Decades ago, he shook hands with W. E. B. Du Bois, born in 1868. It seems impossible, but then again Einstein was a contemporary of Billy the Kid. Lewis went on to write a Pultzer-Prize winning biography of Du Bois. Einstein went on to be Einstein. Presented with the Maysles Documentary Center. Music: Henrique Prince.
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.
No one moves more gracefully between Hollywood and New York. Out west, she wrote for NYPD Blue, among many TV shows, before creating her own, Smash. Back east, her plays include Mauritius, Seminar, and the Pulitzer finalist Omnium Gatherum. She won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, which isn’t really between Hollywood … Continue reading »
Annabelle Gurwitch came to broad attention as a comic performer on the TBS television series “Dinner and a Movie.” I believe she played Dinner. Or perhaps Movie. She has since written several books, most recently I See You Made an Effort, a humorous look at turning fifty. PERSON: Robin Shlein PLACE: Camp Blue Star THING: … Continue reading »
In 2008, he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with green fluorescent protein. Its best known application? “It’s the reason they give in the movie for why Bruce Banner, when he gets angry, turns into the Hulk and becomes green.” Is it any wonder he’s proud? PERSON: Osamu Shimomura PLACE: Cambridge Molecular … Continue reading »
Roberta Smith is the senior art critic for the New York Times; her husband, Jerry Saltz, is the senior art critic for New York magazine. They stride across the art world like colossi or perhaps colusses, depending on your preference—astute, eloquent, wedded colussi. They joined us for a rare joint appearance on stage at the … Continue reading »
Pianist Emanuel Ax was born in Ukraine and lived in Warsaw and Winnipeg before arriving in New York, where he studied at Julliard and later at Columbia, earning a BA not in music but in French. One sign of his esteem as a performer is the roster of colleagues who’ve regularly performed with him, including … Continue reading »
He is the son of the the writer Dominick Dunne and the nephew of two more writers, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. That’s not really an accomplishment; it’s an accident of birth, like being French, only better, but it would have seemed coy, somehow, not to mention it. I first became aware of him … Continue reading »
She is the writer and performer of two off-Broadway shows, a regular on The View, an Emmy-winning writer & producer for Rosie O’Donnell. All very impressive. But what I like about her: she is the anthropologist of post-war suburban Jewish life – my life, the world I grew up in – which she observes acutely, … Continue reading »
Hard rocker and host of the Cartoon Network show “Destroy Build Destroy,” he is our first guest to have a hit record and to give a motivational speech at Yale. Best known for his songs It’s Time to Party, Party Hard and Party ‘Til You Puke, he has elevated the party from ephemeral fun to … Continue reading »
A member of the psychology department at Hunter College, Diana Reiss is an expert in dolphin cognition who has conducted ingenious experiments to demonstrate that these creatures recognize themselves in mirrors: that they are self-aware. She is, incidentally, our first guest to postpone her visit until she returned from a marine mammal conference which, I … Continue reading »
Many of us got to like him in Do the Right Thing and got to like him even more as he became part of the rep company of Spike Lee then of the Coen Brothers. And that represents just a few of his more than 60 films. His latest is Fading Gigolo: he wrote it, … Continue reading »
Like many people, I encountered Roddy Doyle through the Barrytown trilogy – The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van—three terrific novels, and later movies, set in the same fictional working class neighborhood of Dublin, novels that do things with dialogue I hadn’t thought possible. His newest, The Guts, revisits Jimmy Rabbitte – founder of The … Continue reading »
Best known for her memoir Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book is a novel, The Signature of All Things. According to her official website, she lives on the Delaware River, in Frenchtown, New Jersey, information I take as an invitation to drop in. But I’ll call first, so there’s food in the house. And … Continue reading »