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Second part of a two-part interview with designer Michael Bierut. “I’ve found that any reluctance I’ve had to doing more of this ‘political design’ has to do with my own fear that things like T-shirts and posters are usually feeble tools to address the enormous problems we face as a society today.” Read part one.
Interview with writer Sam Harris on “why religion must end”. “People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.”
Interview with Thom Yorke about politics, his solo album, and Radiohead’s impending (yet distant) new album. (via dooce)
Robert Birnbaum interview with Susan Orlean. Here’s his first interview with her from 2001.
Update: I linked to this without reading it first, something I *never* do, but now that I’ve read it, there’s really some great stuff in there about the writing process, magazines (specifically The New Yorker), and editing. And great quotes like “I’d rather work for Drunken Boat than for Time magazine, to be honest with you”. Ouch for Time magazine.
Interview with photographer Chip Simons about inspiration and originality. “You can get work for fancy magazines with just a big ego.”
Interview with Jim Buckmaster, who gives us an update on what Craiglist is up to. “If I look across the Internet at the big Internet companies, there’s a large proportion of their staff that are devoted in various ways to trying to maximize revenue. Those employees I don’t think are delivering much bang for the buck to the end user.”
Interview with designer Michael Bierut. “The best thing design can do for a company is to express that company’s personality accurately and compellingly, and in so doing permit that organizations inherent strengths to prevail.”
Quick interview with me over at leahpeah. “I was never one of those kids who had a ready answer for what they wanted to be when they grew up.”
Fine interview with Pixar/Disney’s John Lasseter, who is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. “I believe in the nobility of entertaining people, and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours out of their busy lives.”
Grist Magazine interview with Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth.
Interview with photographer Jay Parkinson about his aspiring model project. “I feel that it’s a photographic cop-out to take photos of strictly beautiful people because it’s hard to take a bad photo of a beautiful person, especially a very scripted portrait.”
Short interview with Chris Ware upon the occasion of a show of his work at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. “I’ve found that anything I do [to] carefully plan and pare down in advance feels utterly false and constructed once I actually do it, having nothing of the sort of accident and unevenness of real life that I hope to, at least, modestly edge towards.”
Conversation between filmmakers Errol Morris and Adam Curtis. “People criticized my film by saying things like, ‘Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?’ And my response was, ‘What if the other view is wrong?’ That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what’s called “perceived wisdom.” What if perceived wisdom’s wrong?”
John Hodgman comments on the first few “shuffled” tracks of his mp3 collection.
Review of Why? by Charles Tilly, in which he examines the four kinds of reasons people offer as explanations for things and under which situations they are used. See also an October 2005 interview with Tilly.
Trailer for The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) new film. Official site, interview with Aronofsky on the film, which was originally supposed to star Brad Pitt.
Interesting interview with Jonah Peretti about contagious media, business, and web media. (thx, carrie)
Interview with Amy Franceschini, founder of Futurefarmers. Franceschini also had a hand in Atlas Magazine (blast from the past!), which was one of my favorite sites back in the day.
Short interview with Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos.
Interview with some of the new players of SNL, including Lazy Sunday creator Andy Samberg.
Gelf Magazine has an interview with the Smoking Gun’s William Bastone about their expose of James Frey.
Part 2 of the Bill Simmons/Malcolm Gladwell conversation is even better than part 1. They really rip into what Isiah Thomas has done as GM of the Knicks. “The mess [Thomas] is creating right now in New York will be studied by business school students 50 years from now alongside Enron and pets.com.”
Short interview with David Foster Wallace in the San Antonio Current.
Part one of a wonderful rambling email exchange between sportswriter Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. Part two on the morrow. (thx, richard)
Interview with David Remnick about the revitalization of the New Yorker and what exactly it is that makes that magazine unique. “My principle in the magazine - and I am not being arrogant - is that I don’t lose sleep trying to figure what the reader wants. I don’t do surveys. I don’t check the mood of the consumers. I do what I want, what interests me and a small group of editors that influences the way of the magazine.” (thx, george)
Interview with the BBC’s David Frost on his move to Al Jazeera International, a new 24-hour news station. I don’t get why Solomon is so rude in these interviews, particularly when her able subjects handle her “tough” questions with such ease.
Robert Birnbaum interviews physicist Lisa Randall about string theory and science popularizers.
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