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.
A reporter and editor for The New York Times for more than 30 years, he began at the Daily News, in the seventies, when the city faced financial collapse, terrorist bombs, a blackout, a psychotic serial killer, and Studio 54. “What a time to be city editor of a tabloid newspaper in New York!” He was 28. A … Continue reading »
For decades, she ran HBO Documentary Films, producing over a thousand and winning more prime-time Emmies than any other person, clearly reflecting her love of the form. “No! I hate documentaries. I didn’t like documentaries at all. I wanted to do things that people watched; I wanted to get patted on the back; I wanted … Continue reading »
This singer, songwriter, and author didn’t have an easy start. “I had a chaotic childhood, to put it mildly, an abnormal childhood.” Then she discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little Therapist on the Prairie? Nope. A guide to an orderly life. Or so it seemed to a kid. The result: an impressively accomplished adult. Continue reading »
She is an admired actor (West Wing), but it’s her playwriting (Fires in the Mirror), drawing on the techniques of documentary film, that first caught my attention. Just starting as a writer, she met a woman at a party. “And she said I’m going to give you three questions you can ask people. Well, they changed … Continue reading »
An esteemed historian (This Republic of Suffering) and president emeritus of Harvard, she suggests that the widespread misuse of “disinterested” to mean “uninterested” rather than “objective” reflects a broad undervaluing of objectivity, open-mindedness, and intellectual honesty. Seldom has so bleak an insight given me such delight. Continue reading »
Our conversation ranged over modern boxers, Victorian writers, one-room schools, and that nearly mythical creature, that unicorn of politics, the moderate Republican. (I hope to see one someday.) It was a treat to engage with someone interested in, well, everything. Continue reading »
She asserts, boldly if not entirely persuasively, that the supreme literary form is the advice column. She is rightly celebrated for hers, Ask E. Jean, which ran in Elle magazine from 1993 through 2019, and for winning the Miss Cheerleader USA title in 1964, the invariable precursor of an esteemed career in journalism. Continue reading »
From time to time someone suggests that I be a guest on the show and describe my own person, place, and thing. I reply, maybe in season ten, my euphemism for never. Then I smile and add, sure, if we’re confined to our homes by a horrible pandemic exacerbated by a criminally incompetent White House and can’t … Continue reading »
She’s been with the New York City Ballet for 30 years, rising from apprentice to principal to associate artistic director. “When I moved to New York at 15, by myself, I moved into Jacques d’Amboise’s home. He rented the third floor of his brownstone to four young ballet students.” The world’s coolest boarding house. I … Continue reading »
He leads New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, managing the finest municipal water system in America, despite much of it flowing through century-old cast-iron pipes. He told the Municipal Archives, “The pipe under 42nd Street goes back to the time when John Wilkes Booth’s brother was acting as Hamlet on Broadway.” Yes, he dates infrastructure … Continue reading »
He wrote Ken Russell’s Women in Love, geeze, 50 years ago, then wrote plays (The Normal Heart) and novels (Faggots). Amidst the emerging AIDS epidemic, he helped found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Act Up. Accomplished, right? Not according to him. “I feel like I failed,” he says. A life examined. Continue reading »
He is a co-founder of KPF, architects of buildings worldwide, including One Vanderbilt, rising near Grand Central. “It’s very tall at over 1,400 feet, but it’s not the tallest building in New York, and we weren’t trying to make it the tallest,” he told the Center for Architecture. “We didn’t want to get into a … Continue reading »