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 sold to LVMH in 2021; the Paris-based creative agency Art Recherche Industrie, whose clients include Christofle, Moynat, and Gohar World; and Hotel Drei Berge, which he opened in the Swiss Alps last year. With each of his enterprises, Touhami has proven, time and again, how much craft matters—that there’s a real demand for it in a streamlined world that prioritizes efficiency, and that it’s not necessarily at odds with turning a profit.

On the episode, Touhami talks about the parallels between Japan and Switzerland, business as a religion, and the healing power of mountains.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080111540&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092828697&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Ramdane Touhami

[5:29] Hotel Drei Berge Hotel

[5:29] Élisée Reclus

[8:36] Angelo Mangiarotti

[8:36] Tobia Scarpa

[8:36] Dieter Rams

[5:29] “Ramdane Touhami’s Peak Performance”

[17:12] Mos Def

[20:28] Henry David Thoreau

[28:16] Officine Universelle Buly 1803

[28:16] Cire Trudon

[1:00:35] Aman

[27:06] Ignacio Mattos

[28:16] LVMH

[34:54] An Atlas of Natural Beauty

[34:33] Bernard Arnault

[34:54] Izumi Aki

[41:54] Société Helvétique d’Impression Typographique

[43:54] Émile Shahidi

[44:30] Radical Media

[44:59] Tricontinental magazine

[57:24] touhami-paris-home.html">“A Parisian Designer Builds His Dream House in a Former Brothel”

[1:00:35] Southern Silk Road

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 executive producer of an HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, and become a widely respected voice on matters including anti-Asian hate, refugees and immigrants, war and genocide, and memory and memorials. In addition to The Sympathizer, Nguyen has written, among other books, the new memoir A Man of Two Faces (2023); The Sympathizer’s sequel, The Committed (2021); and the nonfiction title Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016). 

On the episode, Nguyen talks about turning The Sympathizer into an HBO miniseries, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” and jokes as a form of truth-telling.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080143921&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092927232&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Viet Thanh Nguyen

[3:43] “An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine”

[3:43] Min Jin Lee

[5:48] F. Scott Fitzgerald

[7:11] The Sympathizer

[7:11] The Sympathizer HBO series

[7:11] Robert Downey Jr.

[7:11] Sandra Oh

[8:41] A Man of Two Faces

[8:41] Casualties of War

[8:41] Apocalypse Now

[8:41] Platoon

[8:41] The Deer Hunter

[11:48] Arundhati Roy

[14:18] 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

[21:33] Fall of Saigon

[33:34] The Great Gatsby

[37:26] Portnoy’s Complaint

[40:28] Great America amusement park

[47:24] Maxine Hong Kingston

[51:06] Chicken of the Sea

[51:06] Simone

[56:19] Operation Petticoat

[56:19] I Was a Male War Bride

[56:19] Catch 22

[56:19] Richard Pryor

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 2019, Mosley has only now, in the past decade or so, begun to receive the international recognition and attention he has long deserved. In his hands, wood sings; he shapes and carves trees into striking abstract forms that often appear as if they’re levitating while honoring and preserving their organic, natural character. As with the work of his two main influences, Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi, Mosley, too, strives to make sculptures that, in his words, beyond today, “will be interesting in a hundred tomorrows.”

On the episode, he talks about the language that poetry, music, and sculpture all share; his early years as a sports writer for a local newspaper; and his life-transforming relationship with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080143921&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092927232&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Thaddeus Mosley

[4:13] Sam Gilliam

[17:24] Carnegie Museum

[21:08] Carnegie International

[21:08] Leon Arkus

[21:08] “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest”

[21:08] “Inheritance”

[24:20] Isamu Noguchi

[27:53] Constantin Brâncuși

[28:28] University of Pittsburgh

[28:28] Martha Graham

[46:15] Floyd Bennett Field

[46:23] Ebony magazine

[46:23] Sepia magazine

[46:23] Jet magazine

[46:23] Pittsburgh Courier

[54:34] John Coltrane

[51:37] Li Bo

[51:37] Dylan Thomas

[56:21] Bernard Leach

[57:45] Langston Hughes

[57:45] Countee Cullen

[57:45] Harriet Tubman

[57:45] Fannie Lou Hamer

[57:45] “The Long-Legged Bait”

[57:45] “Air Step - for Fayard and Harold Nicholas”

[57:45] The Nicholas Brothers

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 solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which he has said was his way of “trying to overwhelm the museum.” This is a natural position for him: His works in and of themselves are often overwhelming. At once political and spiritual, they provoke deep introspection and consideration, practically demanding viewers to look, and then look again.

On this episode, he discusses the elusive, multifarious nature of “Black Dada”; “An Abstraction,” his upcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York (on view from May 3–August 16); painting as a kind of technology; and why, for him, jazz is indefinable.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080143921&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092927232&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.Show notes:

Adam Pendleton

[05:00] Joan Retallack

[05:00] Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths

[05:22] “Becoming Imperceptible”

[07:41] jones.com/">Ishmael Houston-Jones

[07:41] Joan Jonas

[07:41] Lorraine O’Grady

[07:41] Yvonne Rainer

[07:41] Jack Halberstam

[14:26] Fred Moten

[05:22] “Who Is Queen?”

[23:50] Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto

[23:50] Amiri Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus”

[31:14] Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

[31:14] “System of Display”

[31:14] “Reading Dante”

[34:40] “Adam Pendleton” at Pace Gallery

[34:40] “An Abstraction” at Pace Gallery

[34:40] Arlene Shechet

[34:40] “Adam Pendleton x Arlene Shechet”

[40:30] “Blackness, White, and Light” at MUMOK

[45:07] “Twenty-One Love Poems” by Audrienne Rich

[50:40] “Occupy Time” by Jason Adams

[56:04] “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” by Toni Cade Bambara

[57:13] “Some Thoughts on a Constellation of Things Seen and Felt” by Adrienne Edwards

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 seems to suggest, with a wink, “Don’t take yourself too seriously.” Beyond designing clothes, Smith also serves as a mentor to the next generation of designers. In 2020, he launched Paul Smith’s Foundation, through which he helps guide young creatives as they develop their careers. Fifty-four years into his business, which opened its first store in Nottingham, England, in 1970, Smith now operates shops in more than 70 countries around the world, from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and Hong Kong.

On this episode, he discusses his deep, 40-plus-year engagement with the country of Japan; his long-view approach to building a business that transcends time; his ever-growing collection of rabbit ephemera; and the metamorphic impact of music and humor on his life and work.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080143921&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092927232&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

[3:31] Paul Smith

[6:33] Rei Kawakubo

[12:55] Elle Decor Japan

[21:41] Deyan Sudjic

[21:41] John Hegarty

[23:48] Paul Smith’s Foundation

[24:00] Studio Smithfield Fashion Residency

[24:00] John Galliano

[24:00] Alexander McQueen

[24:22] Jony Ive

[31:30] Bauhaus

[34:50] Beeston Road Club

[40:30] The Mini Strip

[48:24] Paul Smith Nottingham Store

[53:30] Maharam collaboration

[53:30] x-paul-smith-vapor-1011.html">Burton collaboration

[53:30] The Rolling Stones

[54:19] Brown’s Hotel Sir Paul Smith Suite

[54:39] David Bowie

[54:39] Patti Smith

[54:39] Eric Clapton

[54:39] Jimmy Page

[1:01:57] Jean-Luc Godard

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 Call My Name (Penguin Press), which she discusses at length on this episode of Time Sensitive, Sante writes about the first six months of her recent transition, the decades-long silence that preceded it, and various piercing moments from her life that led up to it. She is also the author of books such as Nineteen Reservoirs (2022), The Other Paris (2015), and Folk Photography (2009), and her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Artforum, and Vanity Fair. Across all of her work, Sante brings a searing, no-nonsense clarity and a photographic eye for detail.

Also on this episode, Sante talks about why she thinks of the 1960s as “a kind of magic time,” her life-transforming literary journey, and her decision to open the floodgates of her womanhood.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080111539&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092828696&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

[3:49] Lucy Sante

[3:49] I Heard Her Call My Name

[3:49] The Factory of Facts

[6:27] Nineteen Reservoirs

[6:27] Low Life

[9:28] Histories of the Transgender Child

[9:28] Jules Gill-Peterson

[22:11] Tintin

[24:07] Terry Southern

[24:07] Writers in Revolt

[24:07] Alexander Trocchi’s Caine’s Book

[24:07] Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” 

[24:07] Peter Orlovsky

[24:07] William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch

[24:07] Curzio Malapart’s Kaputt

[29:05] The New York Review of Books

[34:23] visible-spectrum.com/018-folk-photography">Folk Photography

[36:55] The Other Paris

[38:04] Walker Evans

[38:04] Robert Frank

[46:10] Maybe People Would Be the Times

[49:52] “The Invention of the Blues”

[51:41] The Velvet Underground

[51:41] Lou Reed

[51:41] Andrew Wylie

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 spaces that are notable in their tactility, warmth, and comfort—environments that incorporate, to use her phrase, “visceral materiality”—Crawford oversees her namesake London-based design studio, Studioilse, which she launched in 2003, and whose projects include the first Soho House members’ club in New York, the Ett Hem hotel in Stockholm, and the Cathay Pacific lounges in Hong Kong. Crawford is also the founder of the department of Man and Wellbeing at the Design Academy Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, which she headed for two decades. Prior to her career as a designer, she was the celebrated founding editor of Elle Decoration U.K.

On this episode, Crawford discusses her approach to crafting beautiful, highly original spaces that push against today’s speedy, copy-paste, Instagram-moment world; her early career in media; and her personal definition of the word “slow.”

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080111539&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092828696&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.Show notes:[5:09] StudioIlse

[7:25] A Frame for Life

[58:32] Design Academy Eindhoven

[7:25] Svenkst Tenn

[7:25] Ett Hem

[16:36] Jeanette Mix

[1:02:51] Cathay Pacific

[47:42] Elle Decoration

[29:11] The Eyes of the Skin

[33:52] Alvar Aalto

[33:52] Paimio Sanatorium

[33:52] Christopher Alexander

[31:35] Sensual Home

[35:24] Leonard Koren

[35:46] Frida Escobedo

[47:42] Architect’s Journal

[47:42] The World of Interiors

[47:42] Min Hogg

[52:48] Donna Karan

[54:04] Soho House

[54:04] Babington House

[1:00:08] Home Is Where the Heart Is?

The Italian chef Massimo Bottura may be a big dreamer, but he’s also a firmly grounded-in-the-earth operator. Based in Modena, Italy, Bottura is famous for his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Osteria Francescana, which has twice held the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. He also runs Food for Soul, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting social awareness about food waste and world hunger. With its first Refettorio opened in 2015, Food for Soul now runs a network of 13 Refettorios around the world—from Paris to San Francisco to Naples—designed to serve people in need via food-recovery programs. In 2019, with his wife, Lara Gilmore, he also opened Casa Maria Luigia, a hospitality concept in the Emilian countryside that became the jumping-off point for their new recipes-slash-interiors book, Slow Food, Fast Cars (Phaidon). In everything he does, Bottura keeps the tradition of the Emilia-Romagna region alive while constantly imagining and executing new possibilities.

On this episode, Bottura discusses the art of aging balsamic vinegar; his vast collection of thousands upon thousands of vinyl records; his deep love of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis; and how he thinks about the role of time, both literally and philosophically, in and out of the kitchen.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1080111540&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1092828697&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Massimo Bottura

[03:27] Food for Soul

[03:27] Refettorio Harlem

[03:27] Refettorio Ambrosiano

[03:46] Universal Exposition in Milan

[15:36] Carlo Petrini

[10:40] Gastromotiva

[12:30] “Chef Massimo Bottura on Why the Future of Food is in Our Trash”

[15:22] Slow Food, Fast Cars

[15:36] Trattoria del Campazzo

[56:07] Casa Maria Luigia

[58:50] Osteria Francescana

[41:32] Cavallino

[41:32] Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia

[43:30] Joseph Beuys

[43:30] Lara Gilmore

[1:01:42] Tortellante

To Helen Molesworth, curating is much more than carefully selecting and positioning noteworthy artworks and objects alongside one another within a space; it’s also about telling stories through them and about them, and in turn, communicating particular, often potent messages. Her probing writing takes a similar approach to her curatorial work, as can be seen in her new book, Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (Phaidon), which culls together 24 of her essays written across three decades. For nearly 20 of those years, Molesworth served in various curatorial roles at museums and arts institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and most recently, as the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). In the five years since her departure from MOCA, Molesworth has built a thriving practice as an independent curator, writer, and podcaster, notably as the host of the six-part podcast Death of an Artist, which was named a best podcast of 2022 by both The Economist and The Atlantic.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Molesworth discusses her lifelong engagement with the work of Marcel Duchamp; the transformative power of a great conversation; and the personal and professional freedom she has found in recent years as a roving, independent voice in the art world.

Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1079557960&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1091365071&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes:

[00:25] Helen Molesworth

[03:50] Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art

[04:02] Marcel Duchamp

[04:09] “At Home with Marcel Duchamp: The Readymade and Domesticity”

[11:33] “The Creative Act”

[12:09] Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”

[17:22] Frank Stella

[17:28] John Baldessari

[21:56] Paul Lafargue

[22:32] Doris Salcedo

[29:50] Josiah McElheny

[35:23] Al Hirschfeld

[36:41] State University of New York at Albany

[36:43] Whitney Museum Independent Study Program

[36:48] Cornell University

[42:33] “One Day at a Time”

[46:57] Kerry James Marshall

[47:00] “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s”

[47:02] “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957”

[47:41] Death of an Artist

[47:46] Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

[47:48] Recording Artists

[54:53] Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

[54:51] Carl Andre

[59:45] WBLS: The Quiet Storm

In another life, the German-born architect Annabelle Selldorf might have been a painter or a profile writer. In this one, she expresses her proclivity for portraiture as the principal of the New York–based firm Selldorf Architects, which she founded in 1988. Renowned for its work in the art world—from galleries such as David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth to cultural institutions including The Frick Collection in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.—Selldorf’s firm has also designed a wide variety of residential projects and civic buildings. Many of these designs serve as architectural depictions of their respective clients, revealing each one’s inner nature and underlying ethos.

On this episode, Selldorf discusses the links she sees between Slow Food and her architecture, the intuitive aspects of form-making, and why she considers architecture “the mother of all arts.”

Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, sys.com/Serving/adServer.bs?cn=trd&pli=1079557967&gdpr=%24%7BGDPR%7D&gdpr_consent=%24%7BGDPR_CONSENT_68%7D&us_privacy=%24%7BUS_PRIVACY%7D&adid=1091365070&ord=%5Btimestamp%5D">Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes: 

[00:31] Selldorf Architects

[08:19] The Frick Collection

[10:42] Lucian Freud

[17:45] Dia Beacon

[18:43] Art Gallery of Ontario expansion

[18:54] Two Row

[18:57] Diamond Schmitt

[26:08] Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility

[30:03] CSO Red Hook

[30:05] CSO Owls Head

[34:31] National Gallery, London

[35:17] One Domino Park

[37:15] John Russell Pope

[37:28] Thomas Hastings

[43:13] I.M. Pei

[55:38] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

[58:54] Neue Galerie