Time Sensitive

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 motherhood, selfhood and individualism, and everyday instances of racial discrimination in ways that shrewdly illuminate the inner workings of American society. Never prescriptive, she leaves room for audiences to consider their own prejudices and privileges, and to understand more intimately where they come from and the systems in which they participate and belong. Often, Rankine seems more interested in questions than answers, and in unpacking the thought processes implied by a given response. These inquiries are at the center of her 2019 New York Times Magazine essay “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked,” which details her experiences of talking with white men about race in airports and on airplanes. Some of these dialogues arise in Rankine’s play Help, too, which recently finished a monthlong run at The Shed in New York City. Her inquisitiveness also lies at the center of The Racial Imaginary Institute, an organization she co-founded in 2016 that prompts artists and institutions to consider their racialized positioning. For Rankine, too much is at stake to not have these kinds of conversations.On this episode, Rankine talks with Spencer about why Americans tend to avoid talking about whiteness and white supremacy, racism in professional tennis, and what liminal spaces can reveal about white privilege. Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.Show notes:Full transcriptclaudiarankine.com[05:48] “Claudia Rankine on How Beyoncé Became an Icon”[05:48] The White Card[18:30] The Racial Imaginary Institute[18:30] The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind[27:58] “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”[34:01] Citizen: An American Lyric[36:41] “The Meaning of Serena Williams”[53:22] Help[58:11] “Weather”[01:10:09] Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric[01:10:09] Just Us: An American Conversation[01:13:51] Plot[01:13:51] The End of the Alphabet

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 his mind, and who doesn’t care about ruffling feathers or messing with the establishment. He pushes against the status quo, and happily so. Schachter is a believer in high culture as much as low, and brings little pretension to his craft, no matter the medium, even if considerable rigor underlies it. Often, he’s decidedly coy.Schachter’s love of art is bona fide and lifelong. Not only did art prove a helpful outlet for him during a difficult childhood, but it has also blossomed into a way of growing closer to his family (particularly with his children, with whom he has mounted a series of inventive exhibitions). Schachter especially appreciates art for its ability to help him depict the time he’s living in. For him, art also serves as a form of cultural and personal commentary and as a mode of humor, often the self-deprecating variety. Schachter has become something of an NFT oracle, too, and will present his latest efforts in this space at next month’s Independent Art Fair (May 5–8) in New York, with Greece’s Allouche Benias gallery.On this episode, Schachter talks with Andrew about art as a form of sense-making, the benefits of being an outsider, and why he employs humor in so much of his work.Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Show notes:Full transcript@kennyschachter[07:56] Schachter’s column for Artnet[09:46] Schachter’s shrugging emoji[28:42] “The Hoarder” series of Sotheby’s sales[29:46] “Kenny Schachter: Retrospective” (2018)[42:15] “Friends & Family” (2012)[57:46] “The Artist Is Online” (2021)[57:57] “Kenny Schachter: Metadada” (2022)[01:01:46] “Forbidden Amuse Yourself Piggy Bank” (2018)[01:23:06] “The Art World’s Mini-Madoff and Me”

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—subjects that have included the rapper Tariq Trotter of The Roots, the late actor Michael K. Williams, and Vice President Kamala Harris. He also brings a literary bent to his activism: In 2020, he founded Freedom Reads, a nonprofit that aims to build libraries inside 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across the country. The program recently installed its first sets of bookshelves at MCI-Norfolk, the Massachusetts prison where Malcolm X was incarcerated, and last month, in a public event at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., it presented the 500 titles that comprise each collection.Betts, a graduate of Yale Law School (where he’s currently in a Ph.D. program), became an advocate for respecting the rights and dignity of the people who are in or who have gone through the American carceral system after experiencing it firsthand himself. Instead of resigning himself to the violence and dehumanizing conditions of incarceration, he turned his focus to books—many by Black writers and poets—that showed him the depth and richness of self-reflection, and that got him thinking about the stories he himself had to tell. On this episode, Betts speaks with Spencer about the long-term impacts of his time behind bars, the current renaissance of prison writing, and the transformative act of giving people who are incarcerated access to literature and books.Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Show notes:Full transcriptdwaynebetts.comA Question of Freedom [18:39]Betts’s 2021 commencement speech at Wesleyan University [25:46]Felon: An American Washi Tale [30:24]“Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me” [30:36]“A Son, A Mother, and Two Gun Crimes” episode of Death, Sex & Money podcast [38:06]“The Lives They Lived” [42:55]Shahid Reads His Own Palm [01:00:27]Bastards of the Reagan Era [01:00:27]Felon [01:00:27]“Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out” [01:03:01]Freedom Reads [01:10:23]“Memorial Hoops” [01:16:54]

Maggie Doyne, who co-founded the BlinkNow Foundation nonprofit at age 19, discusses how, over the past 13 years, she has developed a school, children’s home, health clinic, and women’s center in Surkhet, Nepal.

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 exacerbated by politics and time. In addition to hospitals and health centers around the world, MASS has created schools, public and private housing, farms, campuses, and other projects centered around healing and hope. This focus shines in some of the firm’s recent efforts, including MASS’s Restorative Design Justice Lab, which seeks to design decarceration, and its Covid-19 Design Response team, which provides resources to vulnerable populations, such as Indigenous communities and those in senior housing. “Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics,” an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt (on view through February 20, 2023) that MASS curated and designed, highlights how architecture can serve people in moments of crisis. MASS’s work on memorials further illustrates the firm’s dedication to creating affecting architecture. The practice’s designs for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018) in Montgomery, Alabama; the Gun Violence Memorial Project (2019); and “The Embrace,” a sculpture created with artist Hank Willis Thomas that will rise from the Boston Common this year, offer visceral, multisensory experiences. On this episode, Murphy talks with Spencer about creating a “Slow Space” movement, architecture as a storytelling device, and why the most successful memorials are those that offer tools for collective engagement.Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Show notes:Full transcript[03:15] MASS Design Group[21:30] The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity[21:30] “Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics”[22:10] Michael Murphy’s 2016 TED Talk [34:30] Restorative Justice Design Lab[44:39] National Memorial for Peace and Justice[44:39] “The Embrace”[47:21] Kigali Genocide Memorial—African Center for Peace[55:18] Gun Violence Memorial Project [01:06:30] Butaro District Hospital

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 information and rare ability to draw conclusions in ways that offer viscerally felt, nuanced insights.A large part of Wallace-Wells’s appeal stems from how he straddles two dimensions at once. He unpacks pressing topics by offering of-the-moment analysis while also considering the long-term consequences of such data. Late last year, for example, he wrote frequently about the Omicron variant’s impact—but also compared it to other pandemic data, and detailed unsettling projections about the variant’s protracted effects. In 2019, his New York piece on the wildfires in California traced their devastating toll; he also contextualized it, within the climate crisis, as a once-manageable occurrence that has evolved into a continual threat.On this episode, Wallace-Wells talks with Andrew about society’s troubling capacity for normalization, drama as a means to stir people to climate action, and why—despite all of the above—he’s feeling optimistic for the future.Special thanks to our Season 5 sponsor, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Show notes:Full transcript@dwallacewells[13:48] The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming [32:34] “We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time”[35:53] “Can Anything Stop the Omicron Wave?”[44:05] “Ten Million a Year”

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. In 1987, Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center, which, following the initiative’s success, made it a formal part of the performing arts institution in 1996. The following year, his album Blood on the Fields, an oratorio about slavery, won a Pulitzer Prize. Not even the pandemic could stop Marsalis from using music as a vessel for knowledge and expression. As New York went into lockdown last March, he accelerated JALC’s digital programming with initiatives including a weekly YouTube conversation series and a virtual edition of JALC’s high school jazz band competition. In August 2020, he released The Ever Fonky Lowdown, a horn-powered survey of the forces that divide people and a vision of how we might rise above them. Through it all, Marsalis has remained passionate about the power of his work. “Music is important,” he says, “because music, and all art, is reenactment. The reenactments exist to let you understand the meaning of things across time.”On this episode, Marsalis speaks with Andrew about jazz as a metaphor for democracy, communicating through instruments, and how understanding music lends itself to understanding life.Show notes:Full Transcript[03:55] Ellis Marsalis[04:48] Jazz at Lincoln Center[05:24] Skain’s Domain[09:08] The Ever Fonky Lowdown[09:25] Ellis Louis Marsalis III [11:30] “That Dance We Do” [11:57] The Democracy! Suite  [13:38] Blood on the Fields [14:29] “Sloganize, Patronize, Realize, Revolutionize (Black Lives Matters)”[29:03] “Deeper Than Dreams”[32:36] Branford Marsalis

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 what she calls a “flexibility of mind” led her to eventually reading and studying works in a wide range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. Through her essays, poems, fiction, and nonfiction over the past five decades, Hustvedt’s aim has become clear: to bring together perspectives that might help her—and those who read her work—see the world differently.Hustvedt’s efforts to break down barriers and build a diversity of knowledge have steered her toward an array of topics. Upon moving from her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, to New York City in 1978 to attend Columbia University, from which she earned her Ph.D. in English literature, she worked as a waitress, a researcher for a medical historian, a model, and an artist’s assistant. She went on to write seven novels, including the international bestseller What I Loved (2004) and The Blazing World (2014), the latter of which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 2014. Since 1995, Hustvedt has written extensively about art and what comes from looking deeply at it, unpacking works ranging from Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (1662–1664) to the photorealistic paintings of Gerhard Richter​​. Often, Hustvedt’s subject matter comes to her because it hits close to home. In her 2010 book The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, she investigated the violent tremors that she first experienced in 2006 while delivering her father’s eulogy. Hustvedt (who with her husband, the novelist Paul Auster, has a daughter, the singer-songwriter Sophie Auster) has also long been interested in the peculiarities of motherhood, and more recently, the placenta, a subject she plans to explore at length in a future book. On this episode, Hustvedt talks with Spencer about the mysteries and misunderstandings around gestation, maternity, and being a mother; books as friends; and the problems with putting up walls between disciplines. Show notes:Full Transcriptsirihustvedt.net[05:01] Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021)[47:53] A Plea for Eros (2005)[53:24] “The Future of Literature: The Anatomy of the Novel” (2017)[01:03:31] The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (2010)

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 emissions, food insecurity, and broken supply chains. The extremity of the situation gave him the courage to boldly transition Eleven Madison Park to an entirely plant-based menu when the restaurant reopened earlier this year, in June. It’s one of several ways that Humm is using food to shift perspectives, in the hopes that his approach will lead to environmental and health impacts far outside of the restaurant world.Dogged determination and an inescapable internal call to follow his instincts are chief components of Humm’s successful three-decade-long career. After earning a Michelin star in his first executive chef position at age 24, for an inn in the Swiss Alps called Gasthaus zum Gupf, he helmed the kitchen at Campton Place in San Francisco, where he relocated to in 2003, and proceeded to hone his artful and intentional cooking style. Three years later, at the invitation of restaurateur Danny Meyer, Humm moved to New York to become the executive chef of Eleven Madison Park, which he now owns. Recently, Humm has modified his cooking for a higher purpose. With Eleven Madison Park’s new dishes, for example, he has created a circular ecosystem in which the purchase of each dinner funds meals for New Yorkers in need. Earlier this year, he launched Eleven Madison Truck, which serves meals to food-insecure areas of New York in partnership with Rethink Food—a nonprofit, for which Humm serves as a co-founder, dedicated to creating more equitable food systems. On this episode, Humm speaks with Spencer about cooking and hospitality as performance, why time is his most luxurious ingredient, and what he would say to New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, who recently wrote a cantankerous review of Eleven Madison Park’s updated menu.Show notes:Full transcript[02:33] Eleven Madison Park[04:06] Rethink Food [18:49] I Love New York (2013)[47:13] Brad Cloepfil[59:17] Campton Place[01:01:54] Danny Meyer[01:01:54] Daniel Boulud[01:08:47] The New York Times’s September 2021 review of Eleven Madison Park[01:11:12]  Eleven Madison Truck

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 work of pressing on. She approaches each day as an opportunity to do as much as she can, with all she has. Through her teaching, scholarship, and poetry, Alexander built the foundation for her role as a philanthropic leader. She has held professorships at the University of Chicago; Smith College; Yale University, where she worked for 15 years and chaired the African American studies department; and Columbia University. From 2015 to 2018, she served as director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, and last year, launched the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, a $250 million initiative that aims to rethink and transform America’s commemorative landscape. Alexander’s consciousness and compassion are especially apparent in her writing, which often weaves together biography, history, and memory to potent effect. In articles for publications such as Time and The New Yorker, she has reflected, with great acuity, on racist violence in America. Her collection American Sublime (2005) and memoir, The Light of the World (2015), were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. At President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, she recited her optimistic, clear-eyed poem “Praise Song for the Day.”On this episode, Alexander discusses the vast possibilities of social justice, talking with Spencer about using language to promote change, how monuments and memorials shape collective memory, and the profundity of grounding oneself in the present.Show notes:Full transcriptelizabethalexander.net[10:34] “‘Can you be Black and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s)” (1994)[25:05] Andrew W. Mellon Foundation[25:05] The Monuments Project[49:05] The Clifton House[50:11] The Venus Hottentot (1990)[50:15] Body of Life (1996)[50:15] Antebellum Dream Book (2001)[50:15] American Sublime (2005)[50:42] “Crash” (2001)[55:37]  The Light of the World (2015)[55:37] Ficre Ghebreyesus