The Lives They're Living

Jack Lynch is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rutgers/Newark.  In addition to many scholarly publications, focusing on 18th century British literature, notably Samuel Johnson, he has written widely and brilliantly for a general audience, in books including:  Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard ; You Could Look It...

Gene Seymour, a Connecticut native, spent years working for big-city newspapers as a reporter and movie and jazz critic—including at the Philadelphia Daily News , where we first crossed paths. He's the author of a young adult history, Jazz, the Great American Art . These days, he lives in Philadelphia and contributes mightily on a remarkable range of subjects from baseball to crime novels and many...

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician based in New York and in France.  He has written extensively for The Paris Review , Antaeus , Rolling Stone , and the Village Voice and has won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor award for excellence in music journalism three times. He has three solo albums on Sunnyside and is currently a member of Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas. His new book is called How to Prepare...

Jonathan Coleman's books include AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was made into a CBS miniseries); EXIT THE RAINMAKER ; LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America ;  and a collaboration with basketball icon and NBA logo Jerry West, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life.    He began his career in London on Ian Hamilton's le...

Jane Leavy grew up on Long Island, where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. She worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, up the street from Yankee Stadium, where her grandmother’s synagogue held services on the High Holidays.   She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, coverin...

Tim Page has been the chief classical music critic for the Washington Post and New York Newsday and a regular contributor to the New York Times , where I first encountered his byline. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for work for the Post . He’s a professor emeritus of musicology at USC and his many books include The Glenn Gould Reader , Dawn Powell: A Biography , the memoir Parallel Play ,...

Mike Jensen spent 35 years covering basketball and other sports for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His book about Philadelphia basketball will be published in 2026 by Temple University Press. In 2024, Mike was inducted into the Big 5 Hall of Fame. He also won national Eclipse Awards for his horse racing coverage of Smarty Jones and Barbaro. Among other honors, he was named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of...

David Bianculli is the first return guest to The Lives They're Living. (We talked about Mason Williams in one of the first episodes.)  David has been the TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross since its inception, and has been writing about television since 1975, notably at the  Philadelphia Inquirer  and the New York  Daily News. He's written four books: The Platinum Age Of Television: Fr...

Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novel Glorious Boy , as well as Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face . Her nonfiction includes Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire . Aimee's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books , the Los Angeles Times , Poets & Writers , and many ot...

Dave Barry is an author and humorist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated column, which ran in more than 500 newspapers and was the inspiration for the TV show Dave's World . He has also written dozens of bestselling books, including Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog , the novel Swamp Story , and, most recently, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. Along...

This is a bonus episode because it's not in the usual format--me talking to person A about person B. For this one, I'm going directly to the subject: the prolific non-fiction writer Paul Dickson. I've been aware of and admired Dickson's work for a long time, probably not long after he set out on his own as an independent, aka freelance, writer in 1968. In time I came to think of him as my doppelga...

David Remnick has been editor of the New Yorker since 1998 (making him the second-longest-serving editor in the magazine's history, behind William Shawn). Before that, he was a staff writer at the magazine, and before that he was a reporter for the Washington Post . David won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire , and is also the author of Resurrec...

Elijah Wald has been singing and playing guitar for almost fifty years in a wide variety of styles, from blues, folk, ragtime, swing, country, and cowboy songs to classic Swahili pop, the Bahamian guitar style of Joseph Spence, and Mexican corridos . He hit the road in his late teens as a rambling busker, and has toured all over the United States and much of the rest of the world   Elijah performe...

Varda Bar-Kar is the director of the 2025 documentary  Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, about the singer who burst on the scene in 1966, at the age of fifteen, with her song "Society's Child," Since then Ian's career has, well, careered. from high points to low points and back again, more times than you might think possible. Varda was born in England to a South African mother and aR omanian father and...

Robert Strauss is a veteran journalist and the author of three books:  Daddy's Little Goalie: A Father, His Daughters, and Sports ;  Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents ; and  John Marshall: The Final Founder. His subject is his friend Lois Smith, whose distinguished acting career has spanned more than seven decades o...

John Barth has a long and distinguished career in public broadcasting, which started in earnest in the very early 1980s when he got a peculiar and life-changing phone call from Bill Siemering. Siemering--at left in the photo (Barth is at right)--is one of the Founding Fathers of National Public and, it could be argued, has done more than anyone else to shape NPR's identity. Audio from the first br...

David Leaf is the author of SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson , which will be published in April 2025. More on his many books, documentaries and music projects at his website . Van Dyke Parks is a legendary American musician, who shows up everywhere from Disney's The Jungle Book, to The Honeymooners , to his historic collaborations with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys (picture...

 Casey Schwartz is the author of Attention: A Love Story , and In the Mind Fields , a book about the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis.  She has written for the New York Times , New York Magazine, the Daily Beast, and other publications. She talks about her father, Jonathan Schwartz, the legendary disc jockey, author, and raconteur. Episode clips: Jonathan's conversation with Pete Hamill about...

The guest for the episode is Carrie Rickey, who recently published a biography of filmmaker Agnes Varda, A Complicated Passion . Carrie has served as a film critic for The Village Voice , The Boston Herald , and T he Philadelphia Inquirer She’s also written widely on art, including for Artforum and Art in America . Carrie's subject is her friend the distinguished film critic and author Molly Haske...

Dwight Garner is a book critic for  The New York Times ; his books include  Garner's Quotations and  The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, & Eating While Reading.  Calvin Trillin has been a staff writer at  The New Yorker since 1963 and has published more than 400 pieces there, most recently " Of Yiddish, Litvaks, and the Evil Eye ." He has published twenty-two n...

Literally just as I was finishing this episode, the word came out that its subject, Quincy Jones, had died at the age of 91. So this goes out as a tribute to his legacy and memory. My guest, Chris Molanphy , is a chart analyst and pop critic who writes about the intersection of culture and commerce in popular music. For Slate , he created and hosts the Hit Parade  podcast and writes their “ Why Is...

Since 2016, Steve Wasserman has been publisherof Heyday, an independent, nonprofit press founded in Berkeley, California, where he lives. He graduated from his home town school, UC Berkeley, and  his past positions include serving as deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review ; and editorial positions with  New Republic...

My guest is the legendary journalist Rem Rieder. Over the course of more than five decades, he's had positions at both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the late, lamented Philadelphia Bulletin, the Miami Herald , and the Washington Post . He was also the longtime media columnist for USA Today and editor of the American Journalism Review. His subject is his idol, one of the greatest basketball players...

Jason  Zengerle is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine , where he covers politics and national affairs. He previously wrote for at GQ , New York Magazine, and the New Republic . He’s working on a book tentatively titled Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.  His subject is Sonny Vaccaro, probably the only person who has been de...

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence, and today he reviews movies for the New York Times . Roger Ebert.com, and the Decider. He’s the author of The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface and Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas.  On this episode, he talks about Thelma Schoonmaker, three-time winner of the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, for R...