Through her sharp and biting political commentary—whether as host of the podcast Fast Politics, as a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, or as a political analyst on MSNBC—Molly Jong-Fast has, over the past decade, become something of a household name. But, as the daughter of the once-famous author and second-wave feminist Erica Jong—whose 1973 novel Fear of Flying catapulted her into the literary limelight—she has actually been in the public eye for much longer, decades before this more recent notoriety of her own making. Jong-Fast’s latest book, the searing, heartbreaking (but also, at times, hilarious) memoir How to Lose Your Mother, is in some sense an effort to take her story back after being in the shadow of her narcissistic, too often out-of-reach mother for so long. It’s also a book about aging and frailty, and an extremely difficult, gut-wrenching year: In 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia, right around the same time that Molly’s husband learned he had a rare cancer.

On the episode, Jong-Fast talks about her own actual fear of flying, in addition to her mother’s book of the same name; 27 years of sobriety and how her time in A.A. has transformed her life; and the importance of confronting the vicissitudes of aging and one’s passage through time.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes:

Molly Jong-Fast

[4:28] “Fear of Flying” (1973)

[4:28] Erica Jong

[4:49] “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir”

[7:53] “Spartacus” (1951)

[7:53] “April Morning” (1961)

[7:53] “The Immigrants” (1977)

[9:15] Lee Krasner

[10:04] Susan Faludi

[10:04] “Backlash” (1991)

[12:09] “Fear and Flying Erica & Erotica in Connecticut” (1980)

[12:09] “Fanny” (1980)

[14:57] Marty Seif

[18:26] Special Guest: Erica Jong (2023)

[19:39] Pan Am Flight 001

[21:11] “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005)

[21:11] “Notes to John” (2025)

[26:54] “The Sex Doctors in the Basement” (2005)

[36:46] “Normal Girl” (2000)

[38:52] Jacob Bernstein

[38:52] Carl Bernstein

[38:52] Stalin Peace Prize

[46:05] Michael Tomasky

[48:55] Hazelden

[49:57] “How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom”

Few artists aim to make sense of the subjectivity and complexity of time and space quite like the Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade. In each of her works, ranging from sculptures and large-scale public installations to films, photographs, and works on paper, Kwade displays an astute sense of temporality and the ticking hands of the clock. Her practice, in a literal and figurative sense, is a quest to understand time as a ruler and shaper of our lives and of our world. For her latest exhibition, “Telos Tales,” on view at Pace Gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood through August 15, Kwade has created three monumental steel-frame sculptures with treelike limbs alongside new mixed-media works in an effort to engage the intangible nature of time. As with all her work, “Telos Tales” is philosophical, illusionistic, and inspires wonder: Long after a viewer has seen it, it will leave them questioning.

On the episode, Kwade considers the unfathomability of all things, finds humor in being human, and explains what a relief it is to know that some questions have no clear answers—and never will. 

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes:

Alicja Kwade

[13:19] “Alicja Kwade: Telos Tales” at Pace Gallery

[16:56] “Hiroshi Sugimoto on Photography as a Form of Timekeeping”

[18:41] “Alicja Kwade: Pretopia” (2025)

[24:42] On Kawara’s Date Paintings

[25:04] “Alicja Kwade & Agnes Martin: Rhythm, Equilibrium, and Time” (2024)

[25:04] “Gegen den Lauf” (2012-2014)

[29:48] “Stellar Day” (2013)

[31:44] “Against the Run” (2015)

[31:44] “Against the Run” (2019)

[31:44] Pinacoteca Agnelli Art Center

[35:04] “88 Seconds”  (2017)

[35:04] Eadweard Muybridge

[39:24] Hiroshi Sugimoto

[49:00] Salvador Dalí

[49:00] Harry Houdini

[49:00] Kazimir Malevich

[59:27] “iPhone” (2017)

[59:27] “Computer (PowerMac)” (2017)

[01:04:47] “LinienLand” (2018)

[01:04:47] “Alicja Kwade: Parapivot” (2019)

[01:04:47] “Alicja Kwade: Viva Arte Viva” (2017)

[01:08:30] “L’ordre des Mondes (Totem)” (2024)

[01:13:50] Jason Farago

[01:13:50] “Celestial Visions on the Met Roof”

Richard Christiansen believes that the true definition of luxury is having one’s senses on full blast—seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing, and touching the world around by engaging in its beauty and bounty to the fullest. This idea is at the heart of his company, the garden-pleasure apothecary Flamingo Estate, which is both a place—a home and garden on a seven-acre property in the hills of Los Angeles—and a brand, which operates a global farming collective and sells wellness, beauty, and “home essentials” products. In just a few years, Flamingo Estate has collaborated with cultural figures such as Julianne Moore, Martha Stewart, and Ai Weiwei, and created some 200 or so products, from C.S.A.-style farm boxes and flower arrangements, to scented candles and a rosé wine, to body washes and chocolates. Capturing the spirit of all this is a new book, Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive, which tells the story of his company’s rapid rise and includes interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda, John Legend, and Alice Waters.

On the episode, Christiansen talks about his lifelong connection with beekeeping and honey; why more brands should embrace “radical inconsistency” in their products; and how reading a book by Jane Goodall, and later befriending the anthropologist and conservationist, changed the course of his life.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Richard Christiansen

[4:24] Flamingo Estate

[8:05] Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive

[46:21] Jane Goodall

[12:48] Alice Waters

[15:06] Harvey

[35:35] Chandelier Creative

[45:51] Benetton

[45:51] Colors

[50:35] Rumiko Murata

[52:35] Owl Bureau

[58:28] “The Summer Day”

Over the past decade—and especially in the last year—the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has swiftly risen to become one of the most prominent African voices in art. At age 32, he has already exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney, on Cockatoo Island (his work “No Friend But the Mountains” is currently on view there through June 8, though that date may change because of the coronavirus pandemic), as well as at the 2019 Frieze Sculpture presentation at Rockefeller Center in New York and the Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He’s created large-scale public installations around the world, including in Milan (with the Trussardi Foundation, also in 2019) and Athens (during Documenta 14, in 2017). Mahama’s work has also been shown at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester (also in 2019), the Norval Foundation in Cape Town (yet again in 2019), and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2015). He is represented by the highly respected White Cube gallery. The Africa Report, a Paris-based news magazine that focuses on African politics and economics, recently named Mahama one of the 100 most influential Africans today. In addition to his art-making, he is the founder of an artist-run nonprofit cultural institution and exhibition space, the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), which opened a year ago (yes, also in 2019) in Tamale, a city in the north of Ghana.

Central to Mahama’s inspiration is a specific material: jute sacks. Working with a team of collaborators to repurpose the burlap bags, which are traditionally used to transport cocoa beans, he sews together installations that range from wall- or room-size to monumental, often draping the fabric on, around, and over prominent architectural sites. Though his pieces have often been compared to the “wrap” work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, that is not necessarily an apt analogy, or at least it’s just a surface-level one. While similar in scale and scope to Christo’s ambitious environmental artworks, Mahama’s creations, like his overall practice, are socially oriented and focused on concerns such as labor, migration, globalization, and economic exchange.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Mahama discusses with Spencer his fascination with jute sacks as a material; his views on “Ghanaian time” and Africa’s global influence; his unorthodox upbringing (he grew up among nine siblings and with a polygamous father who had four wives, and was sent to boarding at age 5); and his dreams for the SCCA.

Julia Watson is really into TEK. Not necessarily the Silicon Valley variety of tech, but rather traditional ecological knowledge. An anthropologist, environmentalist, activist, and landscape designer, Watson has become a leading researcher of indigenous communities, closely studying the vast implications of their centuries-old (in certain cases, millennia-old) innovations. In the face of today’s climate crisis, Watson’s new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (Taschen), a culmination of years of research in 18 countries around the globe, is poised to become something of a bible for a growing design movement that’s focused on harnessing nature-based technologies and better understanding how we can all live in closer harmony with the earth.

Born in Australia, Watson studied landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she focused on eco-technologies and preservation of sacred spaces. Currently, she teaches urban design at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Planning and Preservation, as well as at Harvard, and runs her own design studio that’s oriented toward the practice of “rewilding.”

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Watson speaks with Andrew about her deep research into various indigenous communities, the symbiotic relationship between culture and nature, her perspective on the recent Australian bushfires, and more. 

Since establishing the Pioneer Works nonprofit cultural center in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood in 2013, artist Dustin Yellin has slowly grown the place into a powerhouse hub at the nexus of art, technology, music, and science (with literature and food sprinkled in). Like the beautifully complex glass sculptures he creates, Pioneer Works is a richly layered mishmash. Consider this spring’s lineup of programs: One night this April, there’s a performance by the Ghanaian electronic and rap artist Ata Kak; another night, there’s a “Supper Club” dinner featuring traditional Japanese home cooking by chef Emily Yuen and owner Maiko Kyogoku of the New York City restaurant Bessou; on May 2, there’s the institution's annual benefit, this year co-chaired by Austin and Gabriela Hearst, and honoring poet, essayist, playwright Claudia Rankine, as well as economist Marilyn Simons and her billionaire hedge-fund manager husband, James. Currently on display in the galleries is a performance set by artist Jaimie Warren (through April 12) and a showing of four Japanese avant-garde films from the 1960s and ’70s (through April 19). This is to say nothing of the classes, roundtables, and residencies Pioneer Works offers, or its book-publishing arm.

Pioneer Works’s eclectic, wide-ranging buffet of intellectual offerings is pure Yellin. With boundless energy, enigmatic bravado, and a collaborative spirit, he has built a multifaceted community not unlike what Andy Warhol had at The Factory from the ’60s to ’80s—only it’s somewhat more institutional and professionalized, and with a new executive director, Eric Shiner (formerly of White Cube gallery, Sotheby’s, and the Andy Warhol Museum), at the helm. As Yellin points out on this episode of Time Sensitive, maintaining a certain scale and intimacy at Pioneer Works is essential to him, with future growth potentially coming from building satellite locations in other cities. As he sees it, the institution could become the next Stanford, Harvard, or MIT Media Lab—a new outlet for education, an incubator that brings together the best and brightest minds on earth in a fresh way, a place to foster the shapers of the future.

On the episode, Andrew speaks with Yellin about everything from his wide-ranging dreams for Pioneer Works; to his ambitious plans for “The Bridge,” a large-scale monument to the end of oil; to his harrowing memories of Hurricane Sandy.

Nathan Myhrvold is no ordinary chef. With two master’s degrees (one in mathematical economics, the other in geophysics and space physics) and a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics, he is also a technologist who did postdoctoral research with Stephen Hawking. From 1986 to 1999, Myhrvold was the chief strategist and chief technology officer at Microsoft, where he worked closely with Bill Gates on future planning and developing the company’s software. (During this time, he also co-authored Gates’s 1995 best-seller, The Road Ahead; in 1999, at age 40, he retired from the company.) Now, as the CEO of the firm Intellectual Ventures, which he co-founded in 2000, he develops and licenses intellectual property. The company owns upwards of 30,000 assets, nearly 900 of which were invented by Myrhvold himself. So where does cooking come in? Long a gastronomer and foodie (before the latter term was even a thing), Myhrvold began to pursue his passion for cuisine early on. During his Microsoft years (with Gates’s blessing), he took time off to attend the La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy, and later even apprenticed part-time at Rover's restaurant in Seattle. For a time, he was the “chief gastronomic officer” of the Zagat Survey.

It wasn’t until about a decade ago, though, that things really took off for Myhrvold on the food front. In 2011, he established a full-fledged publishing platform with the release of his six-volume Modernist Cuisine, an encyclopedic whirlwind into the science of contemporary cooking. A behemoth of a book, at 2,438 pages, it took about three years to produce, with several dozen people involved. Subsequent iterations have followed: Modernist Cuisine at Home (2012), The Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013), and Modernist Bread (2017). A Modernist Pizza book is currently in the works. The series has become a cult favorite, highly respected by many of the world’s top chefs, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. Especially remarkable about the project—aside from the inventive recipes—is the hyperrealist, meticulously executed photography. Many of the pictures are made through a “cutaway” technique involving machinery to that slices pots, pans, and ovens in half to offer a literal inside look into the processes behind the dishes—a pork roast atop embers, say, or broccoli steaming in a pot. It is through these images that Myhrvold's many talents and interests in science, food, and art collide, and to potent effect.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer speaks with Myhrvold about his journey into sous vide cooking, the problems he sees with the Slow Food movement, why food photography has never been considered a high art, and more.

Since launching her eponymous label in 2015, the Uruguayan-born, New York–based designer Gabriela Hearst has become known for her sincere, forward-thinking approach to sustainability; her slow-growth business ethos; the long waiting lists for her limited-production handbags; her impeccable tailoring; and her high-quality collections that, season after season, have consistently been hailed as critics’ favorites. For her, sustainability isn’t just a buzzword or an item to tick off a list; it’s something essential and, most importantly, actionable. 

Last year, Hearst presented the industry’s first-ever carbon-neutral runway show. A collaboration with Bureau Betak and EcoAct, the presentation was done completely sans blow dryers, straighteners, or curling irons, models were sourced locally, and a carbon-offset fund for the energy-related production costs was donated to the Hifadhi-Livelihoods Project in Kenya. Hearst regularly uses deadstock in her collections. She recently made all of the brand’s packaging biodegradable and compostable, and also tweaked her supply chain to ship by boat instead of by air freight. Hearst’s new eco-conscious store in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, designed by Norman Foster, includes custom furniture made from a tree that fell in a storm and herringbone oak flooring reclaimed from a military barracks. Her preferred word for sustainability? Accountability. 

Raised on a ranch that has been in her family for six generations—which her father bequeathed to her in 2011 when he passed away—Hearst, early in her life, became interested in where things come from and how they’re made, and in understanding the true value of utility, namely that making well-constructed things that stand the test of time matters. Now, in the age of climate change, her less-but-better mindset has become all the more relevant and pressing. Creating timeless, long-lasting clothing, she says, is the only reasonable (and yes, sustainable) way forward. Eschewing a trend-driven outlook in favor of one that’s about creating fewer, better items that her customers will keep forever, Hearst continues to be informed by her upbringing on the farm. It’s an approach that appears to be working: The company had a turnover of between $15 and $20 million in sales revenue in 2018, and last year LVMH Luxury Ventures bought a minority stake in it (the majority is owned 
by Hearst and her husband and business partner, John Augustine “Austin” Hearst, a TV and film producer and media executive who is the grandson of William Randolph Hearst).

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Hearst speaks with Spencer about everything from her youth on a ranch in rural Uruguay, to her personal definitions of sustainability and luxury, to her roundabout path to becoming a fashion designer, to her mother’s Zen Buddhist teachings.

In both his work and his life, Tony Fadell constantly imagines Version 2.0 (if not 3.0, or 4.0 and beyond). On a mission to shape the future through forward-thinking design, engineering, invention, and investing, he is probably most widely recognized for both founding the smart-home products company Nest and for his instrumental involvement in developing the iPod. Through his newest venture, the appropriately coined advisory firm Future Shape, Fadell lends his expertise to promising entrepreneurs and companies, funding and advising a range of environmentally minded startups, such as the biologically produced leather-maker Modern Meadow, semiconductor company Phononic, and micro-LED developer Rohinni. 

After starting his career at General Magic, an early spin-off of Apple, Fadell moved to the electronics behemoth Philips and then, eventually, to Apple, where he started in 2001 and was, from 2006 to 2008, on the executive team that created the iPhone. In 2010, he founded Nest, which Google acquired less than three years later for $3.2 billion. Having played a crucial role in helping many of the most important technological Silicon Valley innovations of the 2000s come to fruition, Fadell has since decamped for Paris, where he now runs Future Shape. Recently, he spent an entire year in Bali with his family.

Rebooting and welcoming change has been a constant thread throughout Fadell’s career, and also in his personal life. While he’s known for his extreme work ethic—early in his career, he famously had a bed in his office—Fadell recognizes the need to take time off in order to explore, and to create space for inner growth outside of the workplace. On this episode, Fadell and Andrew Zuckerman discuss his youth in Detroit; the perils of screen addiction; the external pressures of a career-oriented culture; and paving the way for a healthier society, online and off.

Suketu Mehta tells a story about pinkie fingers, dancing and kissing. It is as confounding as it sounds. And utterly heartbreaking, too. In his assertive and essential new book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto—as well as on this episode of Time Sensitive—he describes the scene: Friendship Park, a half-acre fence on the U.S.-Mexican border. A Mexican man living in the U.S., who hasn’t seen his mother in 17 years, and has been working hard to send money back to her all that time, at last reunites with her at that fateful fence. But because of its thick and rigid design, he can’t see her clearly. Through the holes in the fence, mother and son can only fit stick their pinkies, wagging them back and forth, gently touching, caressing, connecting—but only for a few moments. This small act serves as a greater metaphor about immigration, one with vast implications and consequences, and not just in America but around our world today.

Mehta, a Calcutta-born, New York–based journalist and N.Y.U. professor who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2005 novel Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, is full of stories like this one. (The dancing, kissing pinkies, however, may be among his most gut-wrenching and tear-inducing tales.) As a reporter and writer, Mehta is slow and methodical in his approach, and it shows in his rich and varied body of work, which spans decades and is written with the elegance and grace of a poet. A sort of modern-day Walt Whitman, he has the rare ability to home in on deeply personal human stories and craft narratives around them that reveal larger truths about culture, politics, and society.

On this episode, Mehta speaks with Spencer Bailey about his challenging high school years as an Indian immigrant growing up in Queens, his belief in how the future of democracy “rests on storytelling,” and the importance of considering historical time frames when thinking about today’s contentious immigration debates.

The Dutch-born trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort, founder of the Paris-based consultancy Trend Union, has a knack for being ahead of the curve. In fact, she kind of is the curve, the rare mind who—with her sharp eye, wide-ranging tastes, and quick wit—is able to situate herself within past, present, and future. She astutely understands historical markers of time and often predicts, with surprising precision, what the Next Big Thing is. Working for clients across a variety of industries, from fashion and textiles, to interiors and hospitality, to cars and cosmetics, to retail and food, Edelkoort travels the world studying the subtle market shifts that shape our lives. A sociocultural omnivore with a deep design knowledge, she’s the dean of the Hybrid Design Studies program at Parsons School of Design, where she’s spearheading a new M.F.A. in textile studies.

Since founding Trend Union, in 1975, Edelkoort has gained a cult following as a sustainability-minded soothsayer. For more than three decades, corporate leaders have gravitated toward her, as one would a shaman, for strategic, big-picture advice. In the late ’80s, she started giving her now-infamous trend presentations, in which she unpacks, interprets, and predicts the market movements developing before us. An archaeologist of the modern day, Edelkoort is part curator, part sociologist, digging up vast amounts of information, much of it visual, so as to infer, intuit, and map out complex explanations of the now. Her findings aren’t fanciful, even if on the surface they may appear to be high-minded. They are indeed quite often pragmatic, if not also paradigmatic. Sometimes—as was the case with her 2015 “Anti-Fashion Manifesto,” a treatise against the wastefulness and greed of the global fashion industry—they also tend to be refreshingly direct and pointed. 

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Edelkoort speaks with Spencer Bailey about a movement back toward the farm and nature; the notion of animism (i.e., that a soul is embedded in everything); combatting fear in a time of prolific fear-mongering; and her reasonably optimistic belief in a more collaborative future.

Craig Robins strongly believes that all good things take time. Since launching his vast real estate enterprise Dacra in 1987, at age 24, he has, with this ideology in mind, become one of Miami’s shrewdest mover-shakers. Intimately involved in the revitalization of South Beach in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Robins helped restore—and save from demolition—several now-prized Art Deco properties, including The Webster (designed in 1939 by Henry Hohauser as a hotel and now home to Laure Hériard Dubreuil’s flagship fashion boutique). From there he began to quietly shift his focus across Biscayne Bay, to the Design District neighborhood, unveiling the beginnings of his ambitious plans in 2002. A visionary thinker, tinkerer, and doer, Robins also got involved in bringing the Art Basel fair to Miami in the early aughts and in 2005 co-founded the Design Miami collectible design fair.

Thinking about things slowly and holistically, Robins—unlike so many others in his line of work—does not follow a build-it-cheap-and-fast-and-flip-it edict. His is a long-haul, less-but-better vision. Robins cares deeply about the urban fabric and the textures of the city, about architectural serendipity and surprise, about moments of wonder and beauty and joy. A finger-on-the-pulse master of cultivating culture, he has thoughtfully constructed a synergistic amalgam of art, architecture, design, dining, fashion, and urban planning within the Design District, a New Urbanism–infused neighborhood that seems to subtly morph every month, if not every week, bit by bit. While it hasn’t been without its detractors and naysayers, the Design District clearly offers an alternative, human-scale approach to city building. Now home to standouts such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (which opened in its new location in late 2017) and the Pharrell Williams–owned Swan restaurant and Bar Bevy, the Design District is beginning to show its potential not as just a luxury shopping mall—though it’s certainly that, too—but as a dynamic cultural hub.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Robins talks with Spencer Bailey about his big-picture vision, his early career helping rejuvenate South Beach, his forward-thinking approach to bolstering Miami culture and his obsession with river rafting and disconnecting in nature.

Christian Madsbjerg makes sense. Literally and figuratively, in all the definitions of the phrase. With roots in philosophy and political science, Madsbjerg brings a refreshingly human approach to his work as an author, screenwriter, professor, entrepreneur, and business advisor. In the face of some of the greatest concerns of our time—the climate crisis, technological upheaval—he challenges assumptions and advocates for reflection, deep reading, single-tasking, solitude, and yes, slowness. Though he doesn’t abide by the “digital detox” method, Madsbjerg does operate without a smartphone.

While Madsbjerg is not immune to the contemporary swell of panic and anxiety, his approach is calm, methodical, and sometimes humorous. The co-founder of ReD Associates—a strategy and consulting firm that takes an interdisciplinary approach to advising big companies through observation, social science, and problem solving—the multifaceted Madsbjerg is an astute observer of human behavior. The author of Sensemaking: What Makes Human Intelligence Essential in the Age of the Algorithm and co-author of The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Hardest Business Problem, he is in the process of writing a book called How to Pay Attention and a comedic screenplay about immigration in the U.S., tentatively titled H1B. He also teaches social science, social theory, and discourse analysis at the Parsons School of Design at The New School. 

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Madsbjerg speaks to Andrew Zuckerman about the importance of long-view historical research, the problematic nature of “design thinking,” the deep value of a liberal arts education, and the relevance today of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical perspectives on time and technology.

To the majority of humankind, rocks may appear to be static, timeless objects, but not to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud. In her mind, rocks are rich pieces of text that have evolved (and continue to evolve) across millennia, and are therefore incredibly timeful. “They almost demand reading,” Bjornerud says on this episode of Time Sensitive. “You have the feeling that you’re communicating with some larger, wilder, more ancient wisdom.” A two-time Senior Fulbright Scholar, a professor of geology at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and an expert on the geophysics of earthquakes and mountain building, Bjornerud serves as a sort of geological translator of these “texts,” reading their encrypted messages and stories—tracing their etymologies, essentially—and from there inferring why things are the way they are. Bjornerud’s translations shine across her four books, including the newly published Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.

On the episode, she discusses the power of looking at the world through a Deep Time lens, why we’re currently in what she considers a “golden age” of geoscience, and what a “time literate” society would mean for humanity and the planet.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Marcia Bjornerud

[15:18] Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

[07:16] Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

[07:16] “Studying Stones Can Rock Your World”

[07:16] Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities

[07:16] Carbon cycle

[09:47] Rock deformation

[13:54] The overview effect

[17:42] “Geology Is Like Augmented Reality for the Planet”

[21:28] Colonization of Mars

[21:28] Anthropocene

[29:06] Planned obsolescence

[29:06] Green technology revolution

[31:40] Seventh Generation Principle

[34:01] Stonehenge

[38:29] University of Minnesota

[41:02] Svalbard, Norway

[41:02] Norwegian Polar Institute

[44:15] Yoshihide Ohta

[50:06] “Lost Time in Amatrice”

[54:19] Kola Superdeep Borehole

Many people turn to spiritual professionals such as astrologists and tarot card readers to help answer life’s most essential and cosmic questions. Eric Standop—international speaker, advisor, author, and facial diagnostics expert—guides people to look inward through a different method: by examining their faces. Through analyzing facial characteristics and behaviors, Standop informs his clients of their talents, emotions, personality types, and overall health. 

No stranger to self-doubt and career burnout, Standop spent years seeking fulfillment through a rollercoaster career of long hours and travel in the entertainment industry. Early on, after starting out as a radio and television speaker, and then moving to a role in cinema management, Standop began to suffer from fatigue and skin irritations. He decided to take a six-month break before reentering the corporate arena, this time as a P.R. director in computer gaming. Later, he transitioned to high-pressure positions in events and marketing. The stress would again take its toll. One morning, he awoke to find that he had lost all feeling in his arms and legs. Determined to turn his health around, Standop decided to backpack through South Africa. There he encountered a face reader for the first time, and became fascinated with the practice. Standop would go on to learn from masters on three different continents. 

While we all communicate through facial behavior and recognition on some level, becoming an expert face reader takes significant time and dedication, as with developing any other skill. After several years of gathering information, both about himself and about his practice, Standop set out to teach others. Now, he coaches a wide variety of clients, from business executives to law enforcement officials to even—every once in a while, and only when pressed—babies. Standop’s first book, Read The Face: Face Reading for Success in Your Career, Relationships, and Health (St. Martin’s), came out this fall. 

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Standop and Andrew Zuckerman go deep into the origins of face reading, the function of smell in medical diagnostics, the ups and downs of his circuitous career, and how he ultimately found inner happiness.

Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, the artist Rashid Johnson had a “mixed bag”—racially, at least—of close friends. There were, he says, “four black guys, two Asian guys, two Jewish guys, a white English guy.…” They still keep in touch today via a text chain. This perspective, combined with the one ingrained in him by his Ph.D. history professor mother, who introduced him from a young age to the works of 20th-century African American writers such as Amiri Baraka, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, and his tinkerer father, who owned a Wicker Park electronics shop, led to a deep, contextualized curiosity about the human condition: who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. 

This multicultural (and intellectual) background continues to feed Johnson—as water and light would a plant—growing his insatiable appetite for better understanding the richness, complications, and contradictions of being human, each of us with our own roots, carrying our own energies—no one necessarily a part of any “monolithic experience.” It has also naturally led him to explore the social, cultural, and political realities of being a black man in today’s world. His multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, drawing, sculpture, filmmaking, and installation art, is both biographical and collective. Underlying much of Johnson’s work is the idea of escapism—that each of us, on some level, yearns for another reality. Such a narrative is at the core of his directorial debut, HBO’s Native Son, released earlier this year and based on the 1940 Richard Wright novel of the same name (the screenplay was written by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks). It is also at the heart of “The Hikers,” a ballet film shot on the side of a mountain in Aspen, currently on view at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (through Nov. 10) and opening on Nov. 12 (through Jan. 25, 2020) at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where it will be shown alongside several other works by Johnson, including ceramic mosaics, paintings, and a large-scale sculpture.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Johnson talks with Spencer Bailey about the steep challenge of turning Wright’s famed novel into a feature film; using materials such as shea butter, black soap, and plants in his artworks; why he remains somewhat ambivalent about the idea of “wokeness”; and his ongoing fascination with the complexity and diversity of not only blackness but also whiteness.

It’s safe to say that, if it weren’t for art historian RoseLee Goldberg, performance art would not be what it is today. Not even close. The founder of the nonprofit organization Performa, which for nearly 15 years has been putting on biennials of live performance around New York City, has for decades helped shape and steer the conversation about what “performance art” even is—and what, at its best and most inventive, it’s capable of achieving. A scholar, critic, and New York University professor, Goldberg has written important texts on the subject, including Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson), and has established new modalities for organizing and presenting performances. Her astute understanding of the multidisciplinary medium is unparalleled.

With Performa, Goldberg has radically shifted the landscape of the field through collaborations with hundreds of artists, including Adam Pendleton (in what was a breakout moment for the artist), Yoko Ono, Rashid Johnson, Joan Jonas, and Julie Mehretu. Following previous overarching themes like Futurism (2009), Surrealism (2013), and Dada (2017), this year’s biennial, which runs from November 1 through 24, will explore ideas about the Bauhaus on its centenary year. Among the performances will be works by Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng-Ta, who will unpack Western “influencers” and reality TV culture; Gaetano Pesce, who, at the Salon 94 Design gallery, will create a studio atmosphere, evoking the typical conditions of a day, via his assistants molding, pouring, and crafting; and Bunny Rogers, who will turn various spaces at a public high school—including hallways, a gym, and an auditorium—into a “living installation.”

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Goldberg speaks with Spencer Bailey about her upbringing as a young dancer in Durban, South Africa, when that country was under apartheid rule; her adventurous journey into the beating heart of the art world, first in London and ultimately in New York; and her path to establishing Performa—and elevating performance art as we know it in the process.

Daniel Brush’s acute eye for detail, as well as the rigor and vigor he brings to his craft, comes through loud and clear in all of his creations. A poet of materiality, he is at once a metalworker, a jewelry-maker, a philosopher, an engineer, a blacksmith, a painter, and a sculptor. The late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a friend of Brush’s, once said that Brush’s work is “the result of years of incubation, years of isolation and complete immersion, which have produced his unique and mysterious objects—they are made objects, and yet they seem found.” Sacks was not exaggerating when he said years. Brush’s oeuvre—on full display in the new Rizzoli book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture”—is the accumulation of four-plus decades of steadfast, heads-down, solitary work in his Manhattan studio, alongside his wife and accomplice, Olivia, allowing for only select visits from his closest friends and certain patrons, scholars, and students. 

Brush’s imagination has always run wild—from his beginnings as a concert pianist in his youth, through his early years as a painter, to now, he has always demonstrated a rare intensity. For those who have laid eyes on his intricate cuffs, brooches, necklaces, and other pieces, it may be somewhat surprising to hear that it wasn’t until making a wedding ring for Olivia, in 1967, whom he had known for just three days before marrying, that he became interested in jewelry-making. Now, his work—colored by influences from a life of painting and drawing as well as his astute interests in Japanese Noh theater and Asian art—centers around jewels and objects made from a vast assortment of materials, including Afghan lapis lazuli, aluminum, amethyst, gold, Madagascar sapphire, malachite, steel, tektite, topaz, and tourmaline. 

Brush, not surprisingly, also has a deep appreciation for history and collecting. His own made objects, as well as a large library of books and found objects, are stowed or situated around his home and studio, serving, for him, as a record of passing time. Given that his pieces are not traded on the market and rarely available to acquire, Brush’s work decidedly has, as he puts it, “no value.” Instead, he suggests that the value he derives from his work comes from the connections he has developed with patrons and peers who show respect for the complexity of it all. For Brush, it is the most minute connection—the tiniest detail—that so often reveals the largest truth.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Brush’s use of language and storytelling approaches the poetic. He and Spencer Bailey talk about memory (and interpretations of memory); his deep, monkish engagement with a wide variety of materials; and some of his most valuable tools—breathing, language, and light. 

Inge Solheim is a free spirit, a new-age explorer, and a wilderness guide-guru whose sense of freedom hinges upon not caring, at all, about what other people think of him. Leading trips to the most remote places in the world with diverse groups—ranging from scientists, to private clients, to film crews, to people with disabilities—Solheim trains those who are with him to overcome extreme physical and psychological barriers. Among his most memorable expeditions are a trip to the South Pole with Mark Pollock, who had lost his eyesight nine years prior, and a North Pole expedition with an organization called Walking With The Wounded, accompanied by Prince Harry and a team of English wounded soldiers. 

Born in Norway, he grew up in a rather dysfunctional family that left him mostly to his own devices. From a young age, he turned to nature, learning to appreciate solitude—and to be self-sufficient. At 14, Solheim started working at a pizza shop at which he would become a shareholder within a year. At 19, Solheim’s daughter, Marian, was born, and he transitioned into a nine-year “mundane” (his word) finance job, eventually becoming VP of a bank in Norway. While the career prestige was exhilarating in its own right, his passion led him to take on adventure traveling as a full-time profession. 

A rare combination of old soul, hopeless romantic, and youthful pioneer, Solheim chases beauty and adventure, living peripatetically: He resides part-time in Oslo and finds himself gravitating toward Malibu, California, two to three months a year. Reaching the middle of his life, Solheim remains optimistic about almost everything—even climate change—and is currently working on sustainable tourism and travel business. 

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Solheim and Andrew Zuckerman get philosophical about what it means to be an explorer at a time in which it’s practically never been easier to get anywhere in the world; confronting fear, anxiety, and pressure; trauma and its effect on our perceptions of time; and instant gratification and materialism.

David Duchovny may be swooned over as the hunky special agent Fox William Mulder in The X-Files and Hank Moody in Californication, but it should be noted—and, in our opinion, more widely known—that he is also an accomplished novelist. Yes, novelist. In fact, he has published three novels with the highly esteemed publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux since 2015. A fourth novel, called Truly Like Lightning and publicly revealed for the first time on this episode, is in the works.

Primarily known for his acting—which also includes a well-known, ahead-of-its-time role, in the early ’90s, as the trans FBI agent Denise Bryson on Twin Peaks—Duchovny has carved out a name for himself as a screenwriter, director, producer, and musician, too. With an extensive literary pedigree—his father, Amram, was a “closet” writer until late in his life, when he published the novel Coney—Duchovny graduated with a B.A. in English from Princeton in 1982 and began (though never finished) a comparative literature Ph.D. at Yale.

His mastery across both dramatic and comedic acting, as well as his prolificity in writing and music, is impressive in its breadth and wide-ranging in its subject matter. Less than a decade ago, Duchovny began singing and playing guitar, and in 2015, nearly 30 years into his film and television career, he released his first album, Hell or Highwater. That same year, he also published his first novel, Holy Cow. Since then, he has released a second album, Every Third Thought (2018), and published two more books, Bucky F*cking Dent (2016) and Miss Subways (2018). Now, at age 59, Duchovny’s creative energy continues apace across all these mediums—acting, writing, music—with his next novel soon to come out and plans to turn Bucky F*cking Dent into a film.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Duchovny speaks with Spencer Bailey about novel writing, the need to better understand proposed solutions for the climate crisis, his role as Denise in Twin Peaks, and the various twists and turns of his multifaceted life and career.

Jesse Kamm and her beloved waist-hugging, wide-legged “Kamm pants” embody minimalism. A proponent of producing fewer, better things, Kamm has committed to supporting local craftspeople by making all of her garments in Los Angeles and prioritizing the use of environmentally conscientious materials. This all makes sense within the context of Kamm’s upbringing in a farming and manufacturing town in Illinois, where she was raised by her mother and father—both curious and creative hippies—in a passive solar house they built themselves. The former model turned fashion designer, who spends time in both L.A., where she works, and Panama, where she surfs, lives truly luxuriously by being hyper-protective of her schedule.

Kamm maintains that the currency she trades in is freedom, but her life hasn’t always been so balanced. After arriving in L.A. in her early 20s to pursue a modeling career, she quickly lost control and felt stripped bare by the pressures of the industry (and a consequential eating disorder). Living off of cottage cheese and cigarettes, and unhappy with who she had become, she stepped away from the runway and decided she instead wanted to make something. Kamm signed up for sewing classes, started producing her own clothes, and taught herself the ins and outs of running a business. Soon after, she was selling pants for $500 to women in line at a local coffee shop. Since unveiling her first collection, in 2005, she has created a bubble for herself by abstaining from fashion blogs and fancy industry events. Instead, Kamm focuses on her own projects; she spends time with her husband, Lucas Brower, and their 10-year-old son, Julien; and hangs out for three months a year by the Panama ocean, where she and Luke have built their own home.

On this week’s episode of Time Sensitive, Kamm talks with Andrew Zuckerman about the essential quality of being a present parent, explains how she has hit upon a sustainable work-life stride, and discusses why she has no intentions of expanding her business beyond its current scale.

Sophia Chang pulls no punches. As the self-described (and indeed) “first Asian woman in hip hop,” Chang carries herself—happily, proudly—with the bravado and swagger of the industry brethren she managed throughout much of the ’90s and 2000s, including Ol’ Dirty Bastard (O.D.B.), RZA, and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, Q-Tip and A Tribe Called Quest, and D’Angelo. What makes Chang’s career particularly remarkable, beyond her having worked with so many bold-faced hip hop names, is both the organicness and audaciousness of her journey: A chance encounter in 1985 with Joey Ramone led to a budding friendship with the punk icon and, in a roundabout way, to working for Paul Simon in the late ’80s; through frequenting downtown clubs at the time, she befriended the Wu-Tang Clan, becoming a longtime confidante, insider, and ally of the hip hop collective. By the early ’90s, Chang had landed an A&R gig at Jive Records, where she signed the Fu-Schnickens and worked with names like KRS-One and Tribe.

In 1996, having become deeply engaged in kung fu—a practice and passion she picked up through her friendship with the Wu-Tang Clan—Chang decided to take a major turn, leaving the music business altogether to manage Shi Yan Ming, a Shaolin monk who became her partner and the father of her two children, and his New York City temple. Though the relationship didn’t last—the couple split up in 2007—it proved a key part of Chang’s spiritual journey, life, and career. She would return to hip hop after that, working on various projects with and for the likes of RZA, GZA, and D’Angelo for a few years. Now, at 54, Chang is preparing her next big move, stepping out from behind the curtain to tell—no, to own—her story. This fall, with Audible, she’s releasing The Baddest Bitch in the Room, a coming-of-age audiobook memoir that chronicles her peripatetic path. Chang is soon to venture into television, too, having recently sold a screenplay to HBO.

Born and raised in Vancouver, the first-generation Korean Canadian will not and cannot be pigeonholed, pinned down, put in a box, or stereotyped. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Chang talks to Spencer Bailey with refreshing candor about her exploits in the 1990s hip hop world, including her close friendship with O.D.B., whom she managed; the ever-shifting landscape of racism, sexism, and ageism in America; and why she feels that now, more than ever, is her time to shine.

Kim Hastreiter identifies as a “punk at heart.” The co-founder of Paper magazine, which she started in 1984 with David Hershkovits, she served as the publication’s co-editor-in-chief until handing it off, in 2017. At 67, she remains the cool mom of downtown New York. A curator, editor, writer, and artist, as well as a perpetually delighted connector of people, she witnessed—and amplified—the fledgling careers of Keith Haring, Vivienne Westwood, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and countless others.

Hastreiter is, and has always been, New York hustle incarnate. From spending the Summer of Love building Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti in the desert, to cultivating Paper in 1979 in her loft kitchen, to printing the first issue in 1984 as a black-and-white zine, her gritty commitment to beauty and inspiration has never wavered. There’s never a dull moment with Hastreiter: Throughout Paper’s ascent to pop-culture bible, she curated several art and design shows, authored or co-authored four books, and hosted countless parties for her kaleidoscopic assortment of collaborators and friends. She is currently a mentor for Jim’s Web, a scholarship and mentorship program for emerging creatives, started in memory of her close friend the late design consultant and collector Jim Walrod.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Hastreiter sits down with Andrew Zuckerman to share her experiences of being a Mudd Club kid, selling clothes to Jackie Kennedy, curating in New York at the turn of the millenium, and “breaking the internet” with Kim Kardashian.

Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel has no style. No singular aesthetic, mood, or technique. Rather, his focus is on storytelling. From being the first to capture the Contras on film in Nicaragua to photographing the X-Men series and Superman Returns (2006), Sigel has worn many hats (and no, we’re not talking about his fedoras and baseball caps, although there are those, too). But his desire to pursue these projects of various genres and styles all stem from the same goal: to delve into what makes humans human.

Born and raised during a time of tense racial relations in Detroit, Sigel learned to look at the world through a political lens early in his youth, which later led to his pursuing social-minded documentaries. When his family moved from Detroit to Buffalo, Sigel got involved in a developing media-study program there, his first foray into the field. Since then, he has worked on dozens of films. He is perhaps best-known for his work on Drive (2011) and Three Kings (1999), and, of course, for his first collaboration with director Bryan Singer, on The Usual Suspects (1995). Sigel most recently worked with Singer in 2018—their tenth film together—on a celebratory biopic of Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, which was nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for best cinematography.

On this episode of Time Sensitive—recorded shortly after his arrival back in the U.S. from Vietnam, where he was the director of photography on Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (to be released in 2020)—Sigel shares with Andrew Zuckerman his early years in SoHo’s vibrant art community, his earning a metaphorical film degree by working for the legendary Haskell Wexler, and how he convinced Warner Brothers to create a movie using cross-processed film.

With great privilege, believes the humanitarian and entrepreneur Nachson Mimran, comes great responsibility. Brought up in a family that operates one of the largest agri-industrial businesses in West Africa, Mimran comes from considerable wealth, but unlike so many who have a background such as his, he is open and forthright about his inheritance and the responsibility he sees of doing good with it. With his decarbonization, refugee empowerment, and “human optimization” organization to.org, he’s creating deep impact through various design and development projects in refugee settlements—including the Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Center, completed last year in Uganda—and empowering individuals and communities via what he describes as “venture philanthropy.” At The Alpina Gstaad hotel in the Swiss Alps, which he’s the co-founder of, he provides exceptional hospitality experiences that subvert certain traditional industry codes, fostering a relaxed but elevated environment.

On the episode, recorded in front of a live audience at The Lobby “hospitality event” in Copenhagen earlier this fall, Mimran discusses his big-picture view of the word hospitality; how a family tragedy led him and his brother to found to.org; and his bold vision for building transformative spaces for refugees.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Nachson Mimran

[00:44] The Lobby

[03:46] to.org

[09:37] The Alpina Gstaad

[09:37] Jean Claude Mimran

[11:00] Marcel Bach

[13:47] Arieh Mimran

[19:29] Pangaia

[23:28] Regenerate

[23:28] Kakuma Refugee Settlement

[23:28] Sumayya Vally

[26:04] Hassell

[26:04] Xavier De Kestelier

[27:06] Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Centre

[27:06] Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement

[27:49] Mike Zuckerman

[27:49] Nakivale Refugee Settlement

[32:11] The Throne

[38:16] Kutupalong Refugee Settlement

[48:09] André Balazs

Neri Oxman is simultaneously a hardcore ecologist, evocative futurist, meticulous artist, and abstract scientist. The 43-year-old Israeli-American designer, architect, inventor, and MIT Media Lab professor embodies the same dualities that her work hinges upon. Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; instead, she’s pioneering the “Biological Age” through “material ecology,” which fuses biology and technology, nature and culture, and the grown and made. Among her works are energy-generating photosynthetic wearables, a geometric dome spun by a robotic arm and completed by a swarm of silkworms, and sinewy masks modeled, in part, after the wearer’s own anatomical and physiological makeup—projects as functional and ideologically ambitious as they are beautiful.

Outstanding in their aesthetic rigor, Oxman’s brainchildren have caught the attention of leading museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This fall, she will receive SFMOMA's 2019 Contemporary Vision Award, and her next exhibition, “Material Ecology” at MoMA (on view from Feb. 22 to May 25, 2020), organized by Paola Antonelli and Anna Burckhardt, will present eight works from throughout her 20-year career—most notably an updated version of “Totems,” an array of vehicles for synthetically engineered melanin that debuted earlier this year in the Antonelli-curated “Broken Nature” exhibition at the Triennale in Milan.

Having pursued architecture after dropping out of medical school, Oxman went on to study at the Architectural Association in London and, later, at MIT, where after earning a Ph.D. she stayed on to become a professor and now leads the pathbreaking Mediated Matter group. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Oxman and Spencer Bailey delve into motherhood, “fossils of the future,” robotic queen bees, death masks, and more.

Valerie Steele’s deep contextual dives into the history of fashion set her apart from other academics and curators—two identities she embodies in equal parts. The chief curator and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (since 1997 and 2003, respectively), she has produced upwards of 25 exhibitions while also, over the past 15 years, leading the institution. No corner of fashion is out of bounds for the charismatic and multifaceted Steele. Past exhibition subjects have ranged from corsets to gothic fashion to queerness to the color pink. Writing, too, has been a major part of her unabating scholarship, as is evident in her authoring or co-authoring of nearly 30 books over the past few decades—the first of which, on fashion and eroticism, was a product of her final Ph.D. dissertation at Yale in the early ’80s.

For Steele, clothes aren’t just tangible garments—they’re the constant medium through which to better understand things like politics, psychology, sexuality, and time. (Perhaps not surprisingly, in 2012, Suzy Menkes of The New York Times dubbed her “the Freud of Fashion”—a moniker Steele relishes.) Her rigorous, vibrant exhibitions—and her career as a whole—are the ultimate clapback to academics who once snubbed her studies as frivolous. Her next Museum at FIT showcase, “Paris: The Capital of Fashion” (on view from Sept. 6, 2019, to Jan. 4, 2020), collects roughly 100 objects that exemplify the “cultural construction” of the French city, from the 18th century to the present, contextualizing the evolution of artisanal haute couture into big business.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Steele and Spencer Bailey discuss her ongoing obsession with the city of Paris, academia’s continued distaste for fashion as a subject of worthy inquiry, her circuitous path to FIT (she dropped out of school at 15 and lived in a “lesbian-feminist commune” before attending Dartmouth for undergrad and Yale for her Ph.D.), and why luxury menswear is on the rise.

Michael Kimmelman does nothing in half measures. For more than 30 years, he has brought his assertive, culturally astute, historically sensitive perspective to The New York Times, which he has been contributing to since 1987 and joined full-time in 1990. During his tenure, he has written more than 2,000 articles, ranging from art criticism (he was its chief art critic from 1990 to 2007); to reporting from Europe and the Middle East (from 2007 to mid-2011, he was based in Berlin, where he was the “Abroad” columnist); to civically minded coverage of the built world, which has been his focus as the paper’s architecture critic the past seven years.

Throughout Kimmelman has displayed the rare ability to balance his writing in a way that shows him to be more far more level-headed than hot-headed. He is a classically trained pianist who plays with the well-rounded, even-keeled temperament and gentle skill of someone who clearly has done the work and put the hours in, and the same is true of his pieces in The New York Times. Consider his judicious take—note: not takedown—on a 1992 Julian Schnabel show at Pace gallery: “Mr. Schnabel's ambition and ego continue to outstrip his ability to paint. But there's something impressive about his sheer audacity, and just enough talent in him to make it impossible to dismiss his work out of hand. One wants to ignore it but can't.” Or, more recently, in 2014, his view on David Adjaye’s Sugar Hill social-housing complex in Harlem: “Sugar Hill is something of an extravagance and not easily replicable. But it posits a goal for what subsidized housing might look like, how it could lift a neighborhood and mold a generation.” Kimmelman more often than not sees the bigger picture and, at the same time, injects his own shrewd, deeply studied understanding of the subject at hand.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer Bailey speaks with Kimmelman about his lesser-known talents as a pianist, his three-plus-decade path at The New York Times, and his goal as architecture critic to build a greater discourse around designing cities that are better, healthier, and simply fairer for all.

Andrea Illy breathes coffee. Not literally, of course, but coffee has indeed been a part of his being since birth. The third-generation head of Illycaffè, he is the company’s chairman and, with CEO Massimiliano Pogliani, leads the massive global enterprise. With good reason—namely, its high-quality, beautifully packaged products—Illycaffè remains one of the largest coffee operations on the planet, with distribution in 145 countries. Last year, it brought in 483 million euros in revenue.

Andrea’s path to the trade, on some level, was predictable: The company was founded by his grandfather, Francesco, and later run by his father, Ernesto. He entered the business shortly after earning an advanced degree in chemistry from the University of Trieste. Starting at Illycaffè 1990 as a supervisor of quality control, he quickly rose to become CEO in 1994 and in 2005 was named chairman. (He also studied business at SDA Bocconi in Milan and attended other management and executive programs along the way, including one at Harvard Business School.)

In his current role, the 55-year-old continues to commit himself to the brand. Over the past three decades, he has seen Illycaffè surge from a more regional business to an international phenomenon. Not your average executive, Andrea speaks with the wisdom of a philosopher about things like contemporary art, the redemptive power of beauty, and the chemical, biological, agronomical, and physical elements of coffee growing and preparation. More recently, Andrea has been emphasizing the potential—and for Illycaffè, the reality—of “soil-to-soil” coffee production. He calls the concept “virtuous agriculture,” a term he coined to describe a method that combines sustainable farming with a focus, in part, on regenerating the environment by enriching soil with organic carbon.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Andrea talks with Spencer Bailey about the neurophysiology of beauty, the art and science of coffee, and why Illycaffè had made contemporary art so central to its brand and identity.

New Jersey native Maggie Doyne was age 18 when she arrived in Nepal, 19 when she had co-founded the BlinkNow Foundation nonprofit to support children in the district of Surkhet, and by 25, she had become a mother to 40 children.

Doyne’s unlikely story began in 2005, with the decision to take a gap year after high school and travel; she felt it was necessary to press pause on a more expected path and learn about herself and her purpose in the world. Upon her visit to Nepal, Doyne fell in love with the country and the people. But she also found it in the aftermath of a nearly 11-year civil war, with displaced families, schools shut down, and children breaking rocks to sell for money. Doyne gathered her babysitting savings—just five thousand dollars—to buy a piece of land in Surkhet, and started a children’s home there. She still lives in that home now as the mother to 54 children.

Today, BlinkNow, which she co-founded with her Nepali friend Top Malla, supports the Kopila Valley School, as well as a children’s home, health clinic, “Big Sister’s” home, and women’s center. The Kopila Valley School’s new campus opened this past February. Not only does the pre-primary through 12th grade program have 20 classrooms to educate more than 400 students, it is one of the greenest schools in the world. For her work, Doyne has received the Unsung Hero of Compassion Award, presented to her by the Dalai Lama in 2014, and was recognized as CNN’s 2015 Hero of the Year.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, the 32-year-old Doyne discusses her path from presumably college-bound student to full-time mother of nearly five dozen Nepali children; experiencing heartbreaking loss and meeting the love of her life; and the importance of taking action.

Thirty years ago, on July 19, 1989, at 37,000 feet in the air, the titanium fan disk in the tail-mounted engine of United Airlines Flight 232—a DC-10 carrying 296 people from Denver to Chicago—exploded above the cornfields of Iowa. The spiraling debris punctured the aircraft and cut all of its hydraulics lines, making the jet nearly impossible to steer. The captain, Al Haynes, was left to somehow guide the vessel, its crew, and the passengers to the ground. Eventually, it was determined that the flight would make an emergency landing at Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, Iowa.

Spencer Bailey, now the co-host of Time Sensitive, was on that plane with his 36-year-old mom, Francie, and 6-year-old brother Brandon. They sat in the 33rd row. His fourth birthday was 30 days away. (His father, Brownell, and twin brother, Trent, were not on board.)

After a harrowing 44 minutes that included four swooping 360-degree turns, followed by a call from the cockpit to “brace” amidst howling sirens from the aircraft’s Ground Proximity Warning System, Flight 232 made contact with Runway 22. The tip of the right wing hit the ground, instantly igniting and quickly tearing off. The aircraft’s tail section ripped off, too, ejecting the bank of seats where Spencer, Brandon, and Francie sat. The rest of the plane broke into several pieces. The main section of the fuselage slowed to a stop, upside-down, in a cornfield.

One hundred eleven people, including Francie, died. One hundred eighty five, including Spencer and Brandon, survived.

On this special episode of Time Sensitive, Andrew Zuckerman speaks with Spencer, who shares his story of the crash and its aftermath.

Few executives have the profoundly spiritual presence of Ivy Ross, who more than five years ago joined Google as a vice president, helping to lead the launch of the second edition of Glass at Google X and for the past three years overseeing design for its hardware division. When Ross enters a room, there’s a magical sort of glow around her. The energy she gives off—as was evident at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June, where she was joined by Spencer Bailey onstage in conversation—is contagious. It’s hard not to be charmed by her openness, her enthusiasm, her empathic nature. She is indeed a breath of fresh air within the often hubristic culture of Silicon Valley, and could be seen as a kind of guru—though she would never describe herself as such.

Ross began her career—which has included stints at Calvin Klein, Mattel, Disney, and Gap—as a jewelry designer. And it shows. She’s extremely sensitive to form, color, material, and tactility. She deeply understands the importance of beauty. She believes that energy is embedded in everything, and that it can be felt, positively or negatively, in any object. She’s a shrewd, culturally attuned marketer, too. By the time she was in her mid-20s, she already had jewelry pieces in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Design is in Ross’s blood: She remembers this “incredible curiosity” coming to her at a young age, partly through her father, who worked for the hyper-innovative Raymond Loewy, famous for dreaming up things like Lucky Strike packaging, the Studebaker, various locomotives, and NASA interiors. Ross is someone who throughout life has always trusted her gut, allowing her instincts to lead her through challenging situations, similar to how a drummer might take the reigns and bring a band forward through tricky improvisation. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Ross is also a drummer.)

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Ross and Bailey discuss “design feeling,” as opposed to design thinking, and the role of rhythm in her life and work. She also shares how her spiritual education, from Jungian psychology and sound healing to stone medicine and qigong, has helped fuel her creative work and enliven her corporate career.

For the past two decades, Andri Snær Magnason has been on a quest for language that truly gets at the heart of the climate crisis—the images, mythology, and syntax to crystallize the often-abstracted but very real environmental disasters increasingly taking place around us. The 45-year-old Icelandic writer’s latest book, The Casket of Time, offers an allegorical tale of global calamity and apathy, captured through specific, deeply considered language he has been pursuing—and using—over the past 20-plus years.

Magnason’s diverse body of work includes Dreamland, a nonfiction account of Iceland’s climate policies; a corresponding documentary co-directed by Magnason of the same name; and The Story of the Blue Planet, a whimsical tale of gluttony and sacrifice that won the Icelandic Literary Prize (a first for a children’s book) and was adapted into a play. A rigorous thinker and empathizer in all aspects of his work, Magnason examines beauty and ugliness as symbiotic instead of antagonistic. His poetry book Bonus is characteristic of this dynamic. Stemming from a critique of the Icelandic supermarket Bónus, the book envisions the world, not so unrealistically, as commercialized bulk. Ironically, or maybe not, the Bónus supermarket itself published Bonus, closing off the writer’s satire full circle.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Magnason discusses with Andrew Zuckerman the mutual dependency of spiritual and rational thinking, details two otherworldly, life-altering meetings with the Dalai Lama, and more.

When Elizabeth Diller graduated from Cooper Union with a degree in architecture in 1979, she had no intention of necessarily becoming an architect. In fact, the Polish-born, New York–raised Diller chose architectural studies simply to explore her interests in art and physical space. Two years later, in 1981, she co-founded a forward-thinking practice with Ricardo Scofidio, who had been her professor and who she later married. At first, their budding firm fell into an avant-garde category that existed outside corporate or institutional confines of art and architecture—and indeed it often critiqued those worlds. Diller and Scofidio were primarily making edgy, visually impactful installations and theatrical projects, as well as conceiving what might even be called “paper architecture”—dream concepts seemingly unlikely to be realized.

Over the past three decades, though, with the introduction of numerous technologies, the latter has become reality and, at the same time, the former has continued apace. The firm, now called Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)—Charles Renfro became a partner in 2004, Benjamin Gilmartin in 2015—has gone on to become one of the most groundbreaking, ahead-of-the-curve practices in the field. DS+R’s many cultural and civic projects around the world include the elevated High Line park in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood; the Broad museum in L.A.; The Shed at Hudson Yards, in collaboration with Rockwell Group; an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, opening this fall; and the Centre for Music, a permanent home to be built for the London Symphony Orchestra.

Diller and her firm’s approach, which begins with questions, accounts for much of this success: “What if we made this building out of water?” “How can we create a conversation between digital media and reality?” The results are often radical. Just take the firm’s breakthrough project, the Blur Building, an “architecture of atmosphere” created for the Swiss Expo in 2002 in Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The project was a rebellious, almost anti-architecture statement: the structure disappears. At its heart, the Blur captured the idea of architecture as experience, which is really what the bulk of the firm’s work achieves. DS+R’s buildings typically slow you down; they make you feel something.

Today, Diller is among the most revered architects in the world. She has twice been named to the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, in 2009 and 2018, and she was the recipient of the first MacArthur Foundation fellowship in architecture in 1999. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Diller shares with Spencer Bailey her roundabout path to becoming an architect, the social and cultural impacts of the High Line and The Shed, and the emotional resonance of designing spaces in her home city.

Ten years ago, the Austrian-born, New York–based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister—famous for his attention-grabbing exhibitions, posters, and books, as well as for his impeccable album covers for bands like The Rolling Stones, OK Go, and Aerosmith—walked onto the stage at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England. There to present his findings about the power of time off, he spoke specifically about the virtues and values, personal and professional, of taking a sabbatical every seven years, something he started to do in 2000 and has continued to practice since. Coming in the midst of the Great Recession, the talk resonated widely: its resulting video has been watched more than three million times. Clearly, Sagmeister was, and is, onto something. Even if it’s something most people can only dream about. Since then, Sagmeister has gone on yet another sabbatical—his third, in 2016—this time stopping in Mexico City, Tokyo, and the town of Schwarzenberg, Austria, over the course of a year. (For his first sabbatical, he was in New York City; for his second, Bali.)

On this episode of Time Sensitive, the 56-year-old looks back, with a fuller-picture view, at his three periods of time off. Digging in to how the sabbaticals created opportunities for incubating ideas that became two massive multi-year undertakings—one a project on happiness, the other on beauty—Sagmeister shares with Spencer Bailey how certain things have changed for his practice since that TED Talk a decade ago. In 2012, he joined forces with Jessica Walsh; their firm, Sagmeister & Walsh, now operates in a different, slightly larger office than the one he was in, and having another partner at the firm has shifted how things run overall. Still, Sagmeister’s signature approach to design remains as exuberant as ever. For clients including the duffel-bag brand Baboon, the Jewish Museum, and the Miami advertising agency Gut, the firm continues to produce inventive and playful work.

Perhaps best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009)—or, more recently, Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023)—the author, essayist, and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem could be considered the ultimate modern-day Brooklyn bard, even if today he lives in California, where he’s a professor of English and creative writing at Pomona College. His most celebrated books take place in Brooklyn, or in the case of Chronic City, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and across his genre-spanning works of fiction, his narratives capture a profound sense of the rich chaos and wonder to be found in an urban existence. Lethem is also the author of several essay collections, including the newly published Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture (ZE Books), which compiles much of his art writing from over the years written in response to—and often in exchange for—artworks by friends, including Gregory Crewdson, Nan Goldin, and Raymond Pettibon.

On the episode, Lethem discusses his passion for book dedications; the time he spent with James Brown and Bob Dylan, respectively, when profiling them for Rolling Stone in the mid-aughts; how his work is, in part, a way of dealing with and healing from his mother’s death in 1978, at age 36; and why he views his writing as “fundamentally commemorative.”

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Jonathan Lethem

[5:35] Cellophane Bricks

[5:35] High School of Music and Art

[5:35] Motherless Brooklyn

[5:35] The Fortress of Solitude

[5:35] The Disappointment Artist

[7:15] Carmen Fariña

[9:08] The Great Gatsby

[9:08] Brooklyn Crime Novel

[10:59] Lynn Nottage

[13:08] Bennington College

[23:41] The Collapsing Frontier

[23:41] Italo Calvino

[27:37] Dada movement

[27:37] Dissident Gardens

[31:21] Nan Goldin

[34:33] “The Ecstasy of Influence”

[42:32] “Being James Brown: Inside the Private World of the Baddest Man Who Ever Lived”

[42:32] “The Genius and Modern Times of Bob Dylan”

[51:00] Chronic City

[1:06:26] Jorge Luis Borges

Uzodinma Iweala’s journey to becoming the CEO of the Africa Center, a culture and policy institution located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the northeast corner of Central Park, defies expectations. Prior to the role, which he began in early 2018, he had zero non-profit experience. And though the Washington, D.C., native had co-founded a small media start-up in Lagos, Nigeria, he had never lead an organization of this scale or ambition. What Iweala did understand, though, is the power of storytelling—specifically, storytelling of and about the African diaspora.

Today, at 36, Iweala is confident that by harnessing storytelling he can, and will, reorient the organization, which was founded in 1984 as the Museum for African Art and saw its share of setbacks prior to his arrival. If Iweala’s diverse background and track record is any indication, the Africa Center is poised to grow into a high-impact hub for pushing conversations and greater understandings about the continent forward.

Iweala’s journey has been circuitous to say the least: He wrote the novel Beasts of No Nation, which was adopted into a 2015 Netflix film directed by Cary Fukunaga and starring Idris Elba. He completed a multi-year study of HIV/AIDS in Africa, the result of which became his second book, Our Kind of People. He received an M.D. from Columbia University in 2011, co-founded and launched Ventures Africa magazine, and wrote another novel, Speak No Evil, released last year. In this episode of Time Sensitive, Iweala shares with Spencer Bailey his exceptional experiences as a writer, researcher, doctor, entrepreneur—and now, CEO.

The media tends to hyperbolize and boosterize technologists and the work that they do, creating all kinds of absurdly over-the-top titles for them. But when CBS’s 60 Minutes dubbed Kai-Fu Lee “the oracle of A.I.” earlier this year, it was actually a spot-on assessment. Lee has indeed been at the forefront of the field for more than three decades and is without question an artificial intelligence visionary. There are few people in the world who understand A.I. so astutely, especially within so many social and cultural contexts. His accolades speak volumes: In 2013, Lee was named to that year’s Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, and this January, he was named co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s A.I. Council. His new book, A.I. Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, quickly rose to become a New York Times bestseller.

Lee’s got one extraordinary résumé: After receiving a B.S.in computer science from Columbia University in 1983, he went on to get his Ph.D. in 1988 from Carnegie Mellon, where developed Sphinx, the first-ever speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. In 1990, he joined Apple as a research scientist, heading up multiple R&D groups there for several years. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at Microsoft, where he established what would become Microsoft Research Asia, and later, upon returning to the U.S., he was named a vice president at the company. In 2005, he decamped to Google, resulting in a widely publicized five-month legal battle with Microsoft. Once settled, Lee helped bring Google to China, overseeing its growth and operations there for four years. Lee now runs Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in start-ups in China, many of them in the A.I. space. As of a year ago, according to Bloomberg, Sinovation had $2 billion under asset management with more than 300 companies in its portfolio.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Lee shares with Andrew Zuckerman his fascinating story of emigrating from China to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age 11; why he remains rationally optimistic about A.I. (and its increasingly potent presence in our lives); and how a recent bout with cancer drastically altered his outlook on life and work.

Teresita Fernández defies expectations. For more than 20 years, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist has pushed boundaries, literally and figuratively, through her large-scale sculptures, mixed-media works, and high-profile public installations, such as the seemingly illusory “Fata Morgana” in New York City’s Madison Square Park in 2015 and cocoon-like “Autumn (... Nothing Personal)” at Harvard University last year. Her highly evocative work, at its heart, explores the many complex layers embedded in things—an idea that’s inspired, in part, from the traditional East Asian garden concept of shakkei, or “borrowed landscape,” something she discusses in-depth with Spencer Bailey on this episode of Time Sensitive.

Even if Fernández’s beautiful, affecting art can be enjoyed on the surface, to fully grasp her shrewd explorations of landscape and her exquisite experimentations with materials—from ceramics to charcoal to gold to graphite—viewers must look at them closely and read them deeply. If they do, they’re likely to come away with a greater, and certainly more real, understanding of the complicated colonial history of the Americas, as well as the sublime beauty inherent in so many of the natural wonders around us.

In the lead up to her mid-career retrospective, “Teresita Fernández: Elemental”—perhaps her most ambitious exhibition yet, opening at the Pérez Art Museum Miami this fall (Oct. 18, 2019, to Feb. 9, 2020)—the 51-year-old artist recently came by The Slowdown’s New York City headquarters to share stories about her life and work, from being raised by hardworking Cuban exile parents in Miami to studying for her M.F.A. at Virginia Commonwealth University in a then largely Confederate-proud Richmond. As this interview makes clear, Fernández’s life is as wonderfully layered and complex as her art.

Bjarke Ingels communicates the value—and world-changing potential—of architecture with the giddy enthusiasm and excitement of a sci-fi obsessive anticipating the next big Hollywood blockbuster. This is an analogy that especially makes sense when one gets deep into conversation with Ingels, as Andrew Zuckerman recently did for this episode of Time Sensitive.

At age 44, the Danish-born Ingels has become one of the most widely known and talked about practitioners in his field, reaching a level of fame and notoriety that most leading architects don’t see until they’re nearly twice his age. How did he do it? The answer lies largely in comics, or at least that’s where his success story starts. Dreaming of becoming an illustrator or cartoonist, Ingels found a path to architecture through art school. This background allowed him, over time, to shrewdly distill compelling narratives into everything his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), does, whether a Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant that doubles as a ski mountain, a proposed floating city in the sea, or a Shenzhen skyscraper.

On this episode, Ingels discusses his circuitous path to prominence; why he named his newborn Darwin; some of BIG’s latest undertakings, including The Dryline masterplan in New York; and why architects, developers, city planners, and others all need to take a longer view when it comes to creating our built environments.

Kate Young, the stylist for red carpet luminaries such as Selena Gomez, Margot Robbie, and Michelle Williams, has one of the shrewdest eyes in the business. Given her background—she comes from a family of competitive athletes and began her career at Vogue as an assistant to Anna Wintour, from whom she learned the ability to schedule periods of “utter focus”—this may not be so surprising. But she has carved her own distinctive path.

Pairing fast and slow periods of time into her annual routines, Young believes in (and finds) balance. She achieves as much largely by moving between the bustle of New York City, where she lives and works during the week, and upstate New York, where she has a home and spends summers and weekends. Her style reflects this. In contrast to the attention-grabbing gowns and outfits she chooses for her clients’ public debuts, Young’s approach to what she wears is more “inward-facing” and functional—though she does confess an affinity for a particular Cartier bracelet and, at certain times, enjoys sporting a fancy pair of shoes. Beyond her standout styling work, she has designed a line of lingerie in Japan and, more recently, sunglasses for the brand Tura.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Young discusses her sports-filled youth in New Hope, Pennsylvania; studying English and art history at the University of Oxford; the realities of styling celebrities in the Instagram age; and the public misconception of luxury.

Jon Gray, the CEO of the Bronx-based food collective Ghetto Gastro, describes himself as a “dishwasher.” It’s a cheeky description, but there is a kind of truth to it. After all, his cohort at the firm includes chefs of very high caliber: Malcolm Livingston II (formerly of René Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen and, before that, Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 in New York), Pierre Serrao (formerly of Cracco in Milan), and Lester Walker (formerly of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York). Though Gray himself does cook, his role at Ghetto Gastro is not necessarily in the kitchen, at least certainly not primarily. The high-flying but still refreshingly down-to-earth smooth-talker is, instead, its marketing mastermind, linking the group up with the worlds of art, architecture, design, and fashion—worlds he’s deeply immersed himself in for more than a decade.

Since its founding in 2012, Ghetto Gastro has grown into a cultural force, literally and figuratively cooking up projects that verge on performance art for clients including Apple, Bank of America, Cartier, and Instagram. In this episode of Time Sensitive, the 33-year-old Gray shares the story of how, in the face of a jail sentence at age 20, he turned his life around—and how, after a stint in fashion, he found a calling in combining food with art and design.

The actor Peter Sarsgaard cannot be pinned down. He may be best-known for his portrayal of John Lotter in 1999’s Boy’s Don’t Cry. Or as Charles Lane in the 2003’s Shattered Glass. Or perhaps for his roles in films like Garden State (2004), Green Lantern (2011), and Jackie (2016). Or maybe as the CIA chief in the 2018 Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower. Or it could be for his stage work, on Broadway and Off-Broadway, in plays such as The Seagull, Kingdom of Earth, and Burn This. For good reason, the 48-year-old is among the most talented, versatile, and unassuming actors working today.

In large part, Sarsgaard’s prolific career and success stems from the fact that, beyond the screen and the stage, he has thoughtfully cultivated a rich array of interests in things far outside of acting: Running. Mandolin playing. Gardening and horticulture. Writing. On this episode of Time Sensitive, he speaks with Andrew Zuckerman about how each of these outside engagements continues to feed his life while also helping fuel his acting.

“Why make a podcast right now?” So begins this 10-minute introductory episode of Time Sensitive, a conversation between the show’s two co-hosts, Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman. Time Sensitive is the debut platform of the conscious entertainment media company The Slowdown, co-founded by Bailey, an editor and journalist who has written at length about architecture, art, culture, design, and technology, and Zuckerman, a filmmaker, photographer, and creative director whose work is largely concerned with the intersection of nature and technology. Consider this episode a “who we are, how we got here, where we’re going” primer.

Each week, going forward, Time Sensitive will release an interview conducted respectively by Bailey or Zuckerman with a leading mind in business, the arts, and beyond who has made a profound impact in their field, contributed to the larger conversation, and is concerned with the planet we all share. Episode 1 [include URL to episode], with actor-marathoner-musician-writer-horticulturalist Peter Sarsgaard, is now live. In the weeks to come, you’ll hear lively conversations with Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray, fashion stylist Kate Young, architect Bjarke Ingels, artist Teresita Fernández, and more. The common thread between all of them? They’re curious and courageous—and each has a distinct perspective on time.

Special thanks to drummer Billy Martin, who composed the Time Sensitive theme music; art director Omar Sosa, who collaborated on the design of the Time Sensitive site and identity; web developer Eric Bichan, who coded the site; and sound engineer Pat McCusker.

To the lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, light is at once ubiquitous and precious, quotidian yet miraculous; it can be easily overlooked or taken for granted, but it also has the potential to become transformative or even otherworldly. Through her craft-forward approach, Adelman creates pieces that defy strict labels and explore the tensions between organic and industrial forms and materials, combining hand-blown glass with industrial and machine-milled components. Since launching her eponymous company in 2006, she has built a formidable business, perhaps becoming best known for her Branching Bubble chandeliers, a series that consists of glass “bubbles” elegantly mounted on the ends of brass, bronze, or nickel “branches.” Adelman also runs an experimental space called LaLAB as a means of exploring and meditating on illumination through the creation of one-off and limited-edition pieces, as well as private commissions.

On the episode, she discusses her recent decision to shift her company away from a large-scale production operation and toward a smaller, more intimate “studio” model; the great surprise of having one of her designs installed in Vice President Kamala Harris’s Washington, D.C., home; and her love of hosting.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Lindsey Adelman

[6:05] Ingo Maurer

[6:05] Gaetano Pesce

[7:55] Burst Chandelier

[12:22] “A Realm of Light”

[14:55] Isamu Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures

[17:20] Yosemite National Park

[18:41] James Turrell

[18:41] House of Light

[20:47] Noguchi’s “Lunar Infant”

[24:40] Writings by Agnes Martin

[26:52] Hiroshi Sugimoto

[27:46] David Lynch

[29:08] “Paul McCarthy: WS”

[29:08] Matthew Barney

[30:54] Haruki Murakami

[33:14] “A Cacao Ceremony That Brought Close Friends Even Closer”

[48:13] Branching Bubble chandelier

[48:13] Buckminster Fuller

[52:01] Adelman’s open-source D.I.Y. light project

[52:30] David Weeks

[52:30] Lunette

[52:46] “The Lighting Designer From Everyone’s Dream Brooklyn Brownstone”

[52:46] Rich People Problems

[52:46] Gwyneth Paltrow

In the eyes of the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a building is a living, breathing thing, a structure that can have a spirit and even, at its best, a soul. It’s this optimistic perspective that has given Goldberger’s writing a certain ineffable, captivating quality across his prolific career—first at The New York Times, where he served as the paper’s longtime architecture critic, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1984; then as the architecture critic at The New Yorker from 1997 to 2011; and now, as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Goldberger is the author of several books, including Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry (2015), Why Architecture Matters (2009), and Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture (2009). He is also the chair of the advisory board of the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, where we recorded this episode, our third “site-specific” interview on Time Sensitive.

On the episode, Goldberger discusses the Glass House’s staying power as it turns 75, the evolution of architecture over the past century, what he’s learned from writing architects’ obituaries, and the Oreo cookie from a design perspective.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Paul Goldberger

[05:17] Glass House

[05:17] Philip Johnson

[07:06] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

[07:06] Farnsworth House

[08:42] Brick House

[12:37] Gordon Bunshaft

[12:37] Lever House

[12:37] Frank Lloyd Wright

[12:37] Guggenheim Museum

[13:18] TWA Flight Center

[13:18] Kevin Roche

[13:18] Ford Foundation building

[13:18] CBS Building

[15:17] Noyes House

[16:17] U.N. Headquarters

[17:50] Centre Pompidou

[17:50] I.M. Pei

[17:50] Louvre Pyramid

[17:50] Frank Gehry

[17:50] Guggenheim Bilbao

[20:00] Walt Disney Concert Hall

[23:20] Stuyvesant Town

[24:24] “Oreo, at 75, the World’s Favorite Cookie; Machine Imagery, Homey Decoration”

[25:46] “Quick! Before It Crumbles!: An architecture critic looks at cookie architecture”

[25:46] Nora Ephron

[26:18] “Design Notebook; Commonplace Things Can Be Great Designs”

[27:16] Bauhaus

[29:10] Fallingwater

[29:10] Richard Neutra

[29:10] Lovell House

[29:10] Gehry House

[29:10] Louis Kahn

[32:38] “Philip Johnson, Architecture’s Restless Intellect, Dies at 98”

[32:38] “Louis I. Kahn Dies; Architect Was 73”

[35:30] Paul Rudolph

[36:50] Zaha Hadid

[37:22] “New Police Building”

[38:19] Henry Geldzahler

[41:31] Why Architecture Matters

[43:21] Chrysler Building

[47:28] Vincent Scully

[48:18] Lewis Mumford

[1:00:47] The City Observed: A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan

[1:00:47] World Trade Center

[1:02:49] “Here Is New York” by E.B. White

[1:05:33] Design: The Leading Hotels of the World

[1:07:25] Ritz Paris

[1:07:25] The Dylan Amsterdam

[1:09:01] “Why Buildings Grow On Us”

The artist Francesco Clemente may have been born and raised in Naples, but—having lived and worked around the world, including in Rome, India, New York City, and New Mexico—he considers himself a citizen of no place. Widely known for his work across mediums, from drawings and frescoes to mosaics, oils, and sculptures, Clemente makes art that evokes his mystical perspective, with his paintings often featuring spiritual subjects or dreamlike symbols. Beyond exhibiting in galleries and museums, over the years Clemente has also made works for a variety of other venues, including a nightclub, a hotel, a Hollywood film, and the Metropolitan Opera. This fall, his work (and name) will be central to his latest unusual project: the soon-to-open Clemente Bar at chef Daniel Humm’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park.

On the episode, Clemente discusses his collaboration with Humm, frescoes as the most luminous artistic medium, his deep affinity with India, and the certain timeworn quality to his art.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Francesco Clemente

[3:55] Clemente Bar

[3:55] Eleven Madison Park

[3:55] Daniel Humm

[3:55] Alba Clemente

[7:50] Murals for the Palladium nightclub

[7:50] Hudson Hotel

[7:50] Ian Schrager

[8:43] Arata Isozaki

[8:43] Philippe Starck

[8:43] Kenny Scharf

[8:43] Keith Haring

[8:43] Jean-Michel Basquiat

[8:43] Steve Rubell

[9:43] Works for Great Expectations (1998)

[9:43] “The Sopranos” series

[9:43] Portrait of Fran Lebowitz

[11:37] Portrait of Toni Morrison

[23:12] Jiddu Krishnamurti

[23:12] Theosophical Society

[24:49] Álvaro Siza

[24:49] Museo Madre

[32:48] Cy Twombly

[32:48] Joseph Beuys’s exhibition “We Are the Revolution” (1972)

[35:30] Rudolf Steiner

[36:56] Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

[37:57] Swami Vivekananda

[39:20] Salman Rushdie

[41:31] Nisargadatta Maharaj

[46:51] Andy Warhol

[46:51] Allen Ginsberg

[48:13] William Blake

[48:54] Raymond Foye

[48:54] Hanuman Books

[50:04] “The Four Corners” (1985)

[53:36] Saint Francis

In her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the historian and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis unpacks a major part of United States history that until now wasn’t just brushed over, but was intentionally buried: how the ​​Caucasian War and the end of the Civil War were conflated by P.T. Barnum, former President Woodrow Wilson, and others to shape how we see race in America. Long overdue, The Unseen Truth is a watershed book about photography and visuality that calls to mind works by history-shaping authors such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks. Lewis is also the founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, which strives to educate the public about the importance of art and culture for equity and justice in the U.S., and is launching a new publishing venture with Aperture this fall.

On the episode, she discusses the tension between pedagogy and propaganda; the deep influence of Frederick Douglass’s 1861 “Pictures and Progress” lecture on her work; how a near-death car crash altered the course of her life and The Unseen Truth; and the special ability of certain photographs to stop time.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Sarah Lewis

[04:01] The Unseen Truth

[05:24] Woodrow Wilson

[05:24] Frederick Douglass

[05:24] P.T. Barnum

[06:51] Toni Morrison

[06:51] Angela Davis

[06:51] Mathew Brady

[51:14] Vision & Justice

[11:35] Caucasus

[14:02] Imam Shamil

[17:38] Caucasian War

[19:31] MFA Boston

[19:31] The Metropolitan Museum

[22:30] “Pictures and Progress”

[28:41] “A Circassian”

[28:41] “Slave Ship”

[28:41] “The Gulf Stream”

[35:13] Frances Benjamin Johnston

[39:20] Jarvis Givens

[39:20] Fugitive Pedagogy

[44:05] The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search of Mastery

[49:08] Montserrat

[49:08] Under the Volcano

[51:36] Aperture

[52:26] Maurice Berger

[52:26] Coreen Simpson

[52:26] Doug Harris

[52:26] Deborah Willis

[52:26] Leigh Raiford

[52:57] Hal Foster

[56:01] Hank Willis Thomas

[56:01] Theaster Gates

[56:01] Mark Bradford

[56:01] Amy Sherald

[57:58] Wynton Marsalis

[57:58] Charles Black, Jr.

[57:58] Louis Armstrong

[57:58] Brown v. Board of Education

For Rita Sodi, cooking isn’t so much an art or a science, but rather an intuitive way for her to channel her Tuscan roots and provide a profound sense of home. Following a 15-year career in the world of fashion as a self-described “denim guru” for Calvin Klein Jeans, Sodi transitioned into the realm of restaurants in 2008, when she moved to New York City from Bagno a Ripoli, Italy, and opened the West Village establishment I Sodi. Soon after, Sodi serendipitously met her life and work partner, Jody Williams—the chef-owner of the French bistro Buvette—and the two went on to found the restaurant group Officina 1397. Now, in addition to I Sodi and Buvette, they also operate Via Carota, The Commerce Inn, and Bar Pisellino. Across all of Sodi’s undertakings, her motive is clear: to create dishes she loves with great care and rigor, and, at least in the cases of I Sodi and Via Carota, to share an abiding passion for Tuscan cooking.

On the episode, Sodi discusses learning to cook from her mother, her atypical journey from fashion to food, and some of the stringent rules she follows in the kitchen and in life.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Rita Sodi

[25:50] Tuscany

[4:50] West Village

[5:58] I Sodi

[6:47] Calvin Klein Jeans

[8:31] Jody Williams

[8:31] Via Carota

[8:31] Officina 1397

[8:31] Bar Pisellino

[8:31] The Commerce Inn

[8:31] Buvette

[20:29] Pete Wells

[23:22] “An Ode to I Sodi”

[23:22] “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City 2024”

[23:22] “When I Want to Be Alone, I Eat Dinner at the Bar at I Sodi”

[25:50] Bagno a Ripoli

[29:35] “The Laws of Tuscan Eating at I Sodi in the West Village”

[48:26] Emilia-Romagna

[53:53] Jeff Gordinier

To the landscape designer Edwina von Gal, gardening is much more than just seeding, planting, weeding, and watering; it’s her life calling. Since starting her namesake firm in 1984 in East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island, she has worked with, for, and/or alongside the likes of Calvin Klein, Larry Gagosian, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Annabelle Selldorf, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman, creating gardens that center on native species and engage in other nature-based land-care solutions. In 2008, von Gal founded the Azuero Earth Project in Panama to promote chemical-free reforestation with native trees on the Azuero Peninsula. Stemming out of this initiative, in 2013, she then founded the Perfect Earth Project to promote chemical-free, non-agricultural land management in the U.S. Her most recent effort, Two Thirds for the Birds, is a call-to-action to plant more native plants and eliminate pesticides, thus creating a greater food supply for birds.

On the episode, she discusses the meditative qualities of gardening; reframing landscaping as “land care”; and why she sees herself not as a steward of land, but rather as a collaborator with it.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Edwina von Gal

[15:32] William Cronon

[15:32] Changes in the Land

[15:32] Tiokasin Ghosthorse

[24:04] Carl Sagan

[24:04] The Demon-Haunted World

[26:07] Perfect Earth Project

[40:37] Two Thirds for the Birds

[42:41] John Fitzpatrick

[42:41] Cornell Lab of Ornithology

[42:41] Merlin Bird ID

[47:01] Garden Club of America

[50:21] Diana Vreeland

[51:09] Peter Sharp

[51:09] Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center

[54:46] Frank Gehry

[54:46] Biomuseo

[54:46] Bruce Mau

[56:32] Azuero Earth Project

[1:00:37] Doug Tallamy

[1:02:01] Nature’s Best Hope

[1:05:12] The High Line

[1:05:12] Brooklyn Bridge Park

[1:05:12] The Battery Conservancy

[1:05:12] Brooklyn Museum