Time Sensitive

The drummer and percussionist Billy Martin, whose name many Time Sensitive listeners may recognize—he created the Time Sensitive theme song—defies any boxed-in or limiting definitions of his work. Best known as a member of the band Medeski Martin & Wood (MMW), he’s spent the past three-plus decades making experimental, boundary-pushing, and uncategorizable instrumental jazz-funk-groove music, shap...

For the British architect John Pawson, minimalism isn’t just a design philosophy, but a life philosophy—with his 1996 book, Minimum , serving as a defining jumping-off point. Over the course of more than four decades, Pawson has quietly amassed a global following by distilling spaces, objects, and things down to their most essential. With projects ranging from his career-defining Calvin Klein Coll...

Through her “archaeology of the future” design approach, the Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh has firmly established herself as a humanist who brings a profound awareness of past, present, and presence to all that she does. In the two decades since winning her breakthrough commission—the Estonian National Museum in Tartu—her practice has taken off, with Ghotmeh swiftly becoming on...

For as long as he can remember, Leonard Koren has been searching for beauty and pleasure. Throughout his career, the author and artist—he prefers the term “creator”—has spent considerable time putting to paper expressions and conceptual views that architects, artists, designers, and others have long struggled to find the proper framing of or words for. In 1976, when he launched the counterculture...

Since publishing his debut essay collection— Video Night in Kathmandu , featuring far-flung reportage from 10 Asian countries—in 1988, the prolific travel writer Pico Iyer has gone on to write more than a dozen books exploring themes ranging from displacement and identity to globalization and technology, as well as contribute to publications such as The New York Times , Time , and Condé Nast Trave...

Faye Toogood is perhaps best known for her Roly-Poly chair, among the more famous pieces of furniture to come out of the 2010s and take over the zeitgeist, but the London-based designer’s artistry and craft runs much deeper and spans much wider. She began finding, collecting, cataloging, producing, and editing her “assemblages” long before she ever had a name for them, and her design career has be...

Malcolm Gladwell may be one of the most widely read—and, with his Revisionist History podcast, listened to—journalists of our time. A New Yorker magazine staff writer and the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008), he has myriad awards and honors to his name. But this impressive trajectory has never been some planned-out or...

Richard Christiansen believes that the true definition of luxury is having one’s senses on full blast—seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing, and touching the world around by engaging in its beauty and bounty to the fullest. This idea is at the heart of his company, the garden-pleasure apothecary Flamingo Estate, which is both a place—a home and garden on a seven-acre property in the hills of Los Ange...

To the majority of humankind, rocks may appear to be static, timeless objects, but not to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud. In her mind, rocks are rich pieces of text that have evolved (and continue to evolve) across millennia, and are therefore incredibly time ful . “They almost demand reading,” Bjornerud says on this episode of Time Sensitive. “You have the feeling that you’re communicating with s...

With great privilege, believes the humanitarian and entrepreneur Nachson Mimran, comes great responsibility. Brought up in a family that operates one of the largest agri-industrial businesses in West Africa, Mimran comes from considerable wealth, but unlike so many who have a background such as his, he is open and forthright about his inheritance and the responsibility he sees of doing good with i...

Perhaps best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009)—or, more recently, Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023)—the author, essayist, and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem could be considered the ultimate modern-day Brooklyn bard, even if today he lives in California, where he’s a professor of English and creative writing at Pomona College. His m...

To the lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, light is at once ubiquitous and precious, quotidian yet miraculous; it can be easily overlooked or taken for granted, but it also has the potential to become transformative or even otherworldly. Through her craft-forward approach, Adelman creates pieces that defy strict labels and explore the tensions between organic and industrial forms and materials, com...

In the eyes of the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a building is a living, breathing thing, a structure that can have a spirit and even, at its best, a soul. It’s this optimistic perspective that has given Goldberger’s writing a certain ineffable, captivating quality across his prolific career—first at The New York Times , where he served as the paper’s longtime architecture critic, winning a...

The artist Francesco Clemente may have been born and raised in Naples, but—having lived and worked around the world, including in Rome, India, New York City, and New Mexico—he considers himself a citizen of no place. Widely known for his work across mediums, from drawings and frescoes to mosaics, oils, and sculptures, Clemente makes art that evokes his mystical perspective, with his paintings ofte...

In her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the historian and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis unpacks a major part of United States history that until now wasn’t just brushed over, but was intentionally buried: how the ​​Caucasian War and the end of the Civil War were conflated by P.T. Barnum, former President Woodrow Wilson, and others to shape...

For Rita Sodi, cooking isn’t so much an art or a science, but rather an intuitive way for her to channel her Tuscan roots and provide a profound sense of home. Following a 15-year career in the world of fashion as a self-described “denim guru” for Calvin Klein Jeans, Sodi transitioned into the realm of restaurants in 2008, when she moved to New York City from Bagno a Ripoli, Italy, and opened the...

To the landscape designer Edwina von Gal, gardening is much more than just seeding, planting, weeding, and watering; it’s her life calling. Since starting her namesake firm in 1984 in East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island, she has worked with, for, and/or alongside the likes of Calvin Klein, Larry Gagosian, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Annabelle Selldorf, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman, creating gar...

While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed...

Soon to celebrate his 50th birthday by journeying from Paris to Tokyo by car along the Southern Silk Road, the French Moroccan creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami says he’s “thirsty for life like it’s just the beginning,” and it shows. Among his 17 (yes, 17) companies are the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, which he and his wife co-founded in 2014 and so...

At age 4, following the fall of Saigon, in 1975, Viet Thanh Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam and came to the U.S. as refugees. Throughout the turmoil and its aftermath, neither he nor his family could have imagined that he would go on to not only become an internationally renowned novelist—winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015)—but also to serve as an execut...

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley has a deep and enduring obsession with wood. In his late 20s, he began to use the material for art, carving sculptures in his basement studio, and with his sculpture-making now spanning 70 years, his enduring dedication to his craft is practically unparalleled. Represented by Karma gallery since 2...

Most widely recognized for his paintings that rigorously combine spray paint, stenciled geometric forms, and brushstrokes, the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton is also known for his “Black Dada” framework, an ever-evolving philosophy that investigates various relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Many will recognize Pendleton’s work from “Who Is Queen?,” his 2021 s...

The cheeky, happy-go-lucky spirit of the British fashion designer Paul Smith can be felt across everything he does, from his own clothing designs to his multifarious collaborations—Maharam textiles, Mini cars, Burton snowboards, and a suite at the Brown’s Hotel in London among them. Though Smith may run a business with expert tailoring and a mastery of color at its core, everything he creates seem...

Three years ago, at age 66, the Belgium-born writer and critic Lucy Sante—known for her award-winning essays, criticism, and books, including Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991)—announced to a few dozen close friends that she was transitioning to womanhood. This news came following nearly four decades of publishing her work under the byline Luc Sante. In her new memoir, I Heard Her C...

To the cult British interior and furniture designer Ilse Crawford, interiors too often take a backseat to architecture. Through her humanistic, systems-thinking, “Frame for Life” approach, however, Crawford has shown how interiors and architecture should instead be viewed on the same plane and, as she puts it on this episode of Time Sensitive, “walk hand in hand.”  Widely known for creating indoor...