizza shop at which he would become a shareholder within a year. At 19, Solheim’s daughter, Marian, was born, and he transitioned into a nine-year “mundane” (his word) finance job, eventually becoming VP of a bank in Norway. While the career prestige was exhilarating in its own right, his passion led him to take on adventure traveling as a full-time profession.
A rare combination of old soul, hopeless romantic, and youthful pioneer, Solheim chases beauty and adventure, living peripatetically: He resides part-time in Oslo and finds himself gravitating toward Malibu, California, two to three months a year. Reaching the middle of his life, Solheim remains optimistic about almost everything—even climate change—and is currently working on sustainable tourism and travel business.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Solheim and Andrew Zuckerman get philosophical about what it means to be an explorer at a time in which it’s practically never been easier to get anywhere in the world; confronting fear, anxiety, and pressure; trauma and its effect on our perceptions of time; and instant gratification and materialism.
David Duchovny may be swooned over as the hunky special agent Fox William Mulder in The X-Files and Hank Moody in Californication, but it should be noted—and, in our opinion, more widely known—that he is also an accomplished novelist. Yes, novelist. In fact, he has published three novels with the highly esteemed publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux since 2015. A fourth novel, called Truly Like Lightning and publicly revealed for the first time on this episode, is in the works.
Primarily known for his acting—which also includes a well-known, ahead-of-its-time role, in the early ’90s, as the trans FBI agent Denise Bryson on Twin Peaks—Duchovny has carved out a name for himself as a screenwriter, director, producer, and musician, too. With an extensive literary pedigree—his father, Amram, was a “closet” writer until late in his life, when he published the novel Coney—Duchovny graduated with a B.A. in English from Princeton in 1982 and began (though never finished) a comparative literature Ph.D. at Yale.
His mastery across both dramatic and comedic acting, as well as his prolificity in writing and music, is impressive in its breadth and wide-ranging in its subject matter. Less than a decade ago, Duchovny began singing and playing guitar, and in 2015, nearly 30 years into his film and television career, he released his first album, Hell or Highwater. That same year, he also published his first novel, Holy Cow. Since then, he has released a second album, Every Third Thought (2018), and published two more books, Bucky F*cking Dent (2016) and Miss Subways (2018). Now, at age 59, Duchovny’s creative energy continues apace across all these mediums—acting, writing, music—with his next novel soon to come out and plans to turn Bucky F*cking Dent into a film.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Duchovny speaks with Spencer Bailey about novel writing, the need to better understand proposed solutions for the climate crisis, his role as Denise in Twin Peaks, and the various twists and turns of his multifaceted life and career.
Jesse Kamm and her beloved waist-hugging, wide-legged “Kamm pants” embody minimalism. A proponent of producing fewer, better things, Kamm has committed to supporting local craftspeople by making all of her garments in Los Angeles and prioritizing the use of environmentally conscientious materials. This all makes sense within the context of Kamm’s upbringing in a farming and manufacturing town in Illinois, where she was raised by her mother and father—both curious and creative hippies—in a passive solar house they built themselves. The former model turned fashion designer, who spends time in both L.A., where she works, and Panama, where she surfs, lives truly luxuriously by being hyper-protective of her schedule.
Kamm maintains that the currency she trades in is freedom, but her life hasn’t always been so balanced. After arriving in L.A. in her early 20s to pursue a modeling career, she quickly lost control and felt stripped bare by the pressures of the industry (and a consequential eating disorder). Living off of cottage cheese and cigarettes, and unhappy with who she had become, she stepped away from the runway and decided she instead wanted to make something. Kamm signed up for sewing classes, started producing her own clothes, and taught herself the ins and outs of running a business. Soon after, she was selling pants for $500 to women in line at a local coffee shop. Since unveiling her first collection, in 2005, she has created a bubble for herself by abstaining from fashion blogs and fancy industry events. Instead, Kamm focuses on her own projects; she spends time with her husband, Lucas Brower, and their 10-year-old son, Julien; and hangs out for three months a year by the Panama ocean, where she and Luke have built their own home.
On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, Kamm talks with Andrew Zuckerman about the essential quality of being a present parent, explains how she has hit upon a sustainable work-life stride, and discusses why she has no intentions of expanding her business beyond its current scale.
Sophia Chang pulls no punches. As the self-described (and indeed) “first Asian woman in hip hop,” Chang carries herself—happily, proudly—with the bravado and swagger of the industry brethren she managed throughout much of the ’90s and 2000s, including Ol’ Dirty Bastard (O.D.B.), RZA, and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest, and D’Angelo. What makes Chang’s career particularly remarkable, beyond her having worked with so many bold-faced hip hop names, is both the organicness and audaciousness of her journey: A chance encounter in 1985 with Joey Ramone led to a budding friendship with the punk icon and, in a roundabout way, to working for Paul Simon in the late ’80s; through frequenting downtown clubs at the time, she befriended the Wu-Tang Clan, becoming a longtime confidante, insider, and ally of the hip hop collective. By the early ’90s, Chang had landed an A&R gig at Jive Records, where she signed the Fu-Schnickens and worked with names like KRS-One and Tribe.
In 1996, having become deeply engaged in kung fu—a practice and passion she picked up through her friendship with the Wu-Tang Clan—Chang decided to take a major turn, leaving the music business altogether to manage Shi Yan Ming, a Shaolin monk who became her partner and the father of her two children, and his New York City temple. Though the relationship didn’t last—the couple split up in 2007—it proved a key part of Chang’s spiritual journey, life, and career. She would return to hip hop after that, working on various projects with and for the likes of RZA, GZA, and D’Angelo for a few years. Now, at 54, Chang is preparing her next big move, stepping out from behind the curtain to tell—no, to own—her story. This fall, with Audible, she’s releasing The Baddest Bitch in the Room, a coming-of-age audiobook memoir that chronicles her peripatetic path. Chang is soon to venture into television, too, having recently sold a screenplay to HBO.
Born and raised in Vancouver, the first-generation Korean Canadian will not and cannot be pigeonholed, pinned down, put in a box, or stereotyped. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Chang talks to Spencer Bailey with refreshing candor about her exploits in the 1990s hip hop world, including her close friendship with O.D.B., whom she managed; the ever-shifting landscape of racism, sexism, and ageism in America; and why she feels that now, more than ever, is her time to shine.
Kim Hastreiter identifies as a “punk at heart.” The co-founder of Paper magazine, which she started in 1984 with David Hershkovits, she served as the publication’s co-editor-in-chief until handing it off, in 2017. At 67, she remains the cool mom of downtown New York. A curator, editor, writer, and artist, as well as a perpetually delighted connector of people, she witnessed—and amplified—the fledgling careers of Keith Haring, Vivienne Westwood, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and countless others.
Hastreiter is, and has always been, New York hustle incarnate. From spending the Summer of Love building Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti in the desert, to cultivating Paper in 1979 in her loft kitchen, to printing the first issue in 1984 as a black-and-white zine, her gritty commitment to beauty and inspiration has never wavered. There’s never a dull moment with Hastreiter: Throughout Paper’s ascent to pop-culture bible, she curated several art and design shows, authored or co-authored four books, and hosted countless parties for her kaleidoscopic assortment of collaborators and friends. She is currently a mentor for Jim’s Web, a scholarship and mentorship program for emerging creatives, started in memory of her close friend the late design consultant and collector Jim Walrod.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Hastreiter sits down with Andrew Zuckerman to share her experiences of being a Mudd Club kid, selling clothes to Jackie Kennedy, curating in New York at the turn of the millenium, and “breaking the internet” with Kim Kardashian.
Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel has no style. No singular aesthetic, mood, or technique. Rather, his focus is on storytelling. From being the first to capture the Contras on film in Nicaragua to photographing the X-Men series and Superman Returns (2006), Sigel has worn many hats (and no, we’re not talking about his fedoras and baseball caps, although there are those, too). But his desire to pursue these projects of various genres and styles all stem from the same goal: to delve into what makes humans human.
Born and raised during a time of tense racial relations in Detroit, Sigel learned to look at the world through a political lens early in his youth, which later led to his pursuing social-minded documentaries. When his family moved from Detroit to Buffalo, Sigel got involved in a developing media-study program there, his first foray into the field. Since then, he has worked on dozens of films. He is perhaps best-known for his work on Drive (2011) and Three Kings (1999), and, of course, for his first collaboration with director Bryan Singer, on The Usual Suspects (1995). Sigel most recently worked with Singer in 2018—their tenth film together—on a celebratory biopic of Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, which was nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for best cinematography.
On this episode of Time Sensitive—recorded shortly after his arrival back in the U.S. from Vietnam, where he was the director of photography on Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (to be released in 2020)—Sigel shares with Andrew Zuckerman his early years in SoHo’s vibrant art community, his earning a metaphorical film degree by working for the legendary Haskell Wexler, and how he convinced Warner Brothers to create a movie using cross-processed film.
Neri Oxman is simultaneously a hardcore ecologist, evocative futurist, meticulous artist, and abstract scientist. The 43-year-old Israeli-American designer, architect, inventor, and MIT Media Lab professor embodies the same dualities that her work hinges upon. Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; instead, she’s pioneering the “Biological Age” through “material ecology,” which fuses biology and technology, nature and culture, and the grown and made. Among her works are energy-generating photosynthetic wearables, a geometric dome spun by a robotic arm and completed by a swarm of silkworms, and sinewy masks modeled, in part, after the wearer’s own anatomical and physiological makeup—projects as functional and ideologically ambitious as they are beautiful.
Outstanding in their aesthetic rigor, Oxman’s brainchildren have caught the attention of leading museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This fall, she will receive SFMOMA's 2019 Contemporary Vision Award, and her next exhibition, “Material Ecology” at MoMA (on view from Feb. 22 to May 25, 2020), organized by Paola Antonelli and Anna Burckhardt, will present eight works from throughout her 20-year career—most notably an updated version of “Totems,” an array of vehicles for synthetically engineered melanin that debuted earlier this year in the Antonelli-curated “Broken Nature” exhibition at the Triennale in Milan.
Having pursued architecture after dropping out of medical school, Oxman went on to study at the Architectural Association in London and, later, at MIT, where after earning a Ph.D. she stayed on to become a professor and now leads the pathbreaking Mediated Matter group. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Oxman and Spencer Bailey delve into motherhood, “fossils of the future,” robotic queen bees, death masks, and more.
Valerie Steele’s deep contextual dives into the history of fashion set her apart from other academics and curators—two identities she embodies in equal parts. The chief curator and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (since 1997 and 2003, respectively), she has produced upwards of 25 exhibitions while also, over the past 15 years, leading the institution. No corner of fashion is out of bounds for the charismatic and multifaceted Steele. Past exhibition subjects have ranged from corsets to gothic fashion to queerness to the color pink. Writing, too, has been a major part of her unabating scholarship, as is evident in her authoring or co-authoring of nearly 30 books over the past few decades—the first of which, on fashion and eroticism, was a product of her final Ph.D. dissertation at Yale in the early ’80s.
For Steele, clothes aren’t just tangible garments—they’re the constant medium through which to better understand things like politics, psychology, sexuality, and time. (Perhaps not surprisingly, in 2012, Suzy Menkes of The New York Times dubbed her “the Freud of Fashion”—a moniker Steele relishes.) Her rigorous, vibrant exhibitions—and her career as a whole—are the ultimate clapback to academics who once snubbed her studies as frivolous. Her next Museum at FIT showcase, “Paris: The Capital of Fashion” (on view from Sept. 6, 2019, to Jan. 4, 2020), collects roughly 100 objects that exemplify the “cultural construction” of the French city, from the 18th century to the present, contextualizing the evolution of artisanal haute couture into big business.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Steele and Spencer Bailey discuss her ongoing obsession with the city of Paris, academia’s continued distaste for fashion as a subject of worthy inquiry, her circuitous path to FIT (she dropped out of school at 15 and lived in a “lesbian-feminist commune” before attending Dartmouth for undergrad and Yale for her Ph.D.), and why luxury menswear is on the rise.
Michael Kimmelman does nothing in half measures. For more than 30 years, he has brought his assertive, culturally astute, historically sensitive perspective to The New York Times, which he has been contributing to since 1987 and joined full-time in 1990. During his tenure, he has written more than 2,000 articles, ranging from art criticism (he was its chief art critic from 1990 to 2007); to reporting from Europe and the Middle East (from 2007 to mid-2011, he was based in Berlin, where he was the “Abroad” columnist); to civically minded coverage of the built world, which has been his focus as the paper’s architecture critic the past seven years.
Throughout Kimmelman has displayed the rare ability to balance his writing in a way that shows him to be more far more level-headed than hot-headed. He is a classically trained pianist who plays with the well-rounded, even-keeled temperament and gentle skill of someone who clearly has done the work and put the hours in, and the same is true of his pieces in The New York Times. Consider his judicious take—note: not takedown—on a 1992 Julian Schnabel show at Pace gallery: “Mr. Schnabel's ambition and ego continue to outstrip his ability to paint. But there's something impressive about his sheer audacity, and just enough talent in him to make it impossible to dismiss his work out of hand. One wants to ignore it but can't.” Or, more recently, in 2014, his view on David Adjaye’s Sugar Hill social-housing complex in Harlem: “Sugar Hill is something of an extravagance and not easily replicable. But it posits a goal for what subsidized housing might look like, how it could lift a neighborhood and mold a generation.” Kimmelman more often than not sees the bigger picture and, at the same time, injects his own shrewd, deeply studied understanding of the subject at hand.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer Bailey speaks with Kimmelman about his lesser-known talents as a pianist, his three-plus-decade path at The New York Times, and his goal as architecture critic to build a greater discourse around designing cities that are better, healthier, and simply fairer for all.
Andrea Illy breathes coffee. Not literally, of course, but coffee has indeed been a part of his being since birth. The third-generation head of Illycaffè, he is the company’s chairman and, with CEO Massimiliano Pogliani, leads the massive global enterprise. With good reason—namely, its high-quality, beautifully packaged products—Illycaffè remains one of the largest coffee operations on the planet, with distribution in 145 countries. Last year, it brought in 483 million euros in revenue.
Andrea’s path to the trade, on some level, was predictable: The company was founded by his grandfather, Francesco, and later run by his father, Ernesto. He entered the business shortly after earning an advanced degree in chemistry from the University of Trieste. Starting at Illycaffè 1990 as a supervisor of quality control, he quickly rose to become CEO in 1994 and in 2005 was named chairman. (He also studied business at SDA Bocconi in Milan and attended other management and executive programs along the way, including one at Harvard Business School.)
In his current role, the 55-year-old continues to commit himself to the brand. Over the past three decades, he has seen Illycaffè surge from a more regional business to an international phenomenon. Not your average executive, Andrea speaks with the wisdom of a philosopher about things like contemporary art, the redemptive power of beauty, and the chemical, biological, agronomical, and physical elements of coffee growing and preparation. More recently, Andrea has been emphasizing the potential—and for Illycaffè, the reality—of “soil-to-soil” coffee production. He calls the concept “virtuous agriculture,” a term he coined to describe a method that combines sustainable farming with a focus, in part, on regenerating the environment by enriching soil with organic carbon.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Andrea talks with Spencer Bailey about the neurophysiology of beauty, the art and science of coffee, and why Illycaffè had made contemporary art so central to its brand and identity.
New Jersey native Maggie Doyne was age 18 when she arrived in Nepal, 19 when she had co-founded the BlinkNow Foundation nonprofit to support children in the district of Surkhet, and by 25, she had become a mother to 40 children.
Doyne’s unlikely story began in 2005, with the decision to take a gap year after high school and travel; she felt it was necessary to press pause on a more expected path and learn about herself and her purpose in the world. Upon her visit to Nepal, Doyne fell in love with the country and the people. But she also found it in the aftermath of a nearly 11-year civil war, with displaced families, schools shut down, and children breaking rocks to sell for money. Doyne gathered her babysitting savings—just five thousand dollars—to buy a piece of land in Surkhet, and started a children’s home there. She still lives in that home now as the mother to 54 children.
Today, BlinkNow, which she co-founded with her Nepali friend Top Malla, supports the Kopila Valley School, as well as a children’s home, health clinic, “Big Sister’s” home, and women’s center. The Kopila Valley School’s new campus opened this past February. Not only does the pre-primary through 12th grade program have 20 classrooms to educate more than 400 students, it is one of the greenest schools in the world. For her work, Doyne has received the Unsung Hero of Compassion Award, presented to her by the Dalai Lama in 2014, and was recognized as CNN’s 2015 Hero of the Year.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, the 32-year-old Doyne discusses her path from presumably college-bound student to full-time mother of nearly five dozen Nepali children; experiencing heartbreaking loss and meeting the love of her life; and the importance of taking action.
Thirty years ago, on July 19, 1989, at 37,000 feet in the air, the titanium fan disk in the tail-mounted engine of United Airlines Flight 232—a DC-10 carrying 296 people from Denver to Chicago—exploded above the cornfields of Iowa. The spiraling debris punctured the aircraft and cut all of its hydraulics lines, making the jet nearly impossible to steer. The captain, Al Haynes, was left to somehow guide the vessel, its crew, and the passengers to the ground. Eventually, it was determined that the flight would make an emergency landing at Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa.
Spencer Bailey, now the co-host of Time Sensitive, was on that plane with his 36-year-old mom, Francie, and 6-year-old brother Brandon. They sat in the 33rd row. His fourth birthday was 30 days away. (His father, Brownell, and twin brother, Trent, were not on board.)
After a harrowing 44 minutes that included four swooping 360-degree turns, followed by a call from the cockpit to “brace” amidst howling sirens from the aircraft’s Ground Proximity Warning System, Flight 232 made contact with Runway 22. The tip of the right wing hit the ground, instantly igniting and quickly tearing off. The aircraft’s tail section ripped off, too, ejecting the bank of seats where Spencer, Brandon, and Francie sat. The rest of the plane broke into several pieces. The main section of the fuselage slowed to a stop, upside-down, in a cornfield.
One hundred eleven people, including Francie, died. One hundred eighty five, including Spencer and Brandon, survived.
On this special episode of Time Sensitive, Andrew Zuckerman speaks with Spencer, who shares his story of the crash and its aftermath.
Few executives have the profoundly spiritual presence of Ivy Ross, who more than five years ago joined Google as a vice president, helping to lead the launch of the second edition of Glass at Google X and for the past three years overseeing design for its hardware division. When Ross enters a room, there’s a magical sort of glow around her. The energy she gives off—as was evident at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June, where she was joined by Spencer Bailey onstage in conversation—is contagious. It’s hard not to be charmed by her openness, her enthusiasm, her empathic nature. She is indeed a breath of fresh air within the often hubristic culture of Silicon Valley, and could be seen as a kind of guru—though she would never describe herself as such.
Ross began her career—which has included stints at Calvin Klein, Mattel, Disney, and Gap—as a jewelry designer. And it shows. She’s extremely sensitive to form, color, material, and tactility. She deeply understands the importance of beauty. She believes that energy is embedded in everything, and that it can be felt, positively or negatively, in any object. She’s a shrewd, culturally attuned marketer, too. By the time she was in her mid-20s, she already had jewelry pieces in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Design is in Ross’s blood: She remembers this “incredible curiosity” coming to her at a young age, partly through her father, who worked for the hyper-innovative Raymond Loewy, famous for dreaming up things like Lucky Strike packaging, the Studebaker, various locomotives, and NASA interiors. Ross is someone who throughout life has always trusted her gut, allowing her instincts to lead her through challenging situations, similar to how a drummer might take the reigns and bring a band forward through tricky improvisation. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Ross is also a drummer.)
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Ross and Bailey discuss “design feeling,” as opposed to design thinking, and the role of rhythm in her life and work. She also shares how her spiritual education, from Jungian psychology and sound healing to stone medicine and qigong, has helped fuel her creative work and enliven her corporate career.
For the past two decades, Andri Snær Magnason has been on a quest for language that truly gets at the heart of the climate crisis—the images, mythology, and syntax to crystallize the often-abstracted but very real environmental disasters increasingly taking place around us. The 45-year-old Icelandic writer’s latest book, The Casket of Time, offers an allegorical tale of global calamity and apathy, captured through specific, deeply considered language he has been pursuing—and using—over the past 20-plus years.
Magnason’s diverse body of work includes Dreamland, a nonfiction account of Iceland’s climate policies; a corresponding documentary co-directed by Magnason of the same name; and The Story of the Blue Planet, a whimsical tale of gluttony and sacrifice that won the Icelandic Literary Prize (a first for a children’s book) and was adapted into a play. A rigorous thinker and empathizer in all aspects of his work, Magnason examines beauty and ugliness as symbiotic instead of antagonistic. His poetry book Bonus is characteristic of this dynamic. Stemming from a critique of the Icelandic supermarket Bónus, the book envisions the world, not so unrealistically, as commercialized bulk. Ironically, or maybe not, the Bónus supermarket itself published Bonus, closing off the writer’s satire full circle.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Magnason discusses with Andrew Zuckerman the mutual dependency of spiritual and rational thinking, details two otherworldly, life-altering meetings with the Dalai Lama, and more.
When Elizabeth Diller graduated from Cooper Union with a degree in architecture in 1979, she had no intention of necessarily becoming an architect. In fact, the Polish-born, New York–raised Diller chose architectural studies simply to explore her interests in art and physical space. Two years later, in 1981, she co-founded a forward-thinking practice with Ricardo Scofidio, who had been her professor and who she later married. At first, their budding firm fell into an avant-garde category that existed outside corporate or institutional confines of art and architecture—and indeed it often critiqued those worlds. Diller and Scofidio were primarily making edgy, visually impactful installations and theatrical projects, as well as conceiving what might even be called “paper architecture”—dream concepts seemingly unlikely to be realized.
Over the past three decades, though, with the introduction of numerous technologies, the latter has become reality and, at the same time, the former has continued apace. The firm, now called Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)—Charles Renfro became a partner in 2004, Benjamin Gilmartin in 2015—has gone on to become one of the most groundbreaking, ahead-of-the-curve practices in the field. DS+R’s many cultural and civic projects around the world include the elevated High Line park in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood; the Broad museum in L.A.; The Shed at Hudson Yards, in collaboration with Rockwell Group; an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, opening this fall; and the Centre for Music, a permanent home to be built for the London Symphony Orchestra.
Diller and her firm’s approach, which begins with questions, accounts for much of this success: “What if we made this building out of water?” “How can we create a conversation between digital media and reality?” The results are often radical. Just take the firm’s breakthrough project, the Blur Building, an “architecture of atmosphere” created for the Swiss Expo in 2002 in Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The project was a rebellious, almost anti-architecture statement: the structure disappears. At its heart, the Blur captured the idea of architecture as experience, which is really what the bulk of the firm’s work achieves. DS+R’s buildings typically slow you down; they make you feel something.
Today, Diller is among the most revered architects in the world. She has twice been named to the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, in 2009 and 2018, and she was the recipient of the first MacArthur Foundation fellowship in architecture in 1999. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Diller shares with Spencer Bailey her roundabout path to becoming an architect, the social and cultural impacts of the High Line and The Shed, and the emotional resonance of designing spaces in her home city.
Ten years ago, the Austrian-born, New York–based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister—famous for his attention-grabbing exhibitions, posters, and books, as well as for his impeccable album covers for bands like The Rolling Stones, OK Go, and Aerosmith—walked onto the stage at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England. There to present his findings about the power of time off, he spoke specifically about the virtues and values, personal and professional, of taking a sabbatical every seven years, something he started to do in 2000 and has continued to practice since. Coming in the midst of the Great Recession, the talk resonated widely: its resulting video has been watched more than three million times. Clearly, Sagmeister was, and is, onto something. Even if it’s something most people can only dream about. Since then, Sagmeister has gone on yet another sabbatical—his third, in 2016—this time stopping in Mexico City, Tokyo, and the town of Schwarzenberg, Austria, over the course of a year. (For his first sabbatical, he was in New York City; for his second, Bali.)
On this episode of Time Sensitive, the 56-year-old looks back, with a fuller-picture view, at his three periods of time off. Digging in to how the sabbaticals created opportunities for incubating ideas that became two massive multi-year undertakings—one a project on happiness, the other on beauty—Sagmeister shares with Spencer Bailey how certain things have changed for his practice since that TED Talk a decade ago. In 2012, he joined forces with Jessica Walsh; their firm, Sagmeister & Walsh, now operates in a different, slightly larger office than the one he was in, and having another partner at the firm has shifted how things run overall. Still, Sagmeister’s signature approach to design remains as exuberant as ever. For clients including the duffel-bag brand Baboon, the Jewish Museum, and the Miami advertising agency Gut, the firm continues to produce inventive and playful work.
Uzodinma Iweala’s journey to becoming the CEO of the Africa Center, a culture and policy institution located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the northeast corner of Central Park, defies expectations. Prior to the role, which he began in early 2018, he had zero non-profit experience. And though the Washington, D.C., native had co-founded a small media start-up in Lagos, Nigeria, he had never lead an organization of this scale or ambition. What Iweala did understand, though, is the power of storytelling—specifically, storytelling of and about the African diaspora.
Today, at 36, Iweala is confident that by harnessing storytelling he can, and will, reorient the organization, which was founded in 1984 as the Museum for African Art and saw its share of setbacks prior to his arrival. If Iweala’s diverse background and track record is any indication, the Africa Center is poised to grow into a high-impact hub for pushing conversations and greater understandings about the continent forward.
Iweala’s journey has been circuitous to say the least: He wrote the novel Beasts of No Nation, which was adopted into a 2015 Netflix film directed by Cary Fukunaga and starring Idris Elba. He completed a multi-year study of HIV/AIDS in Africa, the result of which became his second book, Our Kind of People. He received an M.D. from Columbia University in 2011, co-founded and launched Ventures Africa magazine, and wrote another novel, Speak No Evil, released last year. In this episode of Time Sensitive, Iweala shares with Spencer Bailey his exceptional experiences as a writer, researcher, doctor, entrepreneur—and now, CEO.
The media tends to hyperbolize and boosterize technologists and the work that they do, creating all kinds of absurdly over-the-top titles for them. But when CBS’s 60 Minutes dubbed Kai-Fu Lee “the oracle of A.I.” earlier this year, it was actually a spot-on assessment. Lee has indeed been at the forefront of the field for more than three decades and is without question an artificial intelligence visionary. There are few people in the world who understand A.I. so astutely, especially within so many social and cultural contexts. His accolades speak volumes: In 2013, Lee was named to that year’s Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, and this January, he was named co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s A.I. Council. His new book, A.I. Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, quickly rose to become a New York Times bestseller.
Lee’s got one extraordinary résumé: After receiving a B.S.in computer science from Columbia University in 1983, he went on to get his Ph.D. in 1988 from Carnegie Mellon, where developed Sphinx, the first-ever speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. In 1990, he joined Apple as a research scientist, heading up multiple R&D groups there for several years. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at Microsoft, where he established what would become Microsoft Research Asia, and later, upon returning to the U.S., he was named a vice president at the company. In 2005, he decamped to Google, resulting in a widely publicized five-month legal battle with Microsoft. Once settled, Lee helped bring Google to China, overseeing its growth and operations there for four years. Lee now runs Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in start-ups in China, many of them in the A.I. space. As of a year ago, according to Bloomberg, Sinovation had $2 billion under asset management with more than 300 companies in its portfolio.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Lee shares with Andrew Zuckerman his fascinating story of emigrating from China to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age 11; why he remains rationally optimistic about A.I. (and its increasingly potent presence in our lives); and how a recent bout with cancer drastically altered his outlook on life and work.
Teresita Fernández defies expectations. For more than 20 years, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist has pushed boundaries, literally and figuratively, through her large-scale sculptures, mixed-media works, and high-profile public installations, such as the seemingly illusory “Fata Morgana” in New York City’s Madison Square Park in 2015 and cocoon-like “Autumn (... Nothing Personal)” at Harvard University last year. Her highly evocative work, at its heart, explores the many complex layers embedded in things—an idea that’s inspired, in part, from the traditional East Asian garden concept of shakkei, or “borrowed landscape,” something she discusses in-depth with Spencer Bailey on this episode of Time Sensitive.
Even if Fernández’s beautiful, affecting art can be enjoyed on the surface, to fully grasp her shrewd explorations of landscape and her exquisite experimentations with materials—from ceramics to charcoal to gold to graphite—viewers must look at them closely and read them deeply. If they do, they’re likely to come away with a greater, and certainly more real, understanding of the complicated colonial history of the Americas, as well as the sublime beauty inherent in so many of the natural wonders around us.
In the lead up to her mid-career retrospective, “Teresita Fernández: Elemental”—perhaps her most ambitious exhibition yet, opening at the Pérez Art Museum Miami this fall (Oct. 18, 2019, to Feb. 9, 2020)—the 51-year-old artist recently came by The Slowdown’s New York City headquarters to share stories about her life and work, from being raised by hardworking Cuban exile parents in Miami to studying for her M.F.A. at Virginia Commonwealth University in a then largely Confederate-proud Richmond. As this interview makes clear, Fernández’s life is as wonderfully layered and complex as her art.
Bjarke Ingels communicates the value—and world-changing potential—of architecture with the giddy enthusiasm and excitement of a sci-fi obsessive anticipating the next big Hollywood blockbuster. This is an analogy that especially makes sense when one gets deep into conversation with Ingels, as Andrew Zuckerman recently did for this episode of Time Sensitive.
At age 44, the Danish-born Ingels has become one of the most widely known and talked about practitioners in his field, reaching a level of fame and notoriety that most leading architects don’t see until they’re nearly twice his age. How did he do it? The answer lies largely in comics, or at least that’s where his success story starts. Dreaming of becoming an illustrator or cartoonist, Ingels found a path to architecture through art school. This background allowed him, over time, to shrewdly distill compelling narratives into everything his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), does, whether a Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant that doubles as a ski mountain, a proposed floating city in the sea, or a Shenzhen skyscraper.
On this episode, Ingels discusses his circuitous path to prominence; why he named his newborn Darwin; some of BIG’s latest undertakings, including The Dryline masterplan in New York; and why architects, developers, city planners, and others all need to take a longer view when it comes to creating our built environments.
Kate Young, the stylist for red carpet luminaries such as Selena Gomez, Margot Robbie, and Michelle Williams, has one of the shrewdest eyes in the business. Given her background—she comes from a family of competitive athletes and began her career at Vogue as an assistant to Anna Wintour, from whom she learned the ability to schedule periods of “utter focus”—this may not be so surprising. But she has carved her own distinctive path.
Pairing fast and slow periods of time into her annual routines, Young believes in (and finds) balance. She achieves as much largely by moving between the bustle of New York City, where she lives and works during the week, and upstate New York, where she has a home and spends summers and weekends. Her style reflects this. In contrast to the attention-grabbing gowns and outfits she chooses for her clients’ public debuts, Young’s approach to what she wears is more “inward-facing” and functional—though she does confess an affinity for a particular Cartier bracelet and, at certain times, enjoys sporting a fancy pair of shoes. Beyond her standout styling work, she has designed a line of lingerie in Japan and, more recently, sunglasses for the brand Tura.
On this episode of Time Sensitive, Young discusses her sports-filled youth in New Hope, Pennsylvania; studying English and art history at the University of Oxford; the realities of styling celebrities in the Instagram age; and the public misconception of luxury.
Jon Gray, the CEO of the Bronx-based food collective Ghetto Gastro, describes himself as a “dishwasher.” It’s a cheeky description, but there is a kind of truth to it. After all, his cohort at the firm includes chefs of very high caliber: Malcolm Livingston II (formerly of René Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen and, before that, Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 in New York), Pierre Serrao (formerly of Cracco in Milan), and Lester Walker (formerly of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York). Though Gray himself does cook, his role at Ghetto Gastro is not necessarily in the kitchen, at least certainly not primarily. The high-flying but still refreshingly down-to-earth smooth-talker is, instead, its marketing mastermind, linking the group up with the worlds of art, architecture, design, and fashion—worlds he’s deeply immersed himself in for more than a decade.
Since its founding in 2012, Ghetto Gastro has grown into a cultural force, literally and figuratively cooking up projects that verge on performance art for clients including Apple, Bank of America, Cartier, and Instagram. In this episode of Time Sensitive, the 33-year-old Gray shares the story of how, in the face of a jail sentence at age 20, he turned his life around—and how, after a stint in fashion, he found a calling in combining food with art and design.
The actor Peter Sarsgaard cannot be pinned down. He may be best-known for his portrayal of John Lotter in 1999’s Boy’s Don’t Cry. Or as Charles Lane in the 2003’s Shattered Glass. Or perhaps for his roles in films like Garden State (2004), Green Lantern (2011), and Jackie (2016). Or maybe as the CIA chief in the 2018 Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower. Or it could be for his stage work, on Broadway and Off-Broadway, in plays such as The Seagull, Kingdom of Earth, and Burn This. For good reason, the 48-year-old is among the most talented, versatile, and unassuming actors working today.
In large part, Sarsgaard’s prolific career and success stems from the fact that, beyond the screen and the stage, he has thoughtfully cultivated a rich array of interests in things far outside of acting: Running. Mandolin playing. Gardening and horticulture. Writing. On this episode of Time Sensitive, he speaks with Andrew Zuckerman about how each of these outside engagements continues to feed his life while also helping fuel his acting.
“Why make a podcast right now?” So begins this 10-minute introductory episode of Time Sensitive, a conversation between the show’s two co-hosts, Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman. Time Sensitive is the debut platform of the conscious entertainment media company The Slowdown, co-founded by Bailey, an editor and journalist who has written at length about architecture, art, culture, design, and technology, and Zuckerman, a filmmaker, photographer, and creative director whose work is largely concerned with the intersection of nature and technology. Consider this episode a “who we are, how we got here, where we’re going” primer.
Each week, going forward, Time Sensitive will release an interview conducted respectively by Bailey or Zuckerman with a leading mind in business, the arts, and beyond who has made a profound impact in their field, contributed to the larger conversation, and is concerned with the planet we all share. Episode 1 [include URL to episode], with actor-marathoner-musician-writer-horticulturalist Peter Sarsgaard, is now live. In the weeks to come, you’ll hear lively conversations with Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray, fashion stylist Kate Young, architect Bjarke Ingels, artist Teresita Fernández, and more. The common thread between all of them? They’re curious and courageous—and each has a distinct perspective on time.
Special thanks to drummer Billy Martin, who composed the Time Sensitive theme music; art director Omar Sosa, who collaborated on the design of the Time Sensitive site and identity; web developer Eric Bichan, who coded the site; and sound engineer Pat McCusker.
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