The Lives They're Living

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. H...

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...

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...

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 le...

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...

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 S...

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 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 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...

 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.

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 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

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...

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...

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 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 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 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"

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...

"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 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 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 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 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.

Photo © Jennifer Waddell Photography 

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 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.