He’s a (now former) member of The Washington Post’s editorial board, a commentator on the PBS NewsHour, anchor of The Weekend on MSNBC, author of Yet Here I Am. He is liberal in his politics, conservative in his dress. “Absolutely. I love a good, wild outfit, on someone else.”
When this drummer was a kid, his father introduced him to an array of music, from Tito Puente to Dobie Gray. “He bought himself a La-Z-Boy chair. He would sit there after dinner, smoke a cigarette, and zone out listening to music.” Bad for the lungs, great for the soul. The making of a musician. …
A columnist for The Nation and a professor of political science at Tulane University, Melissa Harris-Perry is particularly astute about gender, race and politics, which she explores in her recent book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. In addition to writing, teaching, and raising her daughter, in her copious free time she … Continue reading »
A contributor to the New Yorker for fifty years, he is particularly admired for his writing about food and crime, a combination we leave to more subtle minds to untangle. He is the winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor for his collection, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff. On … Continue reading »
A professor of psychology at Harvard, Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and a writer on language, mind, and human nature. His most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, a title that all but begs some wiseguy interviewer to take a swing at him. He famously defended Larry … Continue reading »
Cartoonist Al Jaffee is the creator of the Mad Magazine Fold-In and Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. He waas 92 when recorded this conversation, the magazine’s longest-running contributor, partly explained by his remark, “Serious people my age are dead.” PERSON: Harvey Kurtzman PLACE: The Muthaiga Country Club, Nairobi, Kenya THING: A MAD fold-in Continue reading »
Historian Eric Foner is particularly admired for his writing on reconstruction. His most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, won pretty much every prize going including the Pulitzer and a—can this be right?—Cy Young Award. Probably a typo. He is our only guest to have written for robots, revising the scripts … Continue reading »
Rachel Dratch isn’t just from Massachusetts, she is the voice of Massachusetts, at least for fans of Saturday Night Live from 1999 to 2006. These days, she appears often on Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City. This episode, recorded in 2013, was posted as a podcast but never broadcasted. Here it is, recut and … Continue reading »
Ma Nishtana is the pen name of Shais Rison, a 30-year-old, fifth-generation, African-American, Orthodox Jew. A writer and film-maker, he is prominent among Jews of Color. Asked if he identifies more as an African-American or a Jew, he once said: “When I walk down the street, nobody says, ‘Hey, look at that Jewish guy.’” PERSON: … Continue reading »
She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s called a standup comic, but is she? She doesn’t tell jokes, she tells stories. And she doesn’t so much tell them as perform them, as a gifted actor might. Randy and Maria met by email when he wrote the Ethicist column for the Times, and she wanted to discuss the … Continue reading »
A history professor at the CUNY graduate center, David Nasaw knows his two-fisted titans of 20th C. America. He’s written much praised biographies of William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie and, most recently, Joseph P. Kennedy. By the way: not a bootlegger. Kennedy. Well, Nasaw isn’t either. As far as we know. But he is a … Continue reading »
Jody Williams calls herself an average woman, but the Nobel Committee saw it differently when they awarded her the 1997 Peace Prize for her work toward the clearing and banning of land mines. This extraordinary ordinary woman more convincingly asserts that change is achieved by grassroots activism, from the ground up not from the top … Continue reading »
Jack Hitt began in journalism as editor of the Paper Clip, his Charleston, SC, grade-school literary magazine. He has since risen or, depending on your perspective, fallen to writing for Harpers and the NY Times and presenting great pieces on “This American Life.” His newest book is Bunch of Amateurs. This podcast was recorded in … Continue reading »
Philippe Petit entered the consciousness of many New Yorkers on August 7, 1974, when he walked—danced!—on a high wire he’d secretly strung between the towers of the World Trade Center, an incredible feat revisited in the 2008 documentary Man on Wire. Philippe joins Randy to talk about his passion for knots, also captured in his … Continue reading »