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 ...

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...

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 urge...

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...

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...

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 ever...

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...

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, L...

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 Apri...

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 develop...

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, sustainabil...

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 F...

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...

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 Thin...

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 193...

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...

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, personalit...

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 America...