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.
He’s framed a ticket to the World Series game Sandy Koufax did not pitch and a sheet of Freud’s stationery on which the great man did not write. In the second of a two-part episode recorded at JCC Manhattan, Jonathan Safran Foer describes the pleasures of the non-event and the joys of possessing archaeological … Continue reading »
By letting us not only understand but inhabit its characters, does a novel reveal the commonality of human experience or demonstrate our differences? Both, of course, but Jonathan Safran Foer is particularly sympathetic to the former. In the first of a two-part episode recorded at JCC Manhattan, we discuss the joys of intimacy and … Continue reading »
Iceland is a paradise for writers, with its highly literate population, generous government grants and total absence of cockroaches. Unfortunately there are only 330,000 Icelanders, so even if they all buy your book your horizons are limited. Fortunately that’s why the novelist (and print-maker, and translator and more) Hallgrímur Helgason visited America. A conversation at the … Continue reading »
For 33 years, he was David Letterman’s music director and comic sideman, a career that began in Canada with the Toronto production of Godspell, as did those of Gilda Radner, Martin Short, and Andrea Martin. Some production! Some careers! And now what? What do you do when your job ends after three decades? Savvy … Continue reading »
If you want to write about the Arctic, must you visit the Arctic? The splendid writers Jim Shepard and Joshua Ferris think not. Are they asserting: write about what you don’t know? It’s complicated. And delightfully so. A conversation about actual landscapes and landscapes of the imagination, at the Center for Fiction, with music … Continue reading »
As a New Yorker, you “spend a very significant amount of time in public,” notes Justin Davidson, architecture and music critic for New York magazine, “encountering other people who behave and dress and think differently from you.” I say that this makes us morally superior to the car-bound denizens of Houston. He demurs: “I don’t … Continue reading »
Diane Arbus’s old contact sheets include images she never meant us to see, so would perusing them violate her rights as an artist? Photographer Benjamin Swett says he’d look at them with pleasure, and he makes a persuasive case that he’s not going to hell. Plus, the invention of the circular saw and celibacy reconsidered: surprisingly … Continue reading »
Nachshon was the first Israelite into the Red Sea – before God parted the waters. So, commited activist or blind follower? Much has been said about leaders, less about what we value in the rank and file. Ruth Messenger has thought about both, as a city council member, as Manhattan borough president, in her … Continue reading »
DJ Alan Freed, who might have coined the term “rock’n’roll,” was destroyed in the payola scandals of the fifties, but he was no more corrupt than his colleagues, says Kenny Vance. And Freed staged some of the first integrated rock shows. Does this mitigate his conduct? Sharp ideas about radio, rock, and the invention … Continue reading »
Some people who’ve profoundly affected our cultural life are esteemed by their colleagues but little known to us civilians. Actor Michael Urie, admired by both groups, reflects on one such person, James Houghton, founder of the Signature Theater. Plus transit tips and gift advice. With music from Patrick Farrell. A conversation in conjunction with the … Continue reading »
Much admired for her novels, essays, and poems, she currently lectures in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. During our conversation at the Brooklyn Historical Society, she spoke about “the Invisible College,” the mind-body problem, and her love of Virginia Woolf, despite Woolf’s lamentable ignorance of 17th century science. With music from Niall Connolly. … Continue reading »
Rabbi Ellen Lippmann and Muslim activist Debbie Almontaser are united by their work for social justice and their affection for Kahlil Gibran. “You can’t really tell if he’s writing from a Christian perspective, a Muslim perspective, a Jewish perspective,” says Debbie. “It’s just so universal.” A conversation about common ground and the difference between … Continue reading »