Interviews By Topic

water

David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. It was popular enough to eventually be published in a thin little book called “This Is Water.”More

David Foster Wallace

Over the years, we did several interviews with Wallace himself. The last was in 2004, about his collection of short stories — "Oblivion." It’s an interview that’s been collected in two Wallace anthologies.More

Cruises suck

David Foster Wallace's essays have their own unique cult following. There’s one, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which is a hilarious diatribe about cruise ships, which convinced many of us we should never, ever go on a cruise.More

Tennis in the Sierpinski triangle

The most famous thing David Foster Wallace wrote is "Infinite Jest," his huge, sprawling novel set in a dystopian near future. It’s a little eerie how well he predicted our world today.More

water

An excerpt from the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005.More

Roadtrip

Amy Wallace-Havens didn’t care whether David was famous, or even whether he was a writer. He was just her big brother. Anne spoke with her about a year after his death.
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During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace was one of the leading figures of post-modern literature. Speaking to TTBOOK in 1996, he said that he saw himself as a realist.More

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David Foster Wallace wrote memorably about Alcoholics Anonymous in his famous novel "Infinite Jest." Writer Marshall Boswell reads one of his favorite passages.More

a poet reads from a telephone pole

Rodrigo Toscano is a serious poet. He’s also a longtime OSHA outreach trainer of workers and the national projects director of The Labor Institute, a non-profit focusing on the contracts and workplace safety of telecommunications workers.More

A family

While caring for other human beings may be the most important work of all, it sure isn’t reflected in the pay scale. That train of thought led Angela Garbes to her book, “Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change.”More

two brothers with different creative minds

Daniel Bergner felt frustrated and helpless back when one of his closest family members — his brother — was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. So Bergner decided to report out other possibilities for his brother’s healing.More

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud has a profound understanding of Earth's deep history. The author of "Timefulness," she says geologic literacy would give us a much healthier sense of time. More

a woman waiting for a job interview

Andrea Dobynes Wagner is legally, but not obviously, blind. Every time she sits down for a job interview, Andrea weighs the pros and cons of disclosure. Will telling people she has a disability help or hurt her chances?More

Gul Dolen

Gül Dölen is a pioneering neuroscientist who's investigating the “critical periods” of psychedelics, including studies where she's given MDMA — also known as “Molly” — to octopuses.More

Two figures in the rain

Maia Szalavitz is an expert in addiction. She is also someone who has experienced it personally as a young woman. It was during that time that she came upon a concept that is only now changing how we think about recovery on a mass scale —harm reduction.
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Barbara Ehrenreich

For her book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America,” writer Barbara Ehrenreich worked at a series of minimally paid jobs. Speaking to Anne in 2003, she said was surprised to be both physically exhausted and mentally challenged by “menial” work.More

A soldier

In 2006, Alex Miller was a US Navy IT specialist, tracking pirates off the coast of Somalia. Two years later, he didn't have a home.More

a worker walks a maze

Sitting together to reflect on Barbara's years of work to shine a light on the experiences of middle and lower class Americans, her friend and colleague Alissa Quart recorded this interview with her in 2021. Ehrenreich died in September of 2022.More

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