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.
She practices rehabilitative medicine, as a clinician and a researcher, helping patients recover from strokes and spinal cord injuries. Why yes, she has taken a patient sky-diving. (Medicare wouldn’t cover it.) A conversation at KGB’s Red Room. Produced with Lori Schwarz. Music: Guy Ruby. Continue reading »
His 60 years as an architect (the Rose Center at the Museum of Natural History, the Clinton presidential library) and dean of Columbia’s graduate school of architecture brought him to this modest conclusion: “It’s not a high art; it is really a craft.” A conversation at the Center for Architecture. Music: Caitlan Warbelow. Photo: Harry … Continue reading »
Two generations of New York City Ballet luminaries. The latter is currently a soloist and principal; the former joined that company nearly 70 years ago as a Balanchine protégé and went on to found the National Dance Institute. Music from Jerry Korman, music director of the NDI, and Susan Walters. Continue reading »
Actor, writer, singer, transgender activist, she argues surprisingly (and persuasively) that anti-LGBTQ laws need not arise from animosity toward LGBTQ people but from something even more cynical. With music from, well yes, Shakina Nayfack. Continue reading »
This cultural historian regards Coco Chanel as a titan of fashion but notes, “Like Picasso or Wagner, she was really really brilliant and just an absolutely despicable human being.” Anti-Semite, union-buster, Nazi spy: when great artists are bad people. Plus music from Eléonore Weill and Ali Dineen. Photo credit: ©2019 The Museum at FIT Continue reading »
I expected this opera director to be astute and eloquent, and he was. I did not expect him to do first-rate impressions of Tom Waits, William Burroughs, and his own father. (Be honest: neither did you.) At Pratt Institute, his alma mater. Music by Pat Irwin and Walter Hawkes. Continue reading »
The choreographer of Hadestown and an all-around theater guy, he grew up in a house designed by his father – not an architect, a member of Mabou Mines. “It pointed me toward a creative proces which is partially planned and partially improvised.” And away from the words “beneath a heap of rubble.” A conversation at the Baryshnikov … Continue reading »
This neurogeneticist esteems Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won a Nobel Prize for her work on human growth factor. She experimented with eggs, and then she ate the eggs. Science during wartime. In hiding. In a basement lab. Great stories at KGB’s Red Room, produced with Lori Schwarz. Music from Leslie Goshko. Continue reading »
The designer of widely-used typefaces, including Surveyor, Tungsten, and Retina, he draws on the history of his native Brooklyn: old subway signs, old newspapers. More surprising, his fonts are also inspired by Walt Whitman. A conversation at the New York Transit Museum. Music from Rahiem and Amiri Taylor. Continue reading »
This Canadian producer, celebrated for Little Mosque on the Prairie, wanted to do a show about death, too often “depicted as this morbid sad thing. We wanted to do a comedy about death.” The Hollywood (Toronto?) suits rejected her. A merry chat about mortality at the New York Baha’i Center. Music from Gloria Thomas Gassaway and the … Continue reading »
The author of How to be a Stoic describes that philosophy’s central precept: “We should live according to nature.” Happily, this demands less involvement with squirrels than you might think. A conversation at the Society for Ethical Culture, with music from David Gracia, Margaret Determann, and Barbara Carlsen. Continue reading »
Sustainable business practices can make a company more profitable, so why resist them? Ignorance? Madness? Alien mind-control? A deft explanation from the former president of the Rainforest Alliance and current director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. Music from Sid Whelan and Trevor Bridgewater. Photo by Kahn, courtesy of the NYU photo bureau. Continue reading »