These principals of the architectural firm WORKac found it challenging to design their own home. The psychological complexity of domestic life? The culmination of years of thought? “The hardest thing about designing our house was that we just haven’t designed a lot of houses.” Produced with the Center for Architecture. Photo: Harry Willks. Continue reading »
He is the founder of Grainery Books. She is a co-owner and a specialist in artists’ books. Together they fight crime in outer space with their robot dog, Sparky, and are curators of the exhibition After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960-2025. Much of this is true. Music: Hubby Jenkins. Thursday, … Continue reading »
The artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company summarizes his aesthetic: “The curtain goes up, twenty minutes happen, the curtain comes down, and it is transformative.” Easy to say, brilliant to achieve. And they do. Continue reading »
He’s worked from Hanoi to Berlin to America’s old-growth forests. “As a photographer, it’s only in getting lost that you move forward.” As a civilian, when I get lost, I pretty much just get lost. Another reason to admire him. Produced with the National Academy of Design. Continue reading »
He led Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and pretty much created theater at Lincoln Center. “The happiest moments of my life have been in rehearsal rooms.” Well, yeah. In there with him? David Mamet, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett. Sequentially, not simultaneously. Presented with Hunter College. Accompanist: Elijah Caldwell. Continue reading »
This lawyer works on health policy at Columbia’s Mailman School: “Public health in a certain sense is about balancing, the rights we have as individuals with the needs of society to preserve, protect, and promote the health of the population.” Not a bad approach to democracy in general. Continue reading »
This children’s book author—Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tiger Rising, The Tale of Despereaux—describes her innate ability: “I have a knack for nothing except being filled with wonder.” I’d dispute that, as would legions of admiring readers. Continue reading »
This graphic designer spent her early childhood in Germany. “My father told me, ‘You are Korean, you are a visitor here, and what that means is, you don’t have to fit in.’ For me, that liberated everything.” The power of outsider consciousness. Presented with Base Design. Continue reading »
“We got it from Lauren Bacall,” says this curator. The flu? Certainly not. An Elsa Peretti handbag, one of 700 items from Bacall’s wardrobe donated to the Museum at FIT, where it was featured in Hill’s recent exhibition, Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities. Continue reading »
“The disease, the people believed, was caused by sorcery and could be cured by sorcery,” says this bioethicist. By “the people” he does not allude to RFK Jr. but to a stone-age tribe in New Guinea. Potato/Potahto. Produced with Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. Music: Rich Jenkins. Continue reading »
Their play Here There Are Blueberries is built around an actual photo album assembled at Auschwitz of the ordinary daily life of the perpetrators. Following a run at the McCarter Theatre, the play is now touring nationally (if you’re reading this early in 2025, not in, oh, 2026 in exile on the Martian penal colony). Continue reading »
This historian, in CCNY’s Black Studies Department, says, “If I want to have a good writing day, I take the train an hour and fifteen minutes to somewhere I love, the quietest place in New York.” Silence and thought. Music: Birsa Chatterjee, saxophone; Raul Reyes, bass; Victor Gould, piano. (Not silent, much appreciated.) Continue reading »