Time Sensitive Podcast

Author and translator Jhumpa Lahiri grew up in what she has called “a linguistic exile.” Born in London to Bengali immigrants who moved to the United States when she was 3, Lahiri experienced a profound sense of alienation as a child and a longing for somewhere that felt like home. Then, during a 1994 trip to Florence, Italy, she fell in love with the Italian language, which she came to see as a gateway to exploring her life and id...

Jancis Robinson wrote the book on wine. Literally. The author of the first four editions of the definitive Oxford Companion to Wine, she has also published some 20 books on the subject and more than 1,500 articles for the Financial Times, for which she has been the wine correspondent since 1989. A member of the royal family’s wine committee, she also helps select wines for Queen Elizabeth II. A trailblazer and a nimble scholar, Rob...

Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza believes that music can unite people across cultures and has spent the past 45 years showing audiences how it can be done. One of his latest projects exemplifies this philosophy: Beginning in October, once a month during the Friday Kabbalat Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, Broza will present tracks from Tefila, a new album that recasts the service’s traditional prayers and hymns...

If life is a garden, the writer, editor, and craftsperson Deborah Needleman certainly knows how to dig and cultivate it. Early in her career, she followed a nonlinear path in the media industry that was, for the better part of a decade, slow and steady—and then, upon launching the home design bible Domino in 2004, meteoric. Over the next dozen years, Needleman rose to become one of the magazine world’s most in-demand editors, servi...

Bethann Hardison has, with great finesse, risen to become among the most vital voices in fashion. A self-described “advocate” who currently serves as Gucci’s executive advisor for global equity and cultural engagement, the former model and agent is a powerhouse figure who has not only reshaped conversations around diversity and anti-racism industry-wide, but has actively pushed for and, in turn, made change in terms of representati...

There is perhaps no one on the planet with a bigger-picture view on the impact of design—in all of its manifestations—than Paola Antonelli. As the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of architecture and design as well as its director of R&D, Antonelli consistently expands notions and definitions of what might be considered “design,” and shows how, in no uncertain terms, design connects to practically everything we see, touch,...

Alfredo Jaar illuminates truths that often escape popular consciousness. Through his work, the artist and filmmaker raises awareness about sociopolitical issues that have been forgotten, suppressed, or ignored, including genocide and the displacement of refugees. Simultaneously, he informs and engages viewers, urging them to be present for those who need their attention most. With all that he makes, Jaar maintains a heightened sens...

Dan Barber is on a mission to quite literally plant seeds for a better future. Around a decade ago, after learning that the nation’s largest food companies rarely breed food for flavor—and instead select for self-serving characteristics, such as the ability to produce high yields or endure long-distance travel—Barber, a chef and the co-owner of the restaurants Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, New Yo...

John Hoke, Nike’s chief design officer, intimately understands how to move design from an object to a feeling. At the company over the past three decades, he has refined his approach to center around creating designs that serve wearers in practical yet unexpected ways, and that often redefine what sportswear can look like and do. Hoke often tells his team that “the goal is goosebumps”—to develop ideas so great that they can be phys...

Claudia Rankine cuts to the chase. She does not mince her words. The poet, essayist, playwright, and educator—whose recent body of work analyzes white supremacy in America—looks closely at its subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations, personal and systemic. Her forthright attention to the unspoken runs across three plays and six collections of poetry, in which Rankine works through subjects of tragedy and despair, maternity and moth...

Kenny Schachter has an insatiable appetite for all things art. The polymathic art dealer, curator, teacher, writer, critic, collector, and self-taught artist brings a Tasmanian Devil–level energy to all that he does, but always with great, arms-open passion and, even within his whirlwind of ideas and projects, deep focus. For good reason, he has become a sort of enfant terrible in the art world, someone who’s not afraid to speak hi...

For Reginald Dwayne Betts—a poet, lawyer, and activist who supports and contributes to prison decarceration efforts—reading and writing have a mind-expanding power that never wanes. The author of three books of poetry and a memoir, his prose is intimate and raw. Even when he’s not writing about himself, Betts finds ways to build personal connections with his subjects for his award-winning work in The New York Times Magazine—subject...

Michael Murphy believes in architecture that promotes connectivity, collectivity, and health, in the broadest sense of the term. As the founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group, a 14-year-old nonprofit architecture and design collective with main offices in Boston and Kigali, Rwanda, he creates buildings with the aim of aiding individuals and communities, and addressing complex issues—particularly ones exacerb...

David Wallace-Wells, author of the best-selling book The Uninhabitable Earth and New York magazine’s editor-at-large, wields vivid language that makes people pay attention. But his writing isn’t hyperbole. Wallace-Wells’s clear-eyed, cinematic storytelling provides coherence and context around some of today’s most complex issues, from California wildfires to Covid-19. His writing demonstrates his special knack for synthesizing info...

Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), is a man bursting with endless energy. Throughout his four-decade career, he has never seemed to run out of steam. He signed his first recording contract at 22, and has gone on to release more than 100 jazz and classical recordings, win nine Grammy Awards, author six books, and earn more than 40 honorary degrees. ...

When Siri Hustvedt was 12 years old, she began reading 19th-century novels by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain that were given to her by her Norwegian mother, and soon developed a passion for literature. She found great satisfaction in how these stories expanded her mind with new ideas and realms beyond. At 13, precociously enough, she decided she wanted to become a writer. Her interest in developing...

Throughout his life, Daniel Humm has constantly pushed himself to the edge. So when Covid-19 arrived, he understood the importance of a quick pivot. Forced to close Eleven Madison Park—his three-Michelin-star Manhattan restaurant, named No. 1 in the world in 2017—he had to lay off all of his staff. Facing bankruptcy, Humm reflected on the many food-related issues that the pandemic was heightening, including meat-production carbon e...

The poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, views her work as an urgent political act. Following in the footsteps of her father, who was a civil rights advisor and special counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Alexander has witnessed the sometimes exasperatingly slow pace of progress, particularly when it comes to racial equality, and the resoluteness required for the vital w...