Posts tagged as Q&As
How They Got There: A Conversation With Chiropractor Bill Walsh
Bill Walsh will openly admit that his many former bosses were justified when they fired him. He was "arrogantly unfit," and is not shy about telling tales of his, shall we say, youthful misadventures. Eventually, Walsh righted himself, joined a recovery program, went to chiropractic school, and started a practice in Park Slope. He's been treating people there for the past 25 years. READ MORE
Talking To The Nerdist's Chris Hardwick
Chris Hardwick has made a career out of being a nerd. Well, actually, he has made several careers out of being a nerd, as the host of "Web Soup" a writer for Wired, an author and the host of The Nerdist podcast. Paste Magazine and Rolling Stone both named The Nerdist one of the ten best podcasts of the year, which means that it's now a TV show, with a special airing tomorrow night on BBC America. The podcast has also spawned a community of tech, science and nerd culture enthusiasts on Nerdist.com. READ MORE
"Not So Pure Michigan": The Man Who Hates Wisconsin and Ohio
When Wisconsin's tourism bureau launched a war on its neighbor by suggesting Wisconsin is actually the "mitten state," Michigan saw an unlikely ally come to its defense: a 30-something video pro named John Kerfoot. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Poetry Teacher Marty Skoble
Marty Skoble sits in his office surrounded by the words of his students. Recently, one of his charges slipped a note under his door that read simply, "Waves look like white horses." That is not the most advanced of similes, but consider the context: The uncertainty of the pensmanship suggests that the anonymous writer was in his or her first decade. READ MORE
Talking To Karen Russell, Author Of 'Swamplandia!'
To open with a bit of an understatement, author Karen Russell has had a very good year. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, has received widespread praise since its publication in February (including a spot on the just-announced New York Times list of the 10 Best Books Of 2011). Then last month, the news broke that HBO has optioned the novel—a bildungsroman of sorts about a teenage alligator wrestler and her search for her missing sister—for what they describe as a “half hour comedy series." The adaptation will coincide with producer Scott Rudin’s other in-the-works literary projects, including Noah Baumbach’s take on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, as well as an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. READ MORE
A Conversation With Writer Scott Raab
Scott Raab’s new memoir The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James isn’t really about basketball. It’s about addiction and sobriety, marriage and divorce, childhood and parenthood, loyalty and autonomy. In 15 years at Esquire—and five years at GQ before that—the 59-year-old Cleveland native has, as he writes in the book, “shared cunnilingus tips with Robert Downey Jr., got tattoos with Dennis Rodman, once smoked a bone with Tupac, twice did nothing with Larry David, and visited with Phil Spector in his castle in Alhambra three times, all without gunplay...[and] even went to Bill Murray's house once for an Oscar party." He’s also responsible for hands-down the most insightful and exhaustive reporting on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. We spoke at his home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Author Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero. READ MORE
A Conversation With Musician Ben Lear
Last night at Le Poisson Rouge, Ben Lear was wearing a wetsuit that made him look like a Starfleet Medical Officer and shaking hands. The 23-year-old son of 89-year-old television mogul and activist Norman Lear (you might know him for producing "All in the Family" or founding progressive advocacy group People For The American Way) had just finished performing Lillian, a show that's like an epic blend of Arcade Fire, Feist, a Muppet adventure and rock opera (although Lear prefers the term "folk opera," for its lower pretentiousness quotient). The story, which is by turns touching and bizarre, follows a young man’s search for his lost love, which takes him to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a soup of plastic that's about twice the size of Hawaii. While there, he meets a group of jellyfish (played by a gospel choir wearing shiny robes, plastic bottles, and Christmas lights) that attempts to baptize him in a pocket of air. Sample lyric from this section: “You little jellyfish, come to me/ You hold the key to a secret place/ With all the things/ That’ve gone to waste.” After an argument with a sea captain, the young man comes to accept that the past is “not lost, just plain dead.” READ MORE
How They Got There: A Conversation With Artist Duke Riley
Duke Riley postponed our first interview because he was freight-train hopping across the country. The Rhode Island School of Design- and Pratt-trained artist needed to be in San Francisco for meetings so he and a friend worked their way west. They made it, eventually. READ MORE
