Skip to content

Category Archives: The Marketplace of Ideas

From my interview archive: Lawrence Osborne on Bangkok

I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. In recent years, Lawrence Osborne has become famous as a novelist, expertly constructing his stories in settings as far-flung as Morocco, Cambodia, Greece, and Mexico. He wasn’t when first […]

From my interview archive: four Los Angeles public radio stars

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. “So when is KCRW or KPCC going to give you your own show?” a Los Angeles-based New Yorker writer once asked me just after we’d finished […]

From my interview archive: public radio interviewer and podcast impresario Jesse Thorn

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. There are the people who’ve had an outsized influence on your life, and within that group there are the people who, when you think about […]

From my interview archive: critics Clive James and James Wood

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. Clive James called his first book The Metropolitan Critic, which always struck me as a decent job title, if a vague one. But only a vague title […]

From my interview archive: “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. People get deep into things in college: music, movies, drugs, their previously unacknowledged sexual orientation, take your pick. I got deep into economics. And though […]

From my interview archive: Arts & Letters Daily founder Denis Dutton

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. My favorite college class won that designation not just by delivering me my sole A, but by introducing me to Arts & Letters Daily. It lasted the […]

From my interview archive: Japanologist and Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburō Ōe translator John Nathan

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. A few years before I ever set foot in Asia, I read John Nathan’s memoir Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, the story of his growing […]

From my interview archive: comic artist Peter Bagge, creator of Hate

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. On trips to the library growing up, I’d make right for the comics section — around Dewey Decimal 741, if memory serves. The selection didn’t […]

From my interview archive: disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer (2008 and 2009)

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. About a decade ago I came across an ad for a book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Intrigued, I looked it up and found that it […]

From my interview archive: economist and Marginal Revolutionary Tyler Cowen (2008 and 2009)

This year, I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015. I don’t remember exactly how I first found Marginal Revolution, but I’ve read it longer than nearly any blog in existence. Part of that owes to […]