Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

By WNYC Studios

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What's Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin about?

From WNYC Studios, award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and performers. Alec sidesteps the predictable by going inside the dressing rooms, apartments, and offices of people we want to understand better: Ira Glass, Lena Dunham, David Brooks, Roz Chast, Chris Rock and others. Hear what happens when an inveterate guest becomes a host.
WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, Snap Judgment, On the Media, Death, Sex & Money, Nancy and many others.
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A Piece of New York: Real E...

10.20.2020

Today, Alec plunges into the politics of real estate with two guests. The first is David Schleicher of Yale Law School, whose expertise is Land Use. He gets to the heart of gentrification and continuously surprises Alec with one idea ...

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin episodes:

10.20.2020 A Piece of New York: Real Estate in NYC Today, Alec plunges into the politics of real estate with two guests. The first is David Schleicher of Yale Law School, whose expertise is Land Use. He gets to the heart of gentrification and continuously surprises Alec with one idea ...
10.06.2020 Peter Asher's Long and Winding Road As a singer, guitarist, producer, and manager, Peter Asher has been at the center of some of the most important music - and moments - of the rock era. In 1964, he was just 19 when his London-based duo Peter ...
09.22.2020 The Eternal Phantom: Davis Gaines Few actors are as deeply associated with a character as Davis Gaines is with the Phantom of the Opera. When the Kennedy Center honored Hal Prince, Phantom’s original director, they turned to Gaines to perform the musical’s signature song, “Music ...
09.08.2020 Jordan Klepper Has Gone from Comedy to Farce Jordan Klepper is a very funny person, and Comedy Central took notice, making him one of their go-to stars: he's hosted his own late-night talk show and two excellent documentary series for the network. But with about 90 million views ...
09.03.2020 Take a Listen to "Tribeca Talks" The Tribeca Film Festival has launched a new podcast, Tribeca Talks, and we want you to know about it. Here's a conversation Alec had with director Guillermo Del Toro at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, covering Del Toro’s incredible career, ...
08.25.2020 The Art of the Art Deal Alec looks at the art world from two angles -- from someone in it, and from someone who has observed the world from a distance. First, writer Michael Shnayerson -- his latest book, Boom, gives an exhaustive history of how ...
08.18.2020 Marc Kudisch Plays Questionable Men Marc Kudisch is a Broadway staple. With three Tony nominations, he has played such roles as The Proprietor in Assassins, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, and the sexist blowhard boss in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5. On screen, Kudisch ...
08.11.2020 Legacies of Vietnam Today, Alec speaks with two colleagues he’s known for a long time, Brian Delate and Dick Hughes -- both actors whose lives were touched by the Vietnam War. Delate, Alec’s first guest, served in Vietnam after high school. He has ...
08.04.2020 Alec Dives into "The Dating Market" Writers Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Fetters may be the country’s most astute observers of modern romance. Fetters even wrote the definitive history of Tinder. Alec discovered their jointly written article, The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse, published in February, 2020, ...
07.28.2020 Ramona Diaz Decodes the Motherland Filipino-American filmmaker Ramona Diaz says each of her films is a “yearning for the motherland.” She’s in a unique position, as she says, able to “decode” the Philippines for the rest of the world. Her most recent film, A Thousand ...
07.14.2020 Everybody Loves Stanley Tucci Alec and Stanley Tucci have only been on set together a couple of times, but they established a rapport deep enough to carry over into a Zoom interview more than a decade later. The two share stories from their families, ...
06.30.2020 Ingrid Newkirk Was a Deputy Sheriff Before She Founded PETA Ingrid Newkirk is the co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. It may be America’s best-known animal rights organization thanks to legal sophistication, scientific seriousness, and off-the-wall publicity stunts like throwing fake blood on models wearing ...
06.16.2020 Micky Dolenz on How The Monkees Went from TV Band to Real-Life Band Micky Dolenz was a successful child-actor, but he became a full-fledged star at 20 in 1966 as the exuberant singer and drummer of The Monkees -- or rather, as the actor playing that character. At first, the band was a ...
06.02.2020 On a Zoom Call with Woody Allen Woody Allen's new book, Apropos of Nothing, starts with a portrait of his father, a tough-guy World War One Navy veteran and onetime gunman in a firing squad. It's the first of a series of surprising, fascinating stories from a ...
05.19.2020 New York City's Post-COVID Future In the midst of a crisis it can be healthy to think of what comes after. In this episode of Here's the Thing, two of the most influential New Yorkers when it comes to long-term economic planning join Alec to ...
05.14.2020 In Memoriam: Wynn Handman Over a 70-year career, Wynn Handman added sharpness and craft to the natural talents of actors including Christopher Walken, Allison Janney, Raul Julia, Richard Gere, James Caan, Anna Deveare Smith, Joanne Woodward, and Mia Farrow. The World War II veteran ...
05.05.2020 Brian De Palma on Scarface, Mission: Impossible, and the Movie He Made in College Brian De Palma's astonishingly diverse hits as a director include Blow Out, Scarface, The Untouchables, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Raising Cain, Carlito’s Way, and Mission: Impossible. He wrote many of those screenplays, too. With his distinctive visual style and ...
04.21.2020 Daryl Hall Invites Alec In Hall & Oates is the biggest-selling vocal duo in history. "Maneater," "Rich Girl," "You Make My Dreams Come True," and countless other hits will be beloved for generations. So Daryl Hall has long been at the top of Alec's Most ...
04.16.2020 In Memoriam: Patricia Bosworth Alec and Patti Bosworth became friends serving together on the board of the Actors Studio. When Bosworth died of complications from COVID-19, it wasn't just a loss to the literary and theatrical worlds; it was also personal for Alec and ...
04.07.2020 Anjelica Huston on Modeling, Movie-Making, and a Life in the Spotlight Anjelica Huston has lived many lives, all with grace and charisma. As the daughter of John Huston (director of The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, and more) she was movie royalty from birth. But she grew up in rural Ireland ...
03.31.2020 Butch Walker's Awesomely Diverse Rock Résumé Butch Walker is one of rock and roll's biggest talents, and on May 8th, he'll be releasing his new album -- a rock opera called American Love Story. You can preview one of the songs on today's episode of Here's ...
03.20.2020 Eliza Shapiro on School Closures, the Big Picture -- and Probably Getting Coronavirus New York Times reporter Eliza Shapiro ranks high on the list of the most powerful people in education because "no one on the education beat is a sharper – or more effective – thorn in the side of city officials." ...
03.10.2020 Revealing Barry Sonnenfeld Barry Sonnenfeld was among Hollywood's most in-demand cinematographers (Big, When Harry Met Sally, Misery) when he decided to make the switch to directing in 1991. The producers were nervous, but the proof was in the pudding: Sonnenfeld's directorial debut was ...
02.25.2020 The Luminous Kelli O'Hara For more than a decade, Kelli O'Hara has been at the very top of the Broadway heap. She gets called "luminous" so often that it must get really very, very tiring. It's been a remarkable journey for a kid who ...
02.11.2020 Russ Tamblyn, from DeMille to David Lynch Russ Tamblyn was born in Los Angeles in the middle of the Depression to a chorus girl and a Broadway "song and dance man." His father had moved his growing family west to press his luck in the talkies. Russ ...
02.07.2020 The Oscars Series, Day 5: For Sama, This Year's Most Powerful Documentary This week, in honor of the upcoming Academy Awards, Here's the Thing brings you a collection of conversations with Oscar-winners -- and, today, with a pair of 2020 nominees. They are Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the co-directors of For ...
02.06.2020 The Oscars Series, Day 4: Spike Lee This week, in honor of the upcoming Academy Awards, Here's the Thing brings you a collection of conversations with Oscar-winners -- including one new interview, coming tomorrow, with the creative team of 2020 Best Documentary-nominee For Sama. Today, on Day ...
02.05.2020 The Oscars Series Day 3: Julianne Moore This week, in honor of the upcoming Academy awards, Here's the Thing brings you a collection of conversations with Oscar-winners -- including one new interview with the creative team of 2020 Best Documentary-nominee For Sama, coming Friday. For Day 3 ...
02.04.2020 The Oscars Series, Day 2: Cameron Crowe This week, in honor of the upcoming Academy awards, Here's the Thing brings you a collection of conversations with Oscar-winners -- including one new interview with the creative team of 2020 Best Documentary-nominee For Sama. For our second installment, we ...
02.03.2020 The Oscars Series, Day 1: Barbra Streisand This week, in honor of the upcoming Academy awards, Here's the Thing brings you a collection of conversations with Oscar-winners -- including one new interview coming Friday with the creative team of 2020 Best Documentary-nominee For Sama. We begin, however, ...
01.21.2020 Kantor and Twohey: The Reporters Who Broke the Harvey Weinstein Story Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are the New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. For five months -- perpetually in danger of losing the scoop -- they cultivated and cajoled sources ranging from the Weinsteins’ accountant to ...
01.07.2020 Wynton Marsalis, Keeper of the Jazz Flame Wynton Marsalis was on the cover of Time as the avatar of the "New Jazz Age." His central role in reviving the genre is thanks partly to his gorgeous, virtuosic trumpet-playing, and partly to his founding of Jazz at Lincoln ...
12.24.2019 Julie Andrews, Revisited We often think of Julie Andrews as the prim nanny from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, but her personal path may have the greatest resemblance to one of her Broadway roles: Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Andrews ...
12.10.2019 Noah Baumbach Gets Personal in Marriage Story Director Noah Baumbach is known for messy and realistic family dramas. The Squid and The Whale chronicles divorce within a family; Margot at the Wedding explores the relationship between two sisters; The Meyerowitz Stories tells the story of 3 adult ...
11.26.2019 Is Cristina Tzintzun Texas Democrats' Best Bet for the Senate? The last Democrat elected to the Senate seat Cristina Tzintzun has her sights on was Lyndon Johnson. Republican takeovers are just a fact of life in the South. And yet in some places, there's light at the end of the ...
11.22.2019 And Another Thing, with Errol Morris Alec wanted to know a few more things about Errol Morris's work -- so he set up a call!
11.12.2019 Errol Morris on Steve Bannon, Self-Loathing, and Life as a Private Eye Errol Morris’s documentaries are visually unmistakable, whether they’re about pet cemeteries or the morally bankrupt "great men" of American history. Thanks to his optical invention, the "Interrotron," Morris's subjects’ are looking straight at those of us in the movie theater ...
10.29.2019 Edward Norton on Directing – and His Directors Edward Norton gets into every aspect of filmmaking, even when he comes to the set as an actor. He's helped rewrite scripts, and sometimes gets intimately involved in editing, as was the case with American History X. That has led ...
10.15.2019 Judith Light Once Told Her Agent, "No Soaps, No Sitcoms" Judith Light has an unequaled emotional and tonal range as an actor. She also has a shape-shifting physicality that made her entirely convincing both as the shuffling yenta Shelly Pfefferman in Transparent and as the lithe, aristocratic Hedda Gabler. But ...
10.01.2019 Peter Bergman, King of the Soaps Peter Bergman is the dean of soap opera actors. His portrayal of Dr. Cliff Warner on All My Children from 1979 to 1989 overlapped precisely with the era when soap operas were America's great guilty pleasure. Liz Taylor made cameos ...
09.17.2019 Lang Lang Plays Dubbed “the hottest artist on the classical music planet” by The New York Times, pianist Lang Lang has reached a level of stardom rare for classical musicians. But his prominence is hard-won. Alec, who adores Lang Lang's charisma and talent, ...
09.03.2019 James Caan: Last of the Tough-Guy Movie Stars At the end of the 1950s, James Caan, son of a German-Jewish butcher, had been kicked out of ROTC and was too poor to finish college on his own. He started a job for his godfather unpacking meat along the ...
08.27.2019 How to Run a Small-Town Paper When Your Town Is East Hampton Since 2004, 1300 towns across America have lost local newspaper coverage. 2004 was also the first full year David Rattray, the third generation of his family to own the East Hampton Star, served as the paper's editor. It's a job ...
08.20.2019 Donna Schaper, Radical Reverend The Reverend Donna Schaper of New York's Judson Memorial Church leads her flock of 300 through life's sacraments like any pastor. But she has a national profile, too, appearing in print and on television to reject the idea that Christian ...
08.13.2019 Matthew Landfield's Wildly Deep History of His Childhood Home Alec Baldwin and Matthew Landfield crossed paths one time before their Here's the Thing interview. In early 2001, Alec was shooting a movie in front of 31 Desbrosses Street in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. Matthew had grown up in the ...
08.06.2019 A Major Conservatory President Who Knows the Life of a Working Musician Six years ago the Board of the Manhattan School of Music faced a daunting decision: who would guide the school into its second century? They turned to someone with a long history with the school, James Gandre. Gandre joined MSM ...
07.23.2019 Brian Lehrer Comes to Here's the Thing Brian Lehrer is a unique figure in the public life of New York City. Beyond hosting the city's defining daily talk show, he's our conscience and our conciliator. When New Yorkers want a fair mayoral debate, they often call Brian. ...
07.12.2019 Julie Brown UPDATED: Acosta's Epstein Explanations Are "Ridiculous," "Disingenuous" Alexander Acosta has resigned from his position as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration. That's because of the sweetheart deal he cut politically connected financier Jeffrey Epstein back in 2008, when Acosta was a federal prosecutor. In the swirl ...
07.09.2019 These Three People Say They Can Fix the Subway Corey Johnson wants to be the next mayor of New York, and the press seems to think he will be. His plan to fix transit is the centerpiece of his platform. Tom Wright is the CEO of the powerful Regional ...
06.25.2019 Adam Schiff Tells All: Could Have Gone to Med School, Mom Livid California Congressman Adam Schiff weighs both sides of the impeachment debate and speaks out forcefully on Iran. Plus why his childhood in Massachusetts had an influence on his future career, why his his mother was so disappointed that he went ...

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