All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 35 in total
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 l...
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...
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...
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 miniseri...
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 th...
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 encounte...
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 Temp...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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-...
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,...
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 clas...
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 son...
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 Buchan...
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 ...
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 m...
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 ...
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 ...
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, &...
