At a Distance

Austrian-born, New York–based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister talks with us about the media’s proclivity for negative news, why progress often stems from complexity, and how recognizing humanity’s historical long-term successes can help encourage a more rationally optimistic perspective.

Policy expert and equity advocate Ifeoma Ozoma, founder of the Santa Fe–based consulting firm Earthseed, discusses how companies use nondisclosure agreements as a means of ensuring indefinite constraint on their employees, the effects that the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have had on the ways in which NDAs serve as corporate cover for illegal behavior, and why holding executives liable for their businesses’ criminal offenses could help facilitate change.

Writer and producer Katie Engelhart, author of the new book “The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die,” speaks with us about the underground euthanasia movement, the differing perspectives on assisted suicide in countries around the world, and the problems with the media’s portrayal of the elderly.

Austin Whitman, founder and CEO of the climate certification nonprofit Climate Neutral, talks with us about the economic benefits of helping brands reduce their environmental impacts, the difference between facts and strategy, and the importance of holding companies of all sizes accountable for offsetting and reducing their carbon emissions.

Doug Bierend, author of the new book “In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms,” discusses using fungi to clean up pollutants, how mycology can guide conversations around the climate crisis, and mushrooms as a gateway to new ways of thinking about food, nature, and society.

Kim Hastreiter, co-founder of Paper magazine and creator of the pop-up “public service” newspaper The New Now, speaks with us about her friends’ pandemic-induced workarounds, the importance of documenting history, and why New York City may be on the verge of a creative explosion.

Danny Dorling, author of the book “Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives” and the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, talks with us about geography as a means to understand culture; how and why, despite our sped-up modern lives, the world has been in a global slowdown since the late 1960s; and the ways in which this slowdown illuminates women’s aptitude for leadership.

London-based artist, author, and master potter Edmund de Waal, whose work is currently on view at the British Museum and Gagosian’s galleries in London and Hong Kong, discusses the psychological value of human touch, the intimate relationship between pottery and poetry, and the importance of kindness as a societal response to the pandemic.

Boston city councilor at-large Michelle Wu, a progressive Democrat currently running in the 2021 Boston mayoral race, speaks with us about transitioning cities to a “community-based” leadership model, why governing bodies need to reflect the people they serve, and the role that local administrations can play in the global climate-justice conversation.

Melissa Harris-Perry, the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University and co-host of The Nation’s new System Check podcast, talks with us about the camera’s monopoly on shaping public conversation, having the courage to be wrong, and why personal experience is an apt way to develop hypotheses, but the wrong way to test them.