The Lives They're Living
by Ben Yagoda
Profiling remarkable people who are a little more under the radar than they deserve to be. Your host is Ben Yagoda, the author, co-author, or editor of fourteen books, including "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English" (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the novel "Alias O. Henry" (Paul Dry Books, 2025). For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.
Episodes
-
Gary M. Pomerantz on Bob Cousy
Gary M. Pomerantz is an author and a lecturer in the graduate program in journalism at Stanford University. He started his career at the Washington Post, where he covered Georgetown University basketballand the National Football League. He then moved to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he...
-
Carl Freedman on Samuel R. Delany
Carl Freedman is the William A. Read Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Louisiana State University and the author of many books, including The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power; The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture; and Versions of Hollywood…
more -
Chris Whipple on Harry Benson
A former Life magazine correspondent and CBS 60 Minutes producer, Chris Whipple is the author of Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History' which was an instant top-ten New York Times bestseller. His previous best-selling books include The…
more -
Tom Reney on Charlie Musselwhite
Tom Reney was honored by the Jazz Journalists Association with the Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Career Excellence in Broadcasting in 2019. In addition to hosting Jazz à la Mode since 1984, Tom writes the Corner Pocket music blog at tomreney.com and hosts the Jazz Beat podcast at New...
-
Jack Lynch on Bryan Garner
Jack Lynch is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rutgers/Newark. In addition to many scholarly publications, focusing on 18th century British literature, notably Samuel Johnson, he has written widely and brilliantly for a general audience, in books including: Becoming...
-
Gene Seymour on Ron Carter
Gene Seymour, a Connecticut native, spent years working for big-city newspapers as a reporter and movie and jazz critic—including at the Philadelphia Daily News, where we first crossed paths. He's the author of a young adult history, Jazz, the Great American Art. These days, he lives in...
-
Brian Cullman on Peter Stampfel
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...
-
Jonathan Coleman on Nan and Gay Talese
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...
-
Jane Leavy on Sandy Koufax
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...
-
Tim Page on Stephin Merritt
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...
-
Mike Jensen on William "Speedy" Morris
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...
-
David Bianculli on James L. Brooks
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…
more -
Aimee Liu on Maxine Hong Kingston
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...
-
Dave Barry on Roy Blount Jr.
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,...
-
Paul Dickson
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...
-
David Remnick on John McPhee
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...
-
Folk Icons II: Elijah Wald on Ramblin' Jack Elliott
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...
-
Folk Icons I: Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian
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…
more -
Robert Strauss on Lois Smith
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...
-
John Barth on Bill Siemering
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...
-
David Leaf on Van Dyke Parks
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...
-
Casey Schwartz on Jonathan Schwartz
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...
-
Carrie Rickey on Molly Haskell
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…
more -
Dwight Garner on Calvin Trillin
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...
-
Chris Molanphy on Quincy Jones
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…
more -
Steve Wasserman on Robert Scheer
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...
-
Rem Rieder on Earl Monroe
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…
more -
Jason Zengerle on Sonny Vaccaro
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…
more -
Glenn Kenny on Thelma Schoonmaker
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…
more -
Brian Fairbanks on Kris Kristofferson
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...
-
Bonus Episode: Newton Minow
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…
more -
Carrie Courogen on Elaine May
"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...
-
Adrienne LaFrance on Albert Brooks
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...
-
Steve Stoliar on Dick Cavett
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…
more -
David Bianculli on Mason Williams
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…
more -
Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Abigail Thomas
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...
-
Gene Seymour on Ishmael Reed
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…
more -
Michael Tisserand on Jules Feiffer
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...
About this show
Profiling remarkable people who are a little more under the radar than they deserve to be. Your host is Ben Yagoda, the author, co-author, or editor of fourteen books, including "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English" (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the novel "Alias O. Henry" (Paul Dry Books, 2025). For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.
Hosted by
Ben Yagoda