A friend of his wife gave his novel Empire Falls to Ivanka Trump. Her response: “This is a book about poor people. Why would I want to read a book about poor people?” Some bad reviews are better than good reviews. Presented with the Center for Fiction and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.

This poet, president of the Mellon foundation, quotes June Jordan on the question activists should ask: “Where is the love? What are we moving toward, not just what are we fighting against?” Poetry, politics, and why your Thanksgiving dinner should include lasagna. Made Eritrean style.

The president and CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust offers a too-modest explanation of its popularity: “I think there’s a universal urge that people have to see and connect with water.” Melville writes something similar at the start of Moby-Dick. Different ending, though.

The founder of Paylocity, he is a partner in the Wayfarer Foundation, whose mission is to “advance humankind spiritually toward a future peaceful world civilization.” Dauntingly ambitious. My mission this weekend is to clean my oven, and I won't. Presented with the New York Baha’i Center.

“The best future for the United States belongs to people who can appreciate both the Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” says Manhattan's borough historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers. “And leaders who’ve actually read both,” he did not add.

Early in his career, the conductor of the National Children’s Chorus interviewed for a job with Sister Stella Maria Enright. “She said, ‘Where did you park?’ And I said, ‘Right in front.’ And she said, ‘There is never parking in front. That is a sign from the holy spirit.’” She was kidding. Kind of. He got the job.

A former writer and performer for Saturday Night Live, he says that each episode was written in one night, “and by night I mean eight, nine PM, until three, four in the morning.” A former U.S. Senator from Minnesota, he does not say how tax laws are written.

Following in her father’s footsteps, the head of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services says, “I had a chance to see first hand someone who worked for New York City government.” She’s second-generation! The latest in our Commissioners Series—how government governs—produced with the Department of Records and Information Services. Music: Jefferson Hamer.

Through her many projects, this landscape architect has learned a lot—about nature, about human behavior, about their intersection. Her hope for the future: “Can we just make better mistakes? Can we not make the really really dumb mistakes?” Setting achievable goals. Produced with Open House New York. Music: Adi Horodniceanu.

He’s just concluded six-years as conductor of the New York Youth Symphony. As a youth himself, he was taken to Disney Concert Hall. “They asked me what it would feel like if you got to conduct here, and I cried immediately.” Tears of Joy. Presumably. Or some trauma with a little mermaid. 

He knows his pandemics, of course. What's more, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases can identify many birds just by their calls, “whether it’s a Carolina wren, a rufous-sided towhee, or a white-breasted nuthatch.” I believe he can do this blindfolded! Which isn’t any harder than eyes-open, but still.

This esteemed musician tells great stories, but they might not be entirely true. “I got to give it a little something. You got to put a little Tabasco on your food.” Presented with the Neal Rosenthal Group. Music: Henrique Prince and Friends (EH Walker, AR Ferguson, Hubby Jenkins) of the Ebony Hillbillies.

He was born into a clan of antiquarian book dealers but avoided entering the family business. Barely. He's now president of Swann Galleries and an authority on vintage posters. Presented with Poster House. Music: Jake Shulman-Ment and Raffi Boden.

This human-rights lawyer, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, was reluctant to embrace her Irish heritage. “I was never particularly interested in that identity because I had so many run-ins with the church.” She’s come around. Music: Cleek Schrey.

In 1958, with Hamilton Holmes, she desegregated the University of Georgia and went on to a distinguished career in journalism. Her early inspiration? Brenda Starr. “I read about her in the comic strips in my grandmother’s newspaper; she read three newspapers a day.”

She leads the Public Design Commission, which must approve anything built on city land—statue, historic marker, playground. How to contend with conflicting parties, often angry, sometimes shouting? “As long as dialogue is alive and well maintained, I feel like anybody can come to a good solution.” Presented with the Van Alen Institute. Music: Henrique Prince, E. H. Walker, A. R. Ferguson, and Hubby Jenkins, of the Ebony Hillbillies.

His Broadway debut, in M. Butterfly, won every award going except the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. Fair enough: there is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. He renewed everyone’s admiration with Law & Order: SVU, and that’s not the half of it, or even the quarter, but why be precise? It’s not as if there’s a Nobel at stake. Produced with Materials for the Arts. Music: Hubby Jenkins. 

I stumbled upon the short videos this Scottish comedian posts online and was immediately won over by her conversation between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien: she plays both of them. What comic does C. S. Lewis? Smart, dark, funny: the Triple Crown.

This terrific comic actor started early: “At five-years-old, I used to sing ‘You Make Me Feel So Young,’ and it got a laugh, and I didn’t know why.” She’s learned, on TV (Only Murders in the Building), on Broadway (Hairspray), and off (the Yiddish Fidler).

On March 2, 2023, the acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly died suddenly, at 78, just two weeks before our scheduled conversation at the Center for Architecture. Rather than cancel, his son Román used the occasion to reflect on his father. Music: Rich Jenkins.

When she enrolled at the Academy, she had a limited idea of the Coast Guard’s mission: “They save people and clean off oily ducks.” Since then, she has served from Juneau to Miami and deepened her understanding. She is now Rear Admiral Bert. You live, you learn.

For years, the obituaries she wrote for The New York Times were the first thing I’d read in the paper—elegant little biographies, exemplary work in a form that she says was once “the scarlet O you wore on your dress that said, I’m a bad writer but the paper doesn’t quite have enough on me to be able to fire me.”

New York City’s fire commissioner leads a force that responds to medical emergencies, plane crashes, building collapses, hazardous materials, even people trapped in elevators. They also fight fires. “If it’s not the police department, if it’s not a crime, everything else is the fire department.” Produced with the Municipal Archives. Music: Rashad Brown.

This artist says, “An object that has been fixed again and again by multiple owners has a particularly fascinating history to me.” And so we’ve tweaked our format to Thing, Thing, Thing, in particular to Broken Thing, Broken Thing, Broken Thing. Produced with the Morgan Library and Museum. Music: Brian Dewan.

These gallerists have much to say about the artist Kaws. To Brigitte: “He is probably the only artist that is an absolute gateway drug into the art world.” So should he be admired or arrested? Definitely the former, they agree. Presented with the New York Academy of Art. Music: Piedmont Bluz. 

To this historian, the story of the New York City Fire Department is the story of New York City. “It’s not just throwing the wet stuff on the red stuff; it’s the other aspects that really are fascinating.” Presented with the New York City Fire Museum.  

“I think the best writers always know the characters more than the characters know themselves,“ she says. The author of The Book of Goose talks about War and Peace, Wuthering Heights, the stories of William Trevor, and her old army buddies. Produced with A Public Space and Rizzoli Bookstores.  Music: Liz Hanley.

The celebrated pianist offers not only beauty but context and insight, like this observation: “If you go to any concert and you hear a Dvořák piece, look for the pigeon and the train; they’re always in there.” Pigeons and trains, presented with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

As a scholar of 18th-century literature, this Rutgers professor wants to pin down what actually occurred, but certain facts remain stubbornly elusive. Does it drive him nuts? “Some things from 350 years ago just aren’t going to be known, and I think I can live with that.” It’s almost Zen.

The self-described Trash Walker prowls corporate dumpsters, seeking egregious waste, and yet she says, “I love stuff, and I want to make that clear. I love things. I think that’s one of the reasons12 I’m so attracted to the trash.” A paradox resolved at Materials for the Arts. Music: Reid Jenkins.

She’s filmed a lot of musicians—Michael Tilson Thomas, Metropolitan Opera productions—but her heart belongs to Doña Carlota Joaquina, princess of Portugal, the Shrew of Queluz: “Any woman who is known as a shrew I would probably like.” Produced with Ralph Farris. Music by Ethel.

As president of the Ford Foundation, he supported Monticello’s efforts to improve its depiction of the enslaved Black people who built it and of Thomas Jefferson, who owned it. “I believe that Thomas Jefferson and his home are one and the same.” Produced with the Municipal Art Society. Guest host: Jami Floyd. Music: Rashad Brown.

Rightly proud of her field, she declares, “We’ve been the most trusted profession in the country for twenty-some odd years.” Police? Priests? Tech execs? Finance weasels? Yeah, right. Nurses! She’s the dean of the Columbia University School of Nursing.

“Many people think that the big words are the big part of the dictionary,” says this lexicographer, “but it’s the little words that are so full of life and variation and complexity,” We talk about “go” and more as Person Place Thing becomes Word Word Word.

Like Conrad, Nabokov, and Beckett, this novelist—In the Distance, Trust— writes in a language other than the one he spoke as a child, and it helps him see the world afresh: “If you move out of one language and into another, it is like moving out of one country and into another.” A conversation at Rizzoli Bookstore. Music: Hubby Jenkins.

When he was in college, he met Duke Ellington. “I was a freshman with a huge afro, an Angela Davis afro, and he pointed at me across the room and said, ‘You must be a musician.’” Thus anointed, he went on to compose operas including X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five.

This terrific bass-baritone likes white orchids in his dressing room. They’re beautiful and ephemeral, like—oh, I don’t know—music? Now everything seems like a metaphor. “Everything is a metaphor,” he says. The joys and jolts of a person of color in the world of classical music.

This singer-songwriter and this composer met at artist Mark Kostabi’s house. “He’s attracted to lots of different kinds of people,” she says. “He brings them together, feeds them, gives them wine, and tells us to perform.“ Isn’t that pretty much the Island of Dr. Moreau? Music: Suzanne Vega, Bill Anderson, and the CompCord quartet. Presented with Composers Concordance and Marsyas Productions.

This graphic designer is admired for his decades as an art director at the New York Times, for his teaching, and for his books, including his most recent, Growing Up Underground,a memoir of his youth in the East Village of the sixties: ”It was disgusting, but in a good way.” Produced with the Type Directors Club, part of The One Club for Creativity. Music: Stephanie Jenkins.

The best medical outcome is that the patient doesn’t get sick in the first place, notes New York City's health commissioner, and yet, “We spend four trillion dollars on health care, and we spend about three cents of every dollar on prevention and public health. Something has to give.” He’s right, but what? Challenging! Presented with Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.  Music: John Sherman.

As a poet and essayist (Inciting Joy), he is acutely in touch with his feelings, and yet he refers to “the many ways I try not to be aware of what’s breaking my heart.” A paradox reconciled, plus pickup basketball as a model of self-government, and the pawpaw as a model fruit. Produced with Orion magazine.

When he was 12, he joined the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham and was thrown in jail. At 15, he entered college, studied mathematics, and went on to lead the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, bringing legions of under-represented students to STEM studies and STEM professions. He is America's secret STEM mentor.

He served in the special forces in Iraq, as a defense policy advisor to NATO, and now teaches international relations at West Point, where a woman colleague gently explained male privilege. He got it: “I had this advantage, in that I’m kind of a fat-headed, broad-shouldered man with badges and gadgets.”

The CEO of PEN America, she has good news and bad news. “We’re not seeing a lot of book burning, thankfully, but we are seeing a kind of forest fire of book banning rippling it way across the United States.” Actually, that’s simply bad news.

These musicians admire the Buddhist teacher and “spiritual entertainer” Alan Watts, despite his having led a flamboyantly imperfect life. Debauchery is not strictly required, however; saintliness, too, has its appeal. “If you can be a shining example on this earth, that’s absolutely inspiring as well,” Rachael tells the New York Baha’i Center.  

Affectionately called “Train Daddy,” he has run transit systems in London, Toronto, and New York, where few people in such jobs are affectionately called anything. He reflects with feeling on subways, seaports, and the almost moral duty to support your home team. “You can’t chop and change.”

This costume designer, known for his work with playwright Taylor Mac, rejects the old saw, there’s no accounting for taste. “Yes, you account for taste. It is part of who you are. And maybe I’m judging you right now. No. I’m kidding.” I don’t think he’s kidding. We talk sense and sensibility and suits at Materials for the Arts.

When Homer refers to the “wine-dark sea,” does he mean red, white, or rosé? He intends no color whatever, asserts the author of Greek to Me, who offers an ingenious alternative. Wine and the Greeks: in the ancient world, the modern world, the world of mythology. Presented with The Neal Rosenthal Group.  Music: Avram Pengas.