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 a...
Sep 25, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Season 2Ep. 19
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. Hastrei...
Sep 18, 2019•1 hr 34 min•Season 2Ep. 18
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 mak...
Sep 11, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Season 2Ep. 17
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 cul...
Sep 04, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Season 2Ep. 16
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 ran...
Aug 14, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 15
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...
Aug 07, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 14
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...
Jul 31, 2019•56 min•Season 1Ep. 13
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 wit...
Jul 24, 2019•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 12
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...
Jul 17, 2019•44 min
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 c...
Jul 10, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 11
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 ...
Jul 03, 2019•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 10
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 ex...
Jun 26, 2019•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 9
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,...
Jun 19, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 8
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 storyt...
Jun 12, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 7
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 ma...
Jun 05, 2019•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 6
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 embed...
May 29, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 5
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 f...
May 22, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 4
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, ...
May 15, 2019•53 min•Season 1Ep. 3
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). Thoug...
May 08, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 2
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, t...
May 01, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 1
“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 conce...
May 01, 2019•12 min
