The Lives They're Living

Brian Cullman on Peter Stampfel

Ben Yagoda — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:15:07 -0400

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 for the Past: Travels In Music and Time.

The book is a memoir composed of vignettes, many about Brian’s encounters and relationships with fascinating people, from the 1960s on, most of them musicians and most of them no longer with us. The book kicks off with a story about Ed Sullivan, and a few of the other people we meet are Dr. John, Jimi Hendrix, Nick Drake, Paul Bowles, Big Joe Turner, and Sandy Denny.

Brian's website

Peter Stampfel's website

Peter playing "Bird Song" to a clip of Easy Rider, Radio City Music Hall, 2019

"Moment of Peter Stampfel" is from a 2010 interview he did called "Advice to Musicians"

Jonathan Coleman on Nan and Gay Talese

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:34:31 -0400

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 legendary journal The New Review, became a book editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, then worked as a journalist for CBS News. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications, and is a contributing editor of The Sunday Long Read. He is also an award-winning voiceover talent and recently narrated the audiobook of Ken Auletta's HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. For many years, he taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia.

Jonathan's essay on Jerry West, from The Hedgehog Review.

Aaron Latham's 1973 New York Magazine piece on Gay.

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," by Gay Talese, originally published in 1966 in Esquire.

"Your moment of Nan Talese" source is a Library of America conversation with her author Margaret Atwood.

Photo is of the Taleses' wedding day in Rome, 1959. Credit: Elio Cardone.

Jane Leavy on Sandy Koufax

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:43:10 -0500

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, covering baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the sports section and writing profiles for the Style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including profiles of comic Danny Kaye, Jane Fonda, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and basketballer Muggsy Bogues, which was longer than he is tall.

Then she moved to writing books, beginning with Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball”. Then she wrote the national bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy Book: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood , Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and now Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It.

Jane's website

Sandy Koufax career statistics

Vin Scully's call of the final inning of Koufax's 1965 perfect game

Koufax's 2022 speech at the unveiling of his statue outside Dodgers Stadium

The photograph shows Koufax after his perfect game--the four balls he's holding in his very large hands represent his four no-hitters. Credit: Bettmann

Tim Page on Stephin Merritt

Ben Yagoda — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:40:05 -0500

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, and four books for the Library of America imprint, on Powell and Virgil Thompson.

Tim grew up in Storrs, Connecticut, where as a kid he was the subject of a celebrated short documentary film, A Day With Timmy Page. Over the course of his career, he has done a stint as a cocktail pianist; played keyboards and composed for his own rock band, Dover Beach; and served as the host of New, Old and Unexpected, a daily program on WNYC-FM, where he presented hundreds of radio premieres.

Stephen Merritt's website

Tim Page's Subtack

Stephen Merritt and the Future Bible Heroes, "Memories of Love"

Photo of Merritt by Kevin Yatarola

Mike Jensen on William "Speedy" Morris

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 14:53:08 -0500

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 the Year and won the Jim O'Connell Award by the United States Basketball Writers Association for Excellence in Beat Reporting. He still has the trophy for winning a foul-shooting contest at the 1976 Julius Erving Basketball Camp.

His subject, the legendary William "Speedy" Morris, spent more than fifty years coaching basketball in Philadelphia on the. high school and college levels.

Morris's speech on being inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2011.

Mike Jensen article on the Speedy Morris "coaching tree."

Comprehensive coverage of Morris after he coached his final game, in 2020. The photo of Morris, taken when he was coaching Penn Charter high school in 1983, is from this site.

Morris teaching the pump fake.

David Bianculli on James L. Brooks

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:07:40 -0500

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: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific (2016); Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 2009); Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (1992); and Dictionary of Teleliteracy (1996). Bianculli is professor of Television Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey.

His subject on this episode is the great writer, director, and producer James L. Brooks, who got his start some sixty years ago in an unexpected place. Since then, among many other achievements, Brooks co-created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons, and wrote and directed the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment.

Conan O'Brien talks about Brooks's laugh.

Clips of Brooks laughing.

Albert Brooks speech from Broadcast News.

Photo of Brooks by Bob Marshak, 2004.

Aimee Liu on Maxine Hong Kingston

Ben Yagoda — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 15:23:21 -0500

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 other periodicals and anthologies. She taught for many years in Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Aimee grew up mainly in Connecticut but also lived in India for two years. Her father was born in Shanghai, the son of a Chinese scholar-revolutionary and his American wife. She studied painting at Yale.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), China Men (1980), and other works.

Some links:

2020 New Yorker profile of Ms. Kingston by Hua Hsu.

John Leonard's 1976 review of The Woman Warrior in the New York Times.

Library of America's Maxine Hong Kingston page.

"Your moment of Maxine Hong Kingston": Ms. Kingston reads from her memoir in verse, I Love a Broad Margin in My Life, in 2011.

Dave Barry on Roy Blount Jr.

Ben Yagoda — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:21:11 -0400

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 with Ridley Pearson, Dave wrote the bestselling Starcatchers series of young-adult novels, one of which was adapted as the Tony-award winning Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher.

His subject is Roy Blount Jr. (pronounced "blunt"), who was raised in Decatur, Georgia, and has been writing about athletes, the South, language, movies, food, and a lot of other things for almost sixty years. He's published twenty-four books, the first of which, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974), was about the Pittsburgh Steelers and was described by The New Yorker as "the best of all books about pro football," and the latest of which is Save Room for Pie: Food, Songs, and Chewy Ruminations. He's contributed articles, essays, and other stuff to 171 different publications.

Roy is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; appeared frequently on A Prairie Home Companion; created and starred in a one-man show in New York, Roy Blount's Happy Hour and a Half; and wrote the screenplay for the Bill Murray movie Larger Than Life.

Photo by Joan Griswold.

Links

Roy Blount's website.

Roy's Substack.

Dave Barry's website.

Roy's 1984 Sports Illustrated profile of Yogi Berra.

The Rock Bottom Remainders singing "Wild Thing" (Roy is in the long-sleeved white t-shirt).

Video clip of Roy on the f-word (your moment of Roy Blount).

Paul Dickson

Ben Yagoda — Tue, 06 May 2025 03:32:29 -0400

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 doppelganger, or me as his doppelganger, as I ended up hanging out my own shingle and writing about some of the same things he did, though nowhere near as prolifically: language, baseball, American history.

All told, he has produced more than 60 non-fiction books and countless newspaper and magazine articles. The Washington Post called him "a one-man book factory" and Public Libraries magazine commented, "Paul Dickson could be called the Energizer bunny of authors …One of the amazing attributes of this prolific writer is that he can't be pigeonholed: his subject matter is always changing."

A few of his recent books, all published within the past dozen years:

"Words from the White House: Words and Phrases Created by Presidents of the United States"
"The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects"
"Contraband Cocktails--How America Drank When it Wasn't Supposed To"
"The Hidden Language of Baseball" (Expanded and Revised Edition)
His newest book is "The Rise of the G.I. Army 1940-1941," the story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force.

Paul Dickson's website.

A final note for language nerds like Paul and me: At one point in the episode we discuss "elegant variation"--H.W. Fowler's dismissive term for creating an elaborate synonym to avoid word repetition. I mention that I made up an example to illustrate the practice--a baseball writer calling a second baseman "the fleet-footed second sacker" on second reference. And that I once Googled "fleet-footed second sacker" (in quotation marks) and found an actual use of the phrase back in the 1920s. (It was actually 1917, in the Athens [Georgia] Banner.) Well, I just repeated the exercise and found three additional uses of the phrase in newspapers, the most recent in 1961. Try it yourself!

David Remnick on John McPhee

Ben Yagoda — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 09:37:40 -0400

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 Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Before joining the Post, he was a student at Princeton University, where he took John McPhee’s legendary class called “The Literature of Fact.”

John McPhee, "A Sense of Where You Are." First published in The New Yorker January 25, 1965.

McPhee's conversation with Robert Wright.

In the interview, David Remnick refers kindly to my 2000 book About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. It seems to have gone out of print, but a good library should have it, and used copies pop up now and again.

Photo credit: Princeton University, Department of Communication

Folk Icons II: Elijah Wald on Ramblin' Jack Elliott

Ben Yagoda — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:24:11 -0400

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 performed and recorded with Dave Van Ronk, and is also coauthor of Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (which inspired the Coen brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis).

In his equally impressive second career, he’s written books on Josh White and Robert Johnson, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton and the censorship of early blues, an alternative history of popular music provocatively titled How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Dylan Goes Electric!, the basis of the film A Complete Unknown, which deservedly got great reviews and notices, including from Mr. Dylan himself.

His subject is the legendary Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who was born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn in 1931, and left home at the age of 15 to join the rodeo. He's been on the road virtually ever since.

Ramblin Jack Elliott's website.

Elijah Wald's website.

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, a documentary by Jack's daughter. Alyana.

Folk Icons I: Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian

Ben Yagoda — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:02:21 -0400

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 had lived on three continents by the time she was ten. Her documentary Big Voice (Netflix, 2015) takes a deep dive into the culture of artistic excellence fostered by Santa Monica High School choir director Jeffe Huls. And Fandango at the Wall (HBO/MAX, 2020) follows Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra Maestro Arturo O’Farrill to the United States-Mexico Border for a bi-national fandango with the masters of a three-hundred-year-old folk music tradition called son jarocho, transforming "the wall" from an object that divides to one that unites.

Varda Bar-Kar's website.

Janis Ian's website.

Robert Strauss on Lois Smith

Ben Yagoda — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 11:07:26 -0400

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 on stage, film, and television.

Lois Smith's IMDB page.

Smith's amazing screen test with James Dean for East of Eden.

Photo: 1955 Warner Brothers publicity shot of Lois Smith.

John Barth on Bill Siemering

Ben Yagoda — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:38:39 -0500

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 broadcast of "All Things Considered," May 3, 1971.

"National Public Radio Purposes," mission statement written by Siermring in 1970.

2022 interview with Siemering.

David Leaf on Van Dyke Parks

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 14:27:30 -0500

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 (pictured above; Van Dyke is holding the guitar).

Sound links: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street" from Song Cycle (1967)

The Beach Boys, "Surf's Up" (1971)

Van Dyke Parks and The Blasting Company, "Old Summer Reckoning," 2021

Moment of Van Dyke, from his interview with Richard Henderson

Casey Schwartz on Jonathan Schwartz

Ben Yagoda — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:31:47 -0500

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 Sinatra, 2015..

Mel Tormé's duet with Jonathan at Michael's Pub, late 1980s.

Excerpts from a 1983 show on WNEW-AM.

Carrie Rickey on Molly Haskell

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:35:41 -0500

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 The 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 Haskell, whose website is here.

Here's an essay from Film Comment where Haskell discuss Man's Favorite Sport and other films directed by Howard Hawks.

Dwight Garner on Calvin Trillin

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:04:02 -0500

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 non-fiction books, four works of fiction, and six of light verse, most of it topical. (Trillin calls it "Deadline Poetry.")

Photo credit: Huangavin

Chris Molanphy on Quincy Jones

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:50:17 -0500

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 This Song No. 1?” series. His most recent book is Old Town Road , about the Lil Nas X song of the same name and the chart history and race/genre intersections that led to its record-setting chart run. Chris’s work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vulture, NPR Music’s The Record, The Village Voice, Billboard and CMJ. He is a frequent guest on National Public Radio (All Things Considered, On the Media, Planet Money, Soundcheck), on SiriusXM, and on numerous podcasts including the Culture Gabfest and the New York Times Popcast.

"His Parade" podcast, two-part Quincy Jones episode.

The Greatest Night in Pop (documentary about the making of "We Are the World").

"We Are the World" on YouTube

Photo of Quincy Jones in 1980: The Los Angeles Times

Steve Wasserman on Robert Scheer

Ben Yagoda — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 17:08:02 -0400

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 Books, Hill & Wang, Times Books and Yale University Press. His latest book, hot off the presses, is Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.

Robert Scheer is a longtime activist, journalist, and author. Some of his books mentioned in this episode are:

America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals
How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam
Cuba: An American Tragedy

Warren Hinckle's memoir of Ramparts magazine and other things is If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade.

Scheer's online journalism site is ScheerPost.

Rem Rieder on Earl Monroe

Ben Yagoda — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 15:14:20 -0400

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 of all time, Earl Monroe.

YouTube Earl Monroe highlight reel.

Woody Allen's profile of Monroe in Sport magazine.

Michael Kay 2013 interview with Earl Monroe.

Jason Zengerle on Sonny Vaccaro

Ben Yagoda — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 11:55:06 -0400

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 described both as a sneaker pimp and the moral conscience of colleges sports. Jason first wrote about Vaccaro in the New Republic in 2008.

Glenn Kenny on Thelma Schoonmaker

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 17:47:02 -0400

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 Raging Bull, The Aviator, and The Departed.

Photo credit: Petr Nôvak,Wikipedia

Brian Fairbanks on Kris Kristofferson

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 18:09:24 -0400

Brian Fairbanks is the author of Willie, Waylon and the Boys, How Nashville Outsiders Change Country Music Forever. Previously, he was an investigative reporter at Gawker and The Consumerist. He's also written for The Guardian, The New York Observer, and many other publications, and is the author of Wizards: David Duke, America's Wildest Election, and The Rise of the Far Right. Kris Kristofferson is a former Pomona College football hero, Rhodes Scholar, Army captain, and legendary singer, songwriter and actor.

Songs heard in this episode:

"Sunday Morning, Coming Down"

"To Beat the Devil"

"A Case of You" (with Brandi Carlile)

Bonus Episode: Newton Minow

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 11:27:48 -0400

For this bonus episode, The Lives They're Living presents a piece done in an earlier iteration of the show, a profile of Newton M. Minow. The date we're going live is significant, for on Thursday, June 27, presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump will engage in in a debate. More than any other person, Mr. Minow was responsible for the institution of the televised presidential debate. But he will always be best known for something else--two words he uttered in an otherwise unmemorable speech.

This episode was produced with the help of Pushkin Industries, and in particular Julia Barton, Mia Lobel, Jacob Smith, and Jacob Weisberg. Thanks to them all.

Carrie Courogen on Elaine May

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:17:29 -0400

"Brilliant," "enigmatic" and "elusive" are just some of the adjectives that have been used to describe Elaine May, but there is no doubt that she has been one of the most influential figures in film and comedy over her nearly seven-decade career. The. guest on this episode, Carrie Courogen, has written the first comprehensive biography of May, Miss May Does Not Exist. In her day job, Carrie leads video development for the Condé Nast music site Pitchfork. As a writer, her work has appeared in. Glamour Magazine, NPR, PAPER, Vanity Fair, Vice, and other publications.

Adrienne LaFrance on Albert Brooks

Ben Yagoda — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 11:43:41 -0400

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic; her profile of the subject of this episode, "The Godfather of American Comedy," appears in the magazine's June 2024 issue. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, she worked as a reporter for WBUR, Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Weekly, and Nieman Journalism Lab. Albert Brooks is a wildly talented comedian, writer, director and actor, and if you don't know his work, get on it.

Steve Stoliar on Dick Cavett

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 22 May 2024 10:21:40 -0400

Steve Stoliar has been a professional writer for more than 40 year. For television, he wrote episodes of Murder She Wrote, Simon & Simon, The New WKRP in Cincinnati, and others. Before that, while a student at UCLA, he was Groucho Marx’s personal secretary and archivist and later wrote a book based on that experience, Raised Eyebrows.The book is currently being developed into a film version starring Geoffrey Rush as Groucho.

Dick Cavett is a legendary talk-show host, comedian, and author.

Photo: By Nick Stepowyj at https://www.flickr.com/people/nickstep/

David Bianculli on Mason Williams

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 06 May 2024 20:14:56 -0400

David Bianculli has been the TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air since 1987, and is currently a professor of television studies at Rowan University in New Jersey. His books include Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, and Dangerously Funny, The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Among his many other accomplishments, Mason Williams wrote and performed one of the biggest-selling instrumental records in history--"Classical Gas."

Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Abigail Thomas

Ben Yagoda — Mon, 06 May 2024 20:10:13 -0400

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, New York, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. Her documentary film awards include an Independent Spirit Award for directing IFC's Keep the River on Your Right and an Emmy nomination for HBO's Finishing Heaven. Her forthcoming book is Amelia and George--"Amelia" being Amelia Earhart. Abigail Thomas is a novelist and memoirist, and probably the best writer you've never heard of.

Gene Seymour on Ishmael Reed

Ben Yagoda — Sat, 04 May 2024 15:26:39 -0400

Gene Seymour spent years working for big-city newspapers as a reporter and movie and jazz critic. 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 steps in between to The Nation, book forums, CNN. com, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and others. Ishmael Reed was born in 1938, and as a novelist, poet, essayist, and provocateur, has been at the center of American letters since the 1960s.

Michael Tisserand on Jules Feiffer

Ben Yagoda — Sat, 04 May 2024 15:03:32 -0400

Michael Tisserand is a Minnesota-based writer whose books include Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White. It's the Eisner Award-winning biography of the creator of the classic comic strip Krazy Kat. Jules Feiffer was born in 1929. He's probably most famous for the comic strip he contributed weekly to The Village Voice for more than 40 years, but that's only the beginning of his accomplishments.

The Lives They're Living--Trailer

Ben Yagoda — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:20:35 -0400