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

Artist and designer Debbie Millman has been fascinated by the power of branding for most of her life. And as the host of the Design Matters podcast (which was recently translated into a book, out next month) and chair of the School of Visual Arts’s Masters in Branding program, she constantly has branding on her mind. For Millman, part of the allure of logos, identities, and marketing stems from the exercise of clearly and confidently expressing a purpose and meaning—a challenge that she has concurrently grappled with on a personal level. The parallels between aims in her work and life are no coincidence: Millman’s professional projects are often her way of searching for answers to life’s deepest questions.Millman has long considered how design can reveal people’s innermost desires. She has worked at several prominent New York City agencies, including Sterling Brands, for which she served as chief marketing officer and president of its design division for 20 years, and was part of teams that created identities for brands such as 7Up, Burger King, Tropicana, and Twizzlers. She even moonlighted as the first-ever creative director of the pioneering hip-hop radio station Hot 97. Over the years, her career has helped her recognize the importance of slowing down, and of trusting that she doesn’t have to approach everything—writing, teaching, special projects, love—as if it’s her last chance to experience it.On this episode, Millman describes her quest to feel comfortable in her own skin, talking with Spencer about the benefits of being a good listener, branding and marketing as ways to manufacture meaning, and why she doesn’t want to peak until the very end of her life.Show notes:Full transcriptdebbiemillman.com(03:50): Roxane Gay(06:34): Millman’s “Together Apart” poster for #CombatCovid(08:15): RAND Art + Data(11:58): Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts(13:19): Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People (HarperCollins)(13:19): Design Matters podcast(33:52): Look Both Ways (HOW Books)(50:09): Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits (SkyHorse Publishing)(54:35): Millman’s 2019 TED Talk, “How Symbols and Brands Shape Humanity”(01:17:16): How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer (Simon & Schuster)

For curator and scholar Glenn Adamson, craft isn’t a quirky hobby that sits on the outskirts of contemporary culture. Rather, it’s a vital, timeless tool for teaching us about one another, and about humanity as a whole. This belief fuels his writing, teaching, and curatorial projects, which seek to unpack the many ways in which the age-old activity shapes our lives. Adamson’s work shows that craft is bigger than any single skillfully handmade object—each of which itself can serve as an important symbol of the human capacity for honing expertise over time—and influences countless aspects of society, from the Japanese tea ceremony to farming robots devised by Google’s parent company, Alphabet X. In this way, craft acts as a lens for understanding people and places across time.Adamson, 49, has explored the virtues of craft throughout his two-decade-long career, which has included roles at Milwaukee’s Chipstone Foundation, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. In his 2018 book Fewer, Better Things, he positions craft as a means of connecting with fundamental issues and ideas (as opposed to those that hold only momentary or superficial relevance), and explains why taking the time to appreciate handmade objects from a maker’s or a user’s perspective holds particular spiritual and psychological value. Adamson’s account of the discipline in the United States, neatly laid out in his latest book, Craft: An American History (Bloomsbury), reveals how artisans—whose trade often includes people who are disempowered by their ethnicity, gender, or both—have been consistently suppressed throughout the nation’s history, but, paradoxically, are integral to many of its greatest achievements. His latest endeavor takes a more forward-looking approach. “Futures,” an exhibition Adamson co-curated that opens in November at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. (on view through summer 2022), considers how craft can signal where we might be headed, and why we should be optimistic about the time to come. Over and over again, Adamson demonstrates how skilled making is about more than just beautiful objects. “Craft stands in for the whole idea of what it means to be human,” he says, “and why that matters.”On this episode, Adamson discusses the various facets of skilled making, talking with Spencer about the value of hand-formed objects, the relationship between time and craft, and the discipline’s essential, often complicated role in the history of human progress.Show notes:Full transcript on timesensitive.fm@glenn_adamsonglennadamson.com(16:20): Fewer, Better Things (Bloomsbury, 2018)(52:57): Chipstone Foundation (53:33): Milwaukee Art Museum(54:16): “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990” (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011)(55:56): The Journal of Modern Craft(56:04): Museum of Arts and Design(59:50): Craft: An American History (Bloomsbury, 2021)(01:17:23): “Futures” (Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, Nov. 2021–Summer 2022)

Trevor Paglen aspires to see the unseen. The artist explores the act of looking through various angles—such as how artificial-intelligence systems have been trained to “see” and categorize the world, or the disquieting sense of being “watched” by a security camera—and creates scenarios that frequently implicate viewers in the experience. At other times, he’ll take pictures of places that are typically kept far out of sight, including the rarely seen headquarters of America’s National Security Agency, or the Mojave Desert, home to numerous military facilities, prisons, and a former nuclear testing site. Paglen, who has a Ph.D. in geography from University of California, Berkeley, also thinks about the relationship between space and time, and how the associations a person makes while looking at something—be it an age-old landscape or a satellite in endless orbit around the Earth—are fleeting and constantly changing. By highlighting invisible frameworks that exist in the world, Paglen invites viewers to think about life’s inconspicuous, and often unsettling, realities. Paglen, who is 47 and has studios in New York and Berlin, draws on science, technology, and investigative journalism to make his wide-ranging work. In one of his early projects, “Recording Carceral Landscapes” (1995–2004), he wore a concealed microphone and posed as a criminology student to document the interiors of California penitentiaries. For “The Last Pictures” (2012), he collaborated with materials scientists at M.I.T. to devise an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with a collection of 100 images, and launched it into space on a communications satellite for aliens to find. More recently, his viral digital art project and app “ImageNet Roulette” (2020), which allowed users to upload photos of their faces to see how A.I. might label them, horrified many users with racist, sexist, or overtly stereotypical results, leading ImageNet, a leading image database, to remove half a million images.  Beyond his art practice, Paglen continues his preoccupation with perception. He studies martial arts, surfs, and composes music—activities that require constant, intense awareness. It all stems from a heightened consciousness of, and interest in, the concept of observation that he’s carried for nearly his entire life. “We’re all trying to learn different ways of seeing,” he says. On this episode, Paglen discusses his deep-seated fascination with perception, talking with Spencer about the impacts of surveillance, deserts as sites of secrecy, and the value of trying to perceive forces that seem impossible to see. Show notes:Full transcript on timesensitive.fm@trevorpaglenpaglen.studio04:54: “The Last Pictures” project (2012)19:51: “Orbital Reflector” (2018)29:48: Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” (1970) 42:53: Paglen’s thrash group, Noisegate47:15: “Recording Carceral Landscapes” (1995–2004) 1:05:13: “ImageNet Roulette” (2020) 1:05:13: “Bloom” (2020)

When describing experiences, New York–based artist and author Maira Kalman almost always goes for the extremes: an instance can be at once stupid and smart, miserable and hopeful, sad and delighted. A bittersweet point of view forms the throughline of her work—which spans more than 30 books for adults and children, as well as performance, opera, film, and industrial and set design—and gives each project its distinct ability to encapsulate the reality of being human. Tragedy and beauty can, and will, she believes, appear out of nowhere. In both instances, it’s what one does with it that determines how the event will impact their life. Kalman, 71, credits this sensibility to credits this sensibility to people and places of significance in her life, specifically to the early death of her husband, the celebrated graphic designer Tibor Kalman, and to her late mother, Sara Berman, in addition to her Jewish heritage and birthplace of Tel Aviv. In tandem with her practice, Kalman makes time to indulge in seemingly mundane activities, such as taking long walks, cleaning, and reading obituaries, which she sees as activators of life. Each gesture is a means for finding clarity in the midst of chaos.On this episode, Kalman talks with Andrew about observation as a creative act, the allure of books, the importance of not thinking, and performing daily rituals as a means for staying sane. Show notes:@mairakalmanmairakalman.com9:37: Tibor Kalman13:08: Alex Kalman13:55: “Love in the Time of Corona” (Times Square Arts, 2020) 17:30: American Utopia (Bloomsbury, 2020) and American Utopia Broadway play (2019–Present)23:46: “The Museum Workout” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017)28:26: “Sara Berman’s Closet” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015)52:21: (Un)fashion (Abrams, 2005)53:43: M&Co56:11: “Tiborocity: Design and Undesign by Tibor Kalman, 1979–1999”  58:08: Alex and Maira Kalman’s short films1:05:08: “New Yorkistan” cover for the New Yorker (2001)