Poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, talks about using language to promote change, how monuments and memorials shape collective memory, and the profundity of grounding oneself in the present.

Elizabeth Alexander on Moving Forward in the Face of Adversity

A podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form interviews with curious and courageous people about their life and work through the lens of time. Host Spencer Bailey speaks with leading minds on how they think about time broadly and how specific moments in time have shaped who they are today.

Explore more at timesensitive.fm

Society & Culture

Personal Journals

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

Business

Investing

Careers

Management & Marketing

Business News

Shopping

The French Moroccan creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami, the creator of Hotel Drei Berge in the Swiss Alps and the co-founder of the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, talks about the parallels between Japan and Switzerland, the healing power of mountains, business as a religion, and his upcoming journey from Paris to Tokyo by car along the Southern Silk Road.

Ramdane Touhami on Why He Will Never Slow Down

“The Sympathizer” author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about turning his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel into a new HBO miniseries of the same name, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” the fickle nature of memory, America as a mythology, and jokes as a form of truth-telling.

Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Need to Recognize Coexisting Truths

The 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley talks about sculpting art out of wood for seven decades straight; the language that poetry, music, and sculpture all share; his early years as a sportswriter for a local newspaper; and his enduring affinity for the work of Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi.

Thaddeus Mosley on Making Art to Be Appreciated for Centuries

The Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton discusses the elusive, multifarious nature of his “Black Dada” philosophical framework; painting as a kind of technology; and why, for him, jazz is indefinable.

Adam Pendleton on His Ongoing Exploration of “Black Dada”

The British fashion legend Paul Smith talks about his deep, 40-plus-year engagement with the country of Japan, where he operates more than 150 stores; his long-view approach to building a business that transcends time; his ever-growing collection of rabbit ephemera; and the metamorphic impact of music and humor on his life and work.

Elizabeth Alexander on Moving Forward in the Face of Adversity

Download our free app to listen on your phone