Person Place Thing With Randy Cohen

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.

This writer is astute and amusing about manners, aging, and their intersection: “The shusher in the movie is always much louder than the person who’s talking; I’ve become a shusher.”  Impressively, he has the self-awareness to recognize it, the courage to admit it, and the sense of humor to make it bearable.

When this Grammy-winning drummer was just a kid, Wynton Marsalis performed at a local high school. “There were all these people in this auditorium, and I looked at Wynton, and it almost felt like everybody disappeared, and it was just me and him.” A musician meets his destiny. Presented with Ralph Farris of the quartet Ethel.

This climate economist is surprisingly optimistic about our onrushing environmental catastrophe. “Things are dire, yes, but things are moving much much faster in the positive direction than anyone would have imagined five, ten years ago.” A ray of hope! “Now, is it fast enough? No.” A ray of gloom. Produced with the New-York Historical Society’s Climate Café. Music: Mamie Minch.

“It’s grand, it’s palatial, it’s beautiful,” says the anthropologist-in-residence for the NY Department of Sanitation about a garage.  She is happy in her work. A scholar looks at what we throw away and what it says about us. Presented with the Sanitation Foundation.  Music: John Sherman. 

This animator—you don’t know his name, but you know his work for MTV and SNL—is fascinated by Samuel Insull, Thomas Edison’s former assistant, who brought electricity to Chicago, achieved global fame, and whose name you (and I) also didn’t know. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t be up there with Carnegie and J. P. Morgan.” Music: Walter Hawkes.

This composer, much admired for his operas, contemplates a happy dichotomy: “These two places are perfectly balanced for the kind of work I do and the kind of life I lead.” Heaven and Hell? New York and Texas? No! His old-fashioned barn-studio and the newfangled MIT Media Lab. Technology, music, and more.

This environmental journalist has covered stories all over the world, but she seldom knows how they continue after she departs: “What keeps me up at night is that all these stories stay with me, and I don’t know the ending all the time.” A conversation about girls in India, maps of Texas, and falcons over Cape Cod. Produced with Orion magazine.

As music students, they were sequestered in Juilliard’s fourth-floor rehearsal rooms. “The fourth floor is all dungeony and without sunlight,” says pianist Dugan. “It’s one of the worst, most magical places ever,” says violinist Yang. Today they have flourishing careers among other human beings. That’s the magic. A conversation at the Kaufman Music Center with two artists in residence.

I respect her as the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, admire her as a practicing architect, but flipped for her when she said, “There are two versions of the story, and both of them are true.” Not contradiction, nuance. The joys of complexity. Presented with the Center for Architecture.  Music: Hubby Jenkins.

A former labor reporter for the New York Times, he is surprisingly optimistic: “When the first Starbucks voted to unionize in Buffalo back in December, that was a humongous deal.” Humongous! (A word that does not appear in his most recent book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.)

I note with chagrin that while we’ve had many doctors on the show, she is our first nurse. In addition to being a practitioner, she’s worked on health policy at Georgetown and is a professor emerita at Hunter. “We like to tell our journalism colleagues that if you’re not interviewing a nurse, you’re likely missing the best part of the story.” She’s right. Except about my being a journalist.

When this improv artist—he created Freestyle Love Supreme with Lin-Manuel Miranda—received a guitar from his wife, he was eager to play at bedtime for their two young daughters. “They were like, ‘Could you stop? Could you just cuddle?’” The ups and downs, but mostly ups, of a performer’s life.

Esteemed as both a scholar and an activist, she’s spent nearly ninety years working for social justice, if you count her first few years, and I do: when she was four, she had a clear (and unpopular) position on the Soviet-Finnish war. She’s since revised it. Continuous rethinking—the mark of the true intellectual.

This heroic Brandeis professor explains how sexual-harassment law derives from civil-rights law: “There was the sense that, OK, now we’ve tackled one area of equality, we’ve prevailed to some extent, let’s build on it.” One right leads to another. Or used to. In ancient days. (Sigh.) Plus, the difference between baggage and luggage.

No first glimpse of a building was more exhilarating to me than his 1975 Best Products facade in Houston, designed with his firm, SITE. And he did it the old-fashioned way: “I’m probably the last architect on earth who still draws by hand.” Ideas and how they get that way, presented with the National Academy of Design.

Pairing a concert pianist with a stage magician means merging distinct performance traditions and can include tensions as well as triumphs. Perhaps that’s why their act is sometimes billed as Magic versus Music—a joke that is not entirely a joke. But what a show! Presented with Ralph Farris of the quartet Ethel.