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.
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.
The Wall Street Journal’s language columnist plays with our format, offering Word Word Word – and more elegantly still, the same word for each segment: orange. Then he makes a painful disclosure: “I myself am color-blind, and so I’m not completely attuned to all the nuances of it.” Hey, Beethoven was deaf, and he got the … Continue reading »
A writer and environmentalist, he counts himself lucky to have worked at The New Yorker with (for? near?) William Shawn, “the greatest editor of the twentieth century.” What contributed to his mastery? “Once he had writers in his stable, he was quite interested in what they were interested in.” Professional skill as a manifestation of individual character. Continue reading »
He’s created buildings from Montreal (Habitat 67) to Singapore (Jewel Changi Airport), but Jerusalem — the center of three Abrahamic religions, where people have lived for 6,000 years – is different: “It takes an act of real arrogance to build in a city like that. It was quite emotionally wrenching.” Presented by the Center for … Continue reading »
This trumpet player has sold 72 million albums worldwide, including five number ones, and also founded A&M records. Ordinarily we’d talk about his person, place, and thing, but instead we devote our conversation to his person, songwriter Burt Bacharach — 73 top-forty hits. One enormously successful musician talks about another, with respect and affection. Continue reading »
This trumpeter and composer is celebrated for his film scores, especially for Spike Lee. His opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones is slated to open the new season at the Met. In this episode, we break format; instead of person, place, and thing, we talk song, song, and song. A conversation about three pieces of music. Continue reading »
Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the celebrated memoir Memorial Drive. As a child, she received three books from her father, meant to cultivate her literary sensibility and deepen her understanding of the world, particularly about race and class: Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Light in August. If you were to pick three, what would they be? Continue reading »
After serving as Secretary of Labor, he resumed teaching at UC Berkeley, gracefully relinquishing power, like Cincinnatus returning to the plow. Or not. “Actually,“ he says, “I have much more power as a professor than I did as a cabinet secretary.” Training a student cadre in the Oakland hills? Encouraging rigorous thought? One of those. Continue reading »
I expected this writer-director, executive producer of the Apollo Theater, to be insightful about theater and film, and she is. I did not expect her to mount a staunch defense of comic books. If she’s not entirely persuasive on this topic (to geezerly me), she’s thoroughly intriguing. Continue reading »
He double-majored in economics and digital media, and, unlike those in show business who enjoy the show but decry the business, “I love the business as much as I love the creative, as much as I love the technical.” The result? Black Love, the TV series he and his wife, Codie Elaine Oliver, created, is in its … Continue reading »
She’s choreographed for everyone from Mikhail Baryshnikov to David Byrne. So where does she get her ideas? “I always loved this quote by Rousseau; he said, ‘My mind only works with my legs.’ Me too! When I am stuck, I just take a walk, and something unlatches.” Movement creates thought; thought creates movement. Photo by … Continue reading »
The author of How to Be Black and host of How to Citizen With Baratunde, he’s worked at The Onion, The Daily Show, and the Obama White House. More impressive, he’s met the whittler’s challenge: carve a chain or a ball in a cage from a single piece of wood. “What I really wanted to do was to make … Continue reading »
He calls himself “a full-on, born-again atheist,” and yet this dancer and choreographer approaches his work reverently, in part as a quest for transcendence, honoring this ecumenical doctrine: “Most religions agree with don’t kill anybody, and I agree with that.” A conversation about classical Indian dance, modern American music, and the greatest cooking utensil of … Continue reading »