Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen

He’s a member of The Washington Post’s editorial board, a commentator on the PBS NewsHour, anchor of The Weekend on MSNBC, author of Yet Here I Am. He is liberal in his politics, conservative in his …

When this drummer was a kid, his father introduced him to an array of music, from Tito Puente to Dobie Gray. “He bought himself a La-Z-Boy chair. He would sit there after dinner, smoke a cigarette, a…

She’s a special correspondent for BBC Studios, a regular contributor to MSNBC, and co-host, with Anthony Scaramucci, of the podcast The Rest Is Politics. “People call journalists curious; I think it’…

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research makes many of the 24 million items in its archive available online, but there’s an “electric moment of actually touching a document,” says its executive directo…

This Obie-winning actor created the role of Helen in the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Memnon. “It is definitely under-utilized. Underappreciated.” Greek mythology in modern theater? That too, but he…

Decades ago, he shook hands with W. E. B. Du Bois, born in 1868. It seems impossible, but then again Einstein was a contemporary of Billy the Kid. Lewis went on to write a Pultzer-Prize winning biogr…

These principals of the architectural firm WORKac found it challenging to design their own home. The psychological complexity of domestic life? The culmination of years of thought? “The hardest thing…

The artistic director of the Paul Taylor Dance Company summarizes his aesthetic: “The curtain goes up, twenty minutes happen, the curtain comes down, and it is transformative.” Easy to say, brilliant…

He’s worked from Hanoi to Berlin to America’s old-growth forests. “As a photographer, it’s only in getting lost that you move forward.” As a civilian, when I get lost, I pretty much just get lost. An…

He led the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and pretty much created theater at Lincoln Center. “The happiest moments of my life have been in rehearsal rooms.” Well, yeah. In there with him? David Mamet, Te…

This lawyer works on health policy at Columbia’s Mailman School: “Public health in a certain sense is about balancing, the rights we have as individuals with the needs of society to preserve, protect…

This children’s book author—Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tiger Rising, The Tale of Despereaux—describes her innate ability: “I have a knack for nothing except being filled with wonder.” I’d dispute tha…

“We got it from Lauren Bacall,” says this curator. The flu? Certainly not. An Elsa Peretti handbag, one of 700 items from Bacall’s wardrobe donated to the Museum at FIT, where it was featured in Hill…

“The disease, the people believed, was caused by sorcery and could be cured by sorcery,” says this bioethicist. By “the people” he does not allude to RFK Jr. but to a stone-age tribe in New Guinea. P…

Their play Here There Are Blueberries is built around an actual photo album assembled at Auschwitz of the ordinary daily life of the perpetrators. Following a run at the McCarter Theatre, the play is…

This historian, in CCNY’s Black Studies Department, says, “If I want to have a good writing day, I take the train an hour and fifteen minutes to somewhere I love, the quietest place in New York.” Sil…

After fifty years as a mezzo-soprano, she still embraces this advice from her first teacher: “Sing as though it comes from the bottom of your heart, because that’s what it’s about.” Her most recent r…

The new president of Hunter College is a champion of “social infrastructure,” describing it as “A public good. Everybody uses it, nobody owns it.” Libraries, schools, parks, or, in a decent society, …

“Isaac Bashevis Singer called my mother the Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish songs,” says Zalmen. His family heritage and Steven’s splendid singing were big factors in the triumph of Fiddler on the Roof in…