Time Sensitive

Through her multifaceted work, the Bulgarian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, reader, and researcher Maria Popova, founder of the “free, ad-free, A.I.-free, fully human” website and newsletter The Marginalian, braids together literature, science, philosophy, poetry, and art in beautiful, alchemical ways. Traversing centuries, she approaches various ideas and thinkers, living and dead, as active references in the expansive, ongoing project of learning what it means to be human. Now, nearly 20 years since the site’s founding, she continues to cultivate a singular space on the internet—one devoted not so much to information but to illumination. Her latest book, Traversal, which links figures such as Mary Shelley and Walt Whitman, alongside other writers, poets, physicists, and philosophers, serves as an intellectual journey and an across-time meditation on creativity, consciousness, and interconnectedness.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Popova discusses the idea of “spiritual ancestors,” why today’s A.I. debates are fundamentally modern versions of age-old questions about the soul, and the mystery of being alive.

Show notes: 

Maria Popova

[4:58] Traversal (2026)

[5:43] René Descartes

[6:50] Aristotle

[6:50] Susan Sontag

[7:03] Alan Lightman

[8:16] Mary Shelley

[8:16] Walt Whitman

[9:42] Frankenstein (1818)

[14:08] Frances “Fanny” Wright

[17:13] Freeman Dyson

[17:13] Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (2018)

[16:04] Rube Goldberg

[22:26] Nina Simone

[23:28] Dan Frank

[23:29] Figuring (2019)

[34:24] The Marginalian

[43:18] T.S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)

[55:00] Dacher Keltner’s Awe (2023)

[45:17] Iris Murdoch

[45:33] The Universe in Verse (2024)

[45:55] Patti Smith

[45:57] Rebecca Elson

[45:58] Vera Rubin

[47:23] “Urns for Living”

[48:54] Sylvia Plath

[59:35] Leaves of Grass (1855)

For our latest “site-specific” episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer meets Sheila Hicks inside her courtyard in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, where she has called home for more than 60 years. The 91-year-old Nebraska-born artist—widely known for her vibrant, sculptural textile and fiber works—resists any firm classification of what she does, as her multifarious output reflects. Currently, Hicks’s work is on view in a solo exhibition at SFMOMA through Aug. 9, and a two-person exhibition, “Material Matters: Sheila Hicks & Shi Hui,” at Shanghai’s West Bund Museum through Aug. 2. Last year, Knoll Textiles reissued her classic Altiplano collection from 1966 in an updated palette, and a major Milan retrospective, her first in Italy, will open on Nov. 16 at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea.

On the episode, Hicks discusses her lifelong relationship with textiles, weaving, and perception through materials and environments; her formative travels in South America, Morocco, India, and Japan; and how chance encounters can shape one’s life.

Show notes: 

Sheila Hicks

[0:44] Cour de Rohan

[3:05] Altiplano (1966) for Knoll Textiles

[10:02] Edward Steichen

[16:36] Josef Albers

[15:03] Yohji Yamamoto

[18:57] George Kubler

[19:10] Trevor Paglen

[28:00] Ford Foundation

[28:00] Darren Walker

[33:20] Raoul d’Harcourt

[37:50] Rue de Seine

[38:43] May Day

[41:56] Jantar Mantar

[55:48] Florence Knoll

[58:44] Cristobal Zañartu

[58:44] Opening the Archives

[58:44] Hanging by a Thread

[1:02:57] “Calder: Rêver en équilibre”

[1:04:14] Monique Lévi-Strauss

[1:05:15] Thaddeus Mosley

Pierre Horay

The singer-songwriter Valerie June has a gift for writing contemporary songs that feel timeless and as though they could also have existed at various points across the past century. Her expansive layering of Appalachian folk, Delta blues, gospel, soul, early country, and even spiritual jazz, at once down to earth and dreamy, has drawn appreciation from the likes of Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, and Mavis Staples, and for good reason. In true folk tradition, the Grammy-nominated June views her work in one long, multigenerational continuum of American songwriting and storytelling, both ancient and urgent. Not one to chase hits or rush her process, she revels, instead, in a slow, patient devotion to her craft, as her latest album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles, puts on full display.

On this episode of Time Sensitive, June discusses songs as vessels capable of preserving and transporting us to once-in-a-lifetime moments, music-making as a mystical act, and the value of prioritizing gradual progress over instant results. 

Special thanks to our Season 13 presenting partner, L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Valerie June

[04:36] Maps for the Modern World (2021)

[06:17] Pema Chödrön

[06:17] How We Live Is How We Die (2022)

[06:17] The Tibetan Book of the Dead

[07:11] Irma Thomas

[08:31] Hazrat Khan

[12:28] Elizabeth Cotten

[12:28] Mississippi John Hurt

[17:38] The Order of Time (2017) album by Valerie June

[17:38] The Order of Time (2017) book by Carlo Rovelli

[25:21] Hitoshi Fugo’s “Flying Frying Pan” series

[33:06] Joni Mitchell

[38:23] Carla Thomas

[26:20] Pushin’ Against A Stone (2013)

[43:57] Mavis Staples

[1:05:28] Sapiens (2015) by Yuval Noah Harari

[1:05:58] The Serviceberry (2024) by Robin Wall Kimmerer

[1:09:11] Owls, Omens, and Oracles (2025)

The novelist, essayist, and short-story writer George Saunders—widely celebrated for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which won the Man Booker Prize, and book of short stories Tenth of December (2013)—has made it his mission to “de-dullify” the world through his clear-eyed, empathic, often-puckish prose. There’s an unwavering spirit of generosity embedded in the way Saunders tells stories and teaches his craft that ensures his readers and students alike stay along for the ride. Saunders’s curiosity about the afterlife, a recurring motif in his writing, rises to the fore in his latest novel, Vigil, which follows a pair of ghostly figures as they visit the deathbed of a prideful, climate-change-denying Texas oil tycoon.

On this episode, he shares how practicing meditation has shifted his approach to writing and his outlook on life, the underlying importance of humor in his work, and why to be a good storyteller is akin to being a good host. 

Special thanks to our Season 13 presenting partner, Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes:

George Saunders

[04:34] Vigil (2026)

[04:34] Lincoln in the Bardo (2018)

[19:18] Master and Man and Other Stories (1895)

[19:18] Tolstoy

[27:41] CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996)

[30:22] Esther Forbes

[30:22] Johnny Tremain (1943)

[35:03] John Steinbeck

[35:03] The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

[36:58] Kurt Vonnegut

[36:58] Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

[42:13] Terry Eagleton

[42:30] Mary Karr

[42:43] Jack Handey

[47:19] Jimi Hendrix

[53:13] Aldous Huxley

[56:11] Tobias Wolff

[59:22] A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021)

There’s an animate quality to the biomorphic sculptures of the self-taught, Utah-born artist Alma Allen. His works, carved from wood, marble, and bronze—and informed by his deep appreciation for the natural world—appear as if they’re living, breathing things, at once prehistoric and futuristic. Far from fixed objects, they eschew any overt symbolism or predetermined narratives.

For this “site-specific” episode of Time Sensitive, our milestone 150th, we traveled to Mexico City to sit down with Allen inside his family’s home there to discuss his highest-visibility exhibition yet: “Call Me the Breeze,” a solo presentation at the U.S. Pavilion for the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, opening May 9 and on view through Nov. 22. In addition to his plans for Venice and how he’s been navigating the noise and public debate around his selection for this year’s U.S. Pavilion, he also delves into the hard-to-pin-down nature of his material-forward sculptures and his peripatetic path to art-world ascendancy. 

Special thanks to our Season 13 presenting partner, Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes: 

Alma Allen

[20:04] Issey Miyake

[20:04] Todd Oldham

[20:04] Julio Espada

[26:06] "Call Me the Breeze" (2026)

[29:00] Mauricio Rocha

[29:00] Isamu Noguchi

[32:02] The Sound and the Fury

[32:02] Thomas Pynchon

[32:02] Samuel Beckett

[41:03] Clyfford Still

[39:10] Pierre Soulages

[50:13] Glenn Adamson

[53:00] J.J. Cale

[55:41] JB Blunk

[57:42] Constantin Brâncuși

[57:42] Lynda Benglis

[57:42] Louise Bourgeois

[57:42] Thaddeus Mosley

[59:24] Museo Anahuacalli

[1:04:38] Alma Allen on Park Avenue (2025)