Episodes
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A Conversation with Los Angeles Impresario Ernest Fleischmann
Ernest Fleischmann, the former General Manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, can be credited with turning this once provincial institution into a world famous orchestra.
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Roosevelt Island’s Octagon Tower: A Proud Ruin
The Octagon Tower on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan was the city's first municipal insane asylum. Today it's a proud ruin, having survived partial demolition, fire and abandonment. And in a novel approach, the tower has been preserved in its dilapidated state. A reminder of its haunted history.
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Spring Fever
This time of year, when the relieved earth shrugs off stale dirt and dead leaves, it pauses, recalling. Then, as it lets out a long, low breath, it slowly releases moisture, a glut of color. Everything is growing. But only for a spell, for soon enough the earth will turn, and then the relentless...
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Garibaldi and Meucci: two friends, two very different lives
https://youtu.be/WVlh-Ooi_u4?rel=0 A small house on Staten Island tells the tale of the friendship between Guiseppe Garibaldi, the famed Italian revolutionary, and Antonio Meucci, a candle maker who just might have invented the telephone. Take a tour of the Garibaldi Meucci Museum with WNYC’s…
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Blacksmith House Poetry Series: Henri Cole and William Logan
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the...
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The Legendary Steinway Hall in Midtown Manhattan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpYg2AE4zcs This archival WNYC TV “Cultural Minute” takes a tour of the Steinway Store in Midtown Manhattan — which, unlike so many traditional city landmarks, is still in business. Watch to see how these famous pianos are actually built!
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Our American “Empire” with Niall Ferguson
Note: This interview has been picked up by the public radio stations WGBH, in Boston, its affiliates WCAI and WNAN, and WCVE in Richmond, VA. It was originally broadcast in 2008. In some ways, the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson is the Russell Crowe of the academic world: charismatic,...
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Blacksmith House Poetry Series: Fanny Howe and Haleh Liza Gafori
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the...
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The Restoration of the Neptune Fountain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21byLfOrwpk?rel=0 At the Modern Art Foundry in Astoria Queens, workers restore the Neptune Fountain, which was missing its hands, an arm and a foot. The statue, which spouted water in Snug Harbor on Staten Island, has been returned to its former home. Watch how…
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Tom Perrotta on Flannery O’Connor — a literary affinity
Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, and also on KUT, in Austin, Texas! Tom Perrotta, author of the novels Mrs. Fletcher, Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers, speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and...
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Blacksmith House Poetry Series: Carl Phillips and Penelope Pelizzon
The Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education has been bringing established and emerging poets to Harvard Square since its founding by Gail Mazur in 1973. The series is named after the Blacksmith House at 56 Brattle Street, site of the village smithy and the...
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Kwame Anthony Appiah: the Cosmopolitan Philosopher
Note: Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the New York Times column, “The Ethicist”, has just won (in the summer of 2024) the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize. A high honor. This program was broadcast on WCAI, an affiliate of WGBH, Boston. In this interview from 2004, New York University...
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Harvard Critic Helen Vendler on Emily Dickinson
Sadly, Helen Vendler has just died on April 23, 2024, at ninety years of age. I’m so glad I got a chance to meet her. Note: This interview was broadcast on the WGBH sister stations WCAI/WNAN, Prairie Public Radio, WABE in Atlanta and on KUT in Austin, Texas. When Helen Vendler was only 13, the...
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Tales from Donegal, told in Kenny’s Bookshop
Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. In 1861 in Clonmany, on the Inishowen peninsula in the far north of County Donegal Ireland, Charles McGlinchy was born. His was a windblown, rough world, wracked with beauty and hardship. A weaver by trade, and a...
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Behind the Scenes at Law and Order
https://youtu.be/QhGC2VP0ZHg?rel=0 Watch the shooting of the Law and Order episode “Blood Libel” from its 6th season. The famous show featured Sam Waterston as Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, Jerry Orbach as Senior Detective Lennie Briscoe, Jill Hennessy as Assistant District...
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Rediscovering James Joyce in Dublin with editor Maurice Earls
Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin,Texas. James Joyce was born and raised in Dublin, and it was from Dublin that he fled as a young man, to Trieste, in order to write Ulysses, perhaps the key novel of the early 20th century. But before he left, he began…
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Charles Simic’s the choice at San Francisco’s Dog Eared Books!
Sadly, since this interview was recorded, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has died at the age of 84. Note: This interview was broadcast on KUT-FM, an NPR station based in Austin, Texas. Kate Rosenberger is one of those rare people who collects independent book stores in San…
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The history and future of the New England Forest
Note: an audio version of this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and by KPIP in Missouri. The forests of New England are, remarkably, a success story. They’ve recovered from attack after attack. The early settlers hacked them down, by hand, for...
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The End of Our Universe among other timely topics…
Note: this program was broadcast on WGBH‘s sister stations WCAI & WNAN, on Sept. 9, 2007, and picked up by KPVL, a Pacifica station, on July 2, 2013! Want to know how the world is going to end? Just ask Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. If it’s our own universe you’re talking about, well, it’s...
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International news and the American attention span
I reported this story on the struggle to cover international news in the late 1990s for Freedom Speaks, a TV program on the media run by the Freedom Forum, and I thought with a ground war now raging in Europe and threatening to destabilize the “world order”, it’s worth a revisit. But remember —...
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The Mau Mau rebellion — a revisionist history
NOTE: Caroline Elkins is in the news again, with a new book called Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. In it she continues her searing research into first world abuse and torture of numberless Africans under their colonial control. How does history get rewritten? How do…
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Zen and the Art of Writing – with Natalie Goldberg
Note: This program was broadcast on WCAI, KZMU and WFIU. Natalie Goldberg, the well-known painter, writer and writing teacher, who wrote the best-seller on how to write called Writing Down the Bones, is also a Zen practitioner, who applies the lessons of Zen Buddhism to her writing, and her life....
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Dancer, Choreographer Ron Brown
I had the pleasure of meeting Ron Brown and his dancers when I was covering the arts for WNYC TV in the 1990s. My visit to his studio has stayed in my memory all this time as full of color and vibrancy, and I think you’ll like the story I put together afterwards. In this past Sunday’s New York...
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The North Atlantic Right Whale: Our Urban Leviathan
Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011! Photo: courtesy US Marine Mammal Commission The endangered North Atlantic Right Whale is probably our closest cetacean neighbor. There are only about 350 of them in total, and they live...
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Women’s Work at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
“Division of Labor: Women’s Work” was an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1995. I covered it in my role as an arts reporter for WNYC TV. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/yB3BFx2tsRM?rel=0
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Rebecca Goldstein: the atheist with a soul
Note: this interview was broadcast on WGBH, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture! Rebecca Goldstein’s latest work, called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is perhaps best described as a hybrid. It is indeed a novel, with its share of psychology, mathematics and...
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The Dan Flavin Art Institute
https://youtu.be/Pz_x6HZ37u8?rel=0 Back when I worked for WNYC TV, I went to Bridgehampton, Long Island to cover an art opening at the Dan Flavin Art Institute, overseen by Dia Center for the Arts. It’s a haunting place, filled with the florescent tubes that made Flavin famous. I hope you enjoy…
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The Peabody Sisters – with biographer Megan Marshall
Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio’s “Arts and Ideas.” Author Megan Marshall has written well-received biographies of Elizabeth Bishop and Margaret Fuller. But before these books, she wrote about the three Peabody sisters – Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia – who were key players in the...
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Dinosaurs on Thoughtcast
The dinosaurs return to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
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Poet Robert Pinsky takes on King David
Note: The WGBH sister stations WCAI and WNAN broadcast this interview, and it also received a 5 star review on PRX! Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky tackles King David of the Bible – the shepherd, poet, warrior and adulterer – in his “Life of David.” Is David a legend? A real, flesh and blood...
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Words @ Work: The Origins of “Rock”
Note: this piece was broadcast on NJN (New Jersey Public Radio), New Hampshire Public Radio and WMUB, an NPR station in Oxford, Ohio. It was also podcast on KXCI.org, in Tucson. What does the word rock mean? Simple enough question. But how did the term originate? Where — and why? These questions...
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Buffalo Dance: A Poem for NPR’s Poetry Month
Buffalo Dance From the secret Kiva past collapse they stomp and sing the story
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Red Hook, Brooklyn, before the Gentrification
On a beautiful spring day in the mid 1990s, I meandered the streets of Red Hook, when it was still a rundown Brooklyn neighborhood. I met its first art gallery owner, and the two longshoremen who ventured inside. This is one of my favorite stories for WNYC TV, the PBS station I worked for in...
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Alan Dershowitz on Preemption and the Hezbollah
Note: this interview was broadcast twice on WGBH radio in Boston. It has also aired on WCAI/WNAN, WNED, KXOT and KYOU. The controversial Harvard Law professor, author and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz talks with ThoughtCast about his book “Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways”, as well as…
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“Why Does the World Exist?” with Jim Holt
Note: this interview was broadcast on the WGBH public radio affiliate WCAI, on the Cape and Islands! In this ThoughtCast interview, science writer Jim Holt takes us on a jaunty tour of being and nothingness, existence and emptiness, quantum tunneling and the uncertainty principle. The author of...
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KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt at the LA Times Book Festival
KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, the host of the literary talk show Bookworm, speaks with Jenny Attiyeh at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Silverblatt is the real thing — an authentic, genuinely interested interviewer who reads not only the latest book his guest has come to discuss, but the...
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Chanticleer Backstage on ThoughtCast!
https://youtu.be/cIkG1q6c628?rel=0 Chanticleer, for those who’ve been lucky enough to attend its concerts already know, is a delightful all-male classical vocal ensemble. It’s sold over a million albums is an audience favorite. Highly versatile, the group performs a diverse repertoire, ranging…
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ThoughtCast Reflects on the Legacy of John McCain
John McCain’s final battle – this time with an aggressive form of brain cancer – is now over, and the debates over his legacy have yet to begin in earnest. Instead, we are awash in adulatory news coverage, which highlights McCain the icon, but obscures the man. Perhaps his performance in a…
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John McCain’s Last Stand – on ThoughtCast!
John McCain, the maverick Republican Senator from Arizona, was diagnosed with brain cancer a year ago now, so there’s not much time left for this remarkably resilient politician to take a final stand. Will McCain live long enough to vote for — or against — Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second Supreme...
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Philip Glass creates an opera – on ThoughtCast!
Note: this mini-documentary, which was broadcast in 1996 on WNYC TV, a public television station in New York City, charts the creation of Les Enfants Terribles, a dance opera by the composer Philip Glass and the choreographer Susan Marshall. Over the course of three months, Jenny Attiyeh saw this...
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Lydia Ratcliff: Vermont Farmer, Stubborn Survivor
I’ve decided to re-post this ThoughtCast program from July 1, 2009 because my friend Lydia Ratcliff died yesterday, February 14th, 2018. The New York Times has written an obituary of her that I think is worth reading. She fought COPD for over a decade, so she could remain involved in the life of...
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Samuel Huntington — on Immigration and the American Identity
The remarkable rise of Donald Trump, fueled in large part by his determination to keep immigrants out of his Greatening America, has caused many to re-examine the key concerns of the controversial political scientist Samuel Huntington. His writings on immigration and American national identity…
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Lessons from a Former Failed Bid for the Presidency?
The press barely noticed former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith’s bid for the presidency in 2000, so entranced were they over the newly candid Arizona Senator John McCain as he crisscrossed Bob Smith’s state in the “Straight Talk Express.” But McCain fever was quickly quenched by the more...
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Al Gore, Reconsidered
Now that we’re faced with Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel, it is tempting to ask, again: What if he’d actually won the Presidential election back in 2000? Remember when the century turned, the chads clung and hung, Florida was in Republican hands, and the Supreme Court ended up deciding the race in...
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Art Therapy: A Place for Self-Expression while in Pain
https://youtu.be/YJ0_Uo9Hywk?rel=0 So let’s say you have leukemia. You have relapsed. What can art therapy do for you? Here at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, young cancer patients struggle with their treatment. But they also have an outlet, a safe place to express themselves. This “WNYC...
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The Hunt for Art Fakes with Tom Hoving
The inimitable Tom Hoving discusses art forgeries, and how to spot them, on ThoughtCast! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZ3RX1f9HQ?rel=0 Tom Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, speaks with Jenny Attiyeh (reporting for WNYC TV, now off the air) about his book –…
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Revered New York Review editor Robert Silvers, R.I.P.
Note: this interview has been picked up by the public radio station WGBH, in Boston, and its sister stations WCAI and WNAN. Sadly, Bob died in March of 2017. This interview was quoted in The New York Times obituary. The venerable New York Review of Books was launched amidst a newspaper strike in...
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Paul Pascarella – An Artist of the Mesa and the Mountain
When I interviewed Paul Pascarella, back in the 90s, I confess he was kind of a friend. Which made following him around with a camera in his Arroyo Seco studio a lot smoother than usual. It’s not easy to gain this access, to watch an artist at work, especially if you’re trying to record each idea...
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Andres Serrano @ The New Museum of Contemporary Art
Andres Serrano: Works 1983-93 opened at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho in early 1995. It was a mid-career retrospective, and I went there to interview the controversial artist for the PBS station WNYC TV. His infamous “Piss Christ”, among other ecclesiastical subjects, was prominently...
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Arianna Huffington on Picasso and the Clinton White House
Arianna Huffington, the author, journalist and founder of The Huffington Post, spoke with Jenny Attiyeh at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. This interview was broadcast on WNYE, a public television station in New York City. Today she is a media mogul, one of Forbes’ 100 most influential...