Trevor Paglen aspires to see the unseen. The artist explores the act of looking through various angles—such as how artificial-intelligence systems have been trained to “see” and categorize the world, or the disquieting sense of being “watched” by a security camera—and creates scenarios that frequently implicate viewers in the experience. At other times, he’ll take pictures of places that are typically kept far out of sight, including the rarely seen headquarters of America’s National Security Ag...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Season 4Ep. 49
When describing experiences, New York–based artist and author Maira Kalman almost always goes for the extremes: an instance can be at once stupid and smart, miserable and hopeful, sad and delighted. A bittersweet point of view forms the throughline of her work—which spans more than 30 books for adults and children, as well as performance, opera, film, and industrial and set design—and gives each project its distinct ability to encapsulate the reality of being human. Tragedy and beauty can, and w...
Sep 08, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Season 4Ep. 48
Kevin Beasley thinks a lot about objects. In particular, specific objects that relate to notions of American-ness and Blackness—and ones that are often linked, subtly or not, with violence. Whether with a Cadillac Escalade, a pair of Air Jordans, or an N.F.L. helmet, Beasley finds deep connections to each item he chooses to work with, rigorously studying their multifarious contexts, meanings, and histories. Happy to let artifacts sit in his New York studio for long periods of time, the 36-year-o...
Jun 30, 2021•1 hr 35 min•Season 3Ep. 47
For Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, processing the past is a constant, endless journey. She’d been thinking about race and reparations long before the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum last year, as both racism and African-American ancestry exist in her family history rooted in the American South, where she was born to country music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, in 1955. Cash channeled her anguish into “The Killing Fields,” a haunting sing...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Season 3Ep. 46
Growing up in the 1950s in the only Chinese family in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Billie Tsien always felt like an outsider. She would seclude herself in the shower of her family’s home’s master bathroom, behind closed doors, escaping into books for hours before her parents, who had originally moved to America from Shanghai to study at Cornell, would find her. Through this Tsien developed a deep understanding of the value of a rich interior life—a concept she has gone on to apply to her work a...
Apr 28, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Season 3Ep. 45
For 37 years, Eileen Fisher has faithfully followed a vision: to create simple, timeless clothes for women that make it easy to get dressed. Soft-spoken, polite, and a self-described introvert, the 70-year-old Fisher is the unlikely CEO of an approximately $500 million fashion company that bears her name. The operation is owned by 42 percent of its largely female staff, and is praised for its longtime environmentalism and progressive business model. Headquartered in Irvington, New York, the bran...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 3Ep. 44
Last year, after more than three decades of practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga, Eddie Stern found himself wondering if he should continue in the discipline. He’d amassed a considerable following through the classes of his New York yoga studios (with celebrity students such as Madonna; Gwyneth Paltrow; and Mike D, of the Beastie Boys), authored two books, launched a successful app with Moby and the alternative-medicine advocate Deepak Chopra, and lectured around the world. But issues within th...
Feb 24, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Season 3Ep. 43
Simon Critchley has seen his share of accidents. In his younger years, he damaged his hands while working in manufacturing plants, and ruined his hearing by rehearsing with a punk band in spaces with subpar acoustics. At 18, he suffered significant memory loss, and most recollections from his childhood in rural England temporarily disappeared. The experience of forgetting, Critchley realized, was something he could make useful: It gave him a clean slate, and the freedom to fill in the blanks how...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 3Ep. 42
New York–based jewelry and object designer Monique Péan sees fossils and extraterrestrial materials as portals to another time, space, and place. Pyritized dinosaur bones, woolly mammoth tooth roots, meteorites, and lunaites are among her work’s mediums. She sources these from remote locations—including the Arctic Circle, where she located fossils with Native Alaskan Inupiat and Yupik tribes, and on Easter Island, where that site’s aboriginal Polynesian inhabitants helped her hand-carve cosmic o...
Dec 16, 2020•58 min•Season 3Ep. 41
Artist Dan Colen built Sky High Farm in the same way all his ideas are realized: intuitively, and with the faith to see it through. A 40-acre self-sustaining ecosystem in New York’s Hudson Valley, the farm helps underserved communities by donating everything it produces to local food banks. Since 2011, Colen and his team have given away more than 70 tons of organic vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. As the pandemic exposes the urgency of the farm’s raison d’être—spotlighting food insecurity and ...
Nov 18, 2020•59 min•Season 3Ep. 40
To make her namesake womenswear line, New York–based designer Angel Chang had to forget everything she knew about fashion. Her label’s clothing is made using age-old techniques developed by China’s indigenous Miao and Dong ethnic minority tribes, whose procedures are at risk of disappearing because a younger generation has, in recent years, largely been indifferent to learning them. Chang, who was born in central Indiana to Chinese immigrants, first encountered Guizhou Province’s garment-making ...
Oct 21, 2020•56 min•Season 3Ep. 39
Asked how the coronavirus pandemic has affected his relationship with time, Daniel Boulud chokes up. The New York–based French chef—who owns 13 restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Daniel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the fast-casual café Épicerie Boulud—laments the ways that Covid-19 has uprooted his staff, suppliers, and customers, deeming it the worst experience of his five-decades-long career. The response reveals a defining trait of the ardent chef, who cares deeply not only for...
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 38
Tom Kundig brings a refreshingly laid-back, aw-shucks, go-with-the-flow attitude to an industry that seems, on the whole, largely to lack that kind of demeanor. Architects tend to be a rather uptight, perfectionist breed. Not Kundig, an experimental, hands-on Seattle-based practitioner, who, though he appreciates details and makes incredibly immaculate, wondrously conceived designs, also has a fondness for the utilitarian, the everyday, the experimental, the imperfect. His elegant buildings, whi...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 3Ep. 37
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 Pav...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 3Ep. 36
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 y...
Mar 25, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 35
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 artis...
Mar 18, 2020•53 min•Season 3Ep. 34
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-authore...
Mar 11, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Season 3Ep. 33
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 som...
Mar 04, 2020•55 min•Season 3Ep. 32
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 entrepreneur...
Dec 18, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 31
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, ...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 30
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 fa...
Dec 04, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 29
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 Dubr...
Nov 27, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 28
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 . Tho...
Nov 20, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Season 2Ep. 27
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...
Nov 13, 2019•1 hr 16 min•Season 2Ep. 26
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. Was...
Nov 06, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 25
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...
Oct 30, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 24
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...
Oct 23, 2019•1 hr 19 min•Season 2Ep. 23
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 M...
Oct 16, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Season 2Ep. 22
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 ...
Oct 09, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Season 2Ep. 21
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 passiv...
Oct 02, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 20
