2245 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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THE AGE OF TOMATO - Η ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΗΣ ΤΟΜΑΤΑΣ

What resists this condition is the private, the silent, the unknown, the unread, the unseen, the unspoken, the untouched, the unsmelled, the unheard—those dimensions that require time to be expressed. All life, in its material and immaterial form, demands duration that is stretched, slow, and unedited.

Georgia Kotretsos
How Deeply Human Is Language? A close-up

The computer metaphor permeates our lives for good reasons, but we need to be mindful of how we harness it to enhance our thoughts, and beware of hurdles and pitfalls along the path. This is what I've been trying to do, and I truly hope that the specifics of my view would be apparent to each and every reader.

Yosef Grodzinsky
The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese - In a nutshell

Tasty is not enough to become an icon. Plenty of delicious things vanish. The ones that endure survive because they do cultural work — signaling refinement to one era, feeding families cheaply in the next, and quietly becoming "comfort" in a third. The staying power was never in the flavor.

Karima Moyer-Nocchi
Le Samouraï - A close-up

Equity, diversity, and inclusion should be the top priority in society. There is no doubt about that. They are a basic human right. However, are we sometimes becoming too defensive to avoid being offensive? Is it becoming difficult to critique others' thoughts? I think there is a clear difference between critiquing and criticizing.

Daisuke Miyao
Cats: A History - In a nutshell

But it was not until after World War II that pet cats became common. In this sense, pet cats on a mass scale occupy only one per cent of the time that cats and humans have had relationships. That's why it's so important for a history of cats to cover not only pet cats, but also the more numerous feral and street cats. They have longer histories.

Rod Phillips
Springsteen Fandom - The wide angle

So the book also became a document of my own journey as a fan. On the larger scale, it looks back across more than forty years to the moment when I first heard "No Surrender" and realized that I really could learn more from a three-minute record than I would ever learn in school.

Nicolas Pethes
Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic - The wide angle

In Australia, the construction of the Sydney Opera House — today the country's most iconic monument — was accompanied by an endless stream of cartoons mocking the building. Were these merely jokes? Far from it. Behind many of these seemingly playful images lay complex editorial, political, and economic agendas.

Gabriele Neri
City on the Edge - The wide angle

The book is pretty personal, more than most books like this. I'm a character in the book. I show up in chapter three, which is about the dot-com bubble of the late 90s. I was the editor of a magazine called The Industry Standard, which was the Bible of the dot-com boom. As journalists, we covered the dot-com boom, and obviously that was super interesting, and I had a front-row seat for all that stuff.

Jonathan Weber
Film Diplomacy - A close-up

That scene condenses the logic of film diplomacy. Turkey gives America images of itself. America gives Turkey the apparatus for producing images. Turkey offers history, landscape, friendship, and civilizational depth. America offers technology, mobility, and the future. A political alliance becomes a childhood friendship. A Cold War relationship becomes a handshake.

Ayşehan Jülide Etem
The Sleepless Ape - The wide angle

So interestingly, the modern mind thinks of the social condition as one that reduces sleep. Oh, I've got to sleep alone, in this sleep cell, this prison, so that nothing interferes with my sleep. But ironically, it was the social evolution of our species that made us such high-efficiency sleepers. Weird and beautiful sleepers in the first place.

David R. Samson
The Coffee Can Investor - A close-up

Matt Ankrum heard that story and decided he wanted to focus on those companies that multiplied 100 times, like Xerox. He started his research on 100-baggers and brought the coffee can concept together with it. Readers will like the metaphor of the coffee can story, and the power of exponential compounding, as well as the power of a relationship…

Neeraj Khemlani
How Deeply Human Is Language? The wide angle

You could say that my work on this book began at the very onset of my academic life. I started out as a medical student, with an interest in linguistics, neurophysiology, and the philosophy of mind. Unable to decide which path to take, I found a reasonable solution in doing many things in parallel, which meant doing both linguistics and medicine.

Yosef Grodzinsky
Abraham Lincoln and little Ms. Bedell

In her letter, with the audacity of a child, she tells him “You are unattractive. Your face, it's too thin, it's too narrow, you...

Robert P. Watson
Freedom Round the Globe - A close-up

This demolition of the private property of the EIC was audacious, horrifying many in England and even in Massachusetts itself. It also put at least some of the American colonies on a collision course with the British government, leading…

Sarah M.S. Pearsall
Le Samouraï - The wide angle

I think the question of the animal, or the thought of the nonhuman to decenter the human, is a crucial area for film theory in the twenty-first century. I would say Melville, as a cat person, tried to cross a border between the human and the nonhuman. Also, Cinema Is a Cat was my attempt to communicate with non-academics, cinephiles, and my fellow researchers and students.

Daisuke Miyao
How We Think - The wide angle

Academics from several disciplines observe monkeys and apes, such as animal behaviorists, psychologists, and ecologists, but anthropologists do it for a specific reason—we want to know if we can trace some patterns of human behavior to our evolutionary cousins. What do we share with nonhuman primates? What makes humans different, if anything?

Meredith F. Small
King PONG - A close-up

What PONG did, and what Atari did that was so successful — the takeaway here is that Atari radically changed the way the coin-operated amusement industry functioned. Games have very limited locations. What Atari did was got its product into those locations — let's call them markets — but it also created new ones.

Raiford Guins
How to Win the World Cup - In a nutshell

A World Cup brings this together in a way that no other sporting event does. Everybody plays the same sport, but has different goals and national environments to work in - and it's the people who tell this story best.

Chris Evans
Springsteen Fandom - In a nutshell

Many of Springsteen's songs are built around characters caught in situations where it's difficult to know what the right decision is. These aren't "big" heroic stories — they're stories about failure, exclusion, disappointment, and hope that often goes nowhere, all grounded in very concrete everyday situations. Just listen to any song on "Nebraska" or "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and you will immediately be drawn into these emotions.

Nicolas Pethes
Public Acoustics - A close-up

Welch zooms in on Claude Perrault — physician, architect, music theorist — and an unpublished preface in which he describes overhearing a debate between two music connoisseurs at a Paris opera. Perrault's defense of contrapuntal music doubles as a defense of complex listening, reframing social noise as intelligible complexity. There is, he implies, pleasure to be found in tuning into the many voices of society.

Ellen R. Welch
The Coffee Can Investor - In a nutshell

Matt is an advocate of investing in companies for the long term, not trading stocks. He has studied companies that have multiplied in value 100 times. They're called hundred baggers and the process usually takes 30 years.

Neeraj Khemlani
How Deeply Human Is Language? In a nutshell

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

Yosef Grodzinsky
Freedom Round the Globe - The wide angle

Iconic moments of the American Revolution (such as the Boston Massacre, the establishment of Valley Forge, the Yorktown surrender) look different by starting outside the thirteen colonies. We see things we did not see before. Such iconic moments become more interesting…

Sarah M.S. Pearsall
Le Samouraï - In a nutshell

Melville's obsessive use of close-ups of the protagonist's face in Le Samouraï also emphasizes the protagonist's subjective viewpoint. These close-ups not only function to represent his psychological state but also reject the viewer's identification with his emotions.

Daisuke Miyao
The Sleepless Ape - In a nutshell

"Not only do humans sleep the least of any primate, but we have the most REM, proportionally. So we have this really special, unique kind of sleep architecture relative to other primate species."

David R. Samson
Film Diplomacy - The wide angle

Missionaries form the earlier layer of this story. American Protestant missionaries in Turkey used film in schools, churches, hospitals, prisons, and villages. They screened science films, agricultural films, health films, Disney films, and religious films.

Ayşehan Jülide Etem
City on the Edge - In a nutshell

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

Jonathan Weber
Profit vs. Progress - In a nutshell

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

Brad Swanson
King PONG - The wide angle

The argument I always make as an educator and a historian is that I hope game developers today are looking at older games to see, one, what's been done — don't do it again, think differently. I don't know how much history is active in game design programs.

Raiford Guins
How We Think - In a nutshell

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

Meredith F. Small

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