She is the writer and performer of two off-Broadway shows, a regular on The View, an Emmy-winning writer & producer for Rosie O’Donnell. All very impressive. But what I like about her: she is the anthropologist of post-war suburban Jewish life – my life, the world I grew up in – which she observes acutely, … Continue reading »
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Episode 67: Andrew W. K.
Hard rocker and host of the Cartoon Network show “Destroy Build Destroy,” he is our first guest to have a hit record and to give a motivational speech at Yale. Best known for his songs It’s Time to Party, Party Hard and Party ‘Til You Puke, he has elevated the party from ephemeral fun to … Continue reading »
Episode 66: Diana Reiss
A member of the psychology department at Hunter College, Diana Reiss is an expert in dolphin cognition who has conducted ingenious experiments to demonstrate that these creatures recognize themselves in mirrors: that they are self-aware. She is, incidentally, our first guest to postpone her visit until she returned from a marine mammal conference which, I … Continue reading »
Episode 71: John Turturro
Many of us got to like him in Do the Right Thing and got to like him even more as he became part of the rep company of Spike Lee then of the Coen Brothers. And that represents just a few of his more than 60 films. His latest is Fading Gigolo: he wrote it, … Continue reading »
Featured Episode 65: Roddy Doyle
Like many people, I encountered Roddy Doyle through the Barrytown trilogy – The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van—three terrific novels, and later movies, set in the same fictional working class neighborhood of Dublin, novels that do things with dialogue I hadn’t thought possible. His newest, The Guts, revisits Jimmy Rabbitte – founder of The … Continue reading »