The British author and journalist Oliver Burkeman has spent decades pondering what it means to live a meaningful life, both in his former Guardian column “This Column WIll Change Your Life” and across several books—most recently, Meditations for Mortals , out in paperback this October. That’s why he brings a healthy dose of skepticism to so-called “time management” systems and productivity hacks as a means toward true fulfillment. Burkeman’s compelled by the notion that, rather than being separa...
Sep 24, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 12Ep. 137
As the physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker—the author of the mind-expanding book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence —sees it, every single thing on Earth can be traced to life’s beginnings. Walker studies the origins of life on this planet—one of science’s greatest unsolved puzzles—and, beyond that, whether alien life exists on other planets. As part of her research, she’s advancing a physics known as “assembly theory,” a new way of thinking and talking about lif...
Aug 27, 2025•56 min•Season 11Ep. 136
In 2003, when the author James Frey published his first book, A Million Little Pieces— a gut-punch account of his experience with addiction and rehab—nobody could have expected what would come next. Thanks to an Oprah Book Club endorsement, A Million Little Pieces was instantly catapulted to bestseller status, but soon blew up in scandal after Frey admitted to having falsified certain portions of the book, which had been marketed as a memoir. The drama that ensued sparked a media controversy—one...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Season 11Ep. 135
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 rec...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 11Ep. 134
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 ...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Season 11Ep. 133
With one small, clever—and now-trademark—idea in 1990, the chef Thomas Keller turned not only the notion of the ice-cream cone on its head, but the fine-dining world, too. Now, 35 years later, his hospitality group comprises 10 restaurants, including The French Laundry in Yountville, California, and Per Se in New York City—both of them three-Michelin-starred—as well as Bouchon Bistro and Bouchon Bakery in Las Vegas and The Surf Club Restaurant in Miami. Across his entire hospitality operation, a...
May 21, 2025•55 min•Season 11Ep. 132
The drummer and percussionist Billy Martin, whose name many Time Sensitive listeners may recognize—he created the Time Sensitive theme song—defies any boxed-in or limiting definitions of his work. Best known as a member of the band Medeski Martin & Wood (MMW), he’s spent the past three-plus decades making experimental, boundary-pushing, and uncategorizable instrumental jazz-funk-groove music, shaping sounds that feel as expansive as they are definitive and distinctive. Across all his artisti...
May 14, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 11Ep. 131
For the British architect John Pawson, minimalism isn’t just a design philosophy, but a life philosophy—with his 1996 book, Minimum , serving as a defining jumping-off point. Over the course of more than four decades, Pawson has quietly amassed a global following by distilling spaces, objects, and things down to their most essential. With projects ranging from his career-defining Calvin Klein Collection flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York City, completed in 1995, to a remote monastery c...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Season 11Ep. 130
Through her “archaeology of the future” design approach, the Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh has firmly established herself as a humanist who brings a profound awareness of past, present, and presence to all that she does. In the two decades since winning her breakthrough commission—the Estonian National Museum in Tartu—her practice has taken off, with Ghotmeh swiftly becoming one today’s fastest-rising architectural stars. Just a week after we recorded this episode of Time Sen...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 11Ep. 129
For as long as he can remember, Leonard Koren has been searching for beauty and pleasure. Throughout his career, the author and artist—he prefers the term “creator”—has spent considerable time putting to paper expressions and conceptual views that architects, artists, designers, and others have long struggled to find the proper framing of or words for. In 1976, when he launched the counterculture publication WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing , he ushered in the idea of “gourmet bathing,” whic...
Apr 02, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 11Ep. 128
Since publishing his debut essay collection— Video Night in Kathmandu , featuring far-flung reportage from 10 Asian countries—in 1988, the prolific travel writer Pico Iyer has gone on to write more than a dozen books exploring themes ranging from displacement and identity to globalization and technology, as well as contribute to publications such as The New York Times , Time , and Condé Nast Traveler . Over the years, Iyer’s travels have taken him to some of the world’s most remote destinations—...
Mar 26, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 11Ep. 127
Faye Toogood is perhaps best known for her Roly-Poly chair, among the more famous pieces of furniture to come out of the 2010s and take over the zeitgeist, but the London-based designer’s artistry and craft runs much deeper and spans much wider. She began finding, collecting, cataloging, producing, and editing her “assemblages” long before she ever had a name for them, and her design career has been marked by exactly that, beginning with the debut of Assemblage 1 (2010) and through to her latest...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 11Ep. 126
Malcolm Gladwell may be one of the most widely read—and, with his Revisionist History podcast, listened to—journalists of our time. A New Yorker magazine staff writer and the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008), he has myriad awards and honors to his name. But this impressive trajectory has never been some planned-out or preordained journey; in fact, as Gladwell says on this episode of Time Sensitive, he has never been...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 10Ep. 125
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 es...
Dec 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 10Ep. 124
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 time ful . “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 geolog...
Nov 20, 2024•59 min•Season 10Ep. 123
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...
Nov 13, 2024•54 min•Season 10Ep. 122
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 E...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 10Ep. 121
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...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr•Season 10Ep. 120
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 no...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 10Ep. 119
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, ove...
Sep 25, 2024•59 min•Season 10Ep. 118
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...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 10Ep. 117
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, J...
Sep 04, 2024•58 min•Season 10Ep. 116
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, vo...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Season 9Ep. 115
While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-esque abstractions of the ocean that he has taken at roughly 250 locations around the worl...
Jun 12, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 9Ep. 114
Soon to celebrate his 50th birthday by journeying from Paris to Tokyo by car along the Southern Silk Road, the French Moroccan creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami says he’s “thirsty for life like it’s just the beginning,” and it shows. Among his 17 (yes, 17) companies are the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, which he and his wife co-founded in 2014 and sold to LVMH in 2021; the Paris-based creative agency Art Recherche Industrie, whose clients include C...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 9Ep. 113
At age 4, following the fall of Saigon, in 1975, Viet Thanh Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam and came to the U.S. as refugees. Throughout the turmoil and its aftermath, neither he nor his family could have imagined that he would go on to not only become an internationally renowned novelist—winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015)—but also to serve as an executive producer of an HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, and become a widely respected voice on mat...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 9Ep. 112
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley has a deep and enduring obsession with wood. In his late 20s, he began to use the material for art, carving sculptures in his basement studio, and with his sculpture-making now spanning 70 years, his enduring dedication to his craft is practically unparalleled. Represented by Karma gallery since 2019, Mosley has only now, in the past decade or so, begun to receive the international recognition a...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 9Ep. 111
Most widely recognized for his paintings that rigorously combine spray paint, stenciled geometric forms, and brushstrokes, the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton is also known for his “Black Dada” framework, an ever-evolving philosophy that investigates various relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Many will recognize Pendleton’s work from “Who Is Queen?,” his 2021 solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which he has said was his way of “trying to overw...
Apr 24, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 9Ep. 110
The cheeky, happy-go-lucky spirit of the British fashion designer Paul Smith can be felt across everything he does, from his own clothing designs to his multifarious collaborations—Maharam textiles, Mini cars, Burton snowboards, and a suite at the Brown’s Hotel in London among them. Though Smith may run a business with expert tailoring and a mastery of color at its core, everything he creates seems to suggest, with a wink, “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” Beyond designing clothes, Smith also...
Apr 10, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 9Ep. 109
Three years ago, at age 66, the Belgium-born writer and critic Lucy Sante—known for her award-winning essays, criticism, and books, including Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991)—announced to a few dozen close friends that she was transitioning to womanhood. This news came following nearly four decades of publishing her work under the byline Luc Sante. In her new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Penguin Press), which she discusses at length on this episode of Time Sensitive, Sante ...
Apr 03, 2024•59 min•Season 9Ep. 108
