The greatest gift to any humorist is a parent who is impossible to please. This writer, a co-creator of Late Night With David Letterman, describes a note in her mother’s copy of David Copperfield. “It said, ‘Not one of his best works. I was disappointed.’ If she was giving Dickens a hard time, what did I think that I was going to get?” … Continue reading »
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 »
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 »
Many of us become interested in our family’s history later in life, but the author of the celebrated memoir The Mighty Franks was drawing family trees before he was 14. Who they were shapes who we are. A conversation at KGB’s Red Room. Music from Lauren Lee. Produced with Lori Schwarz. Continue reading »
Admired for his astute observations of the upper classes and the art world, he is loath to write about, let alone revisit, scenes of his own past: “I don’t want to see a bunch of young people running around doing what I used to do.” With music from the suspiciously youthful Vanisha Gould and the … Continue reading »
A novelist and Pulitzer-winning columnist, when she was in college she babysat Maggie Haberman, who grew up to be a terrific political reporter. A torch is passed, a head is spinning: mine. Plus music from the splendid quartet Ethel; some other part of my body is awhirl. PERSON: Charles Dickens PLACE: 229 West 43 … Continue reading »
Decades ago she was aiming for med school until she read the college catalogs. “Some of them were polite and said, ‘Not accepting negro students at this time,’” she recalls. “I guess come back in twenty years.” I’d have plunged into rage and despair; she became a first-rate science writer. A conversation at Columbia … Continue reading »
Much admired for his his autobiographical novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, and his work on French literature and culture, he is unashamed of his youthful craving for fame, noting: “If you say it in French, ‘gloire,’ it sounds better.” Well, sure: what doesn’t? A conversation at La Maison Française with music from Rich Jenkins. PERSON: … Continue reading »
Observe the world with “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist,” urges the writer and environmental advocate Miriam Horn, citing Nabokov. She is describing not just how to see but how to be. Her other philosophical advice: live like the Ponderosa pine. Is this metaphor or pantheism? A conversation at the … Continue reading »
Poet Sonia Sanchez and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates each love Howard University, but it’s a complicated relationship. “Howard didn’t really want me to teach there,” she says. And for him: “I was never a great student at Howard University, but I was a great student of Howard University.” Love: it’s never simple. Two writers, two … Continue reading »
Born in America, the daughter of immigrants, writer Gish Jen recalls that, “When we were growing up, people would often say: your father is very Chinese.” Not just a little Chinese – very Chinese. What did they mean by that? She answers astutely, with reference to her father’s unlikely memoir, the Tianamen Square tank … Continue reading »