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Robert Birnbaum interviews author Sebastian Junger about his new book, Death in Belmont. The interview is a little confusing if you haven’t read the book (or at least a synopsis) but there’s some good stuff in there. “I went to Bosnia with a bunch of notebooks and pens and flew to Zagreb and started. There will always be those young people. And I encourage them. My answer is save up a few thousand bucks and just go.”
Nice interview with Michael Frumin on the occasion of him leaving Eyebeam. “There’s so much data out there, and so little time!”
Great interview with David Remnick, conducted just after he’d taken over at the New Yorker. I love this guy. (via emdashes)
Rebecca Blood posted the interview she did with me for her Bloggers on Blogging series. It’s a nice change of pace to be interviewed about blogging by someone who knows as much or more than I do about it.
Anil Dash interviews Paul Lindner, one of the creators of Gopher and current Six Apart employee. Here’s my recent post on Gopher.
Part two of a conversation between Jesse James Garrett and Steven Johnson. Here’s part one. (thx, kevin)
Jesse James Garrett talks with Steven Johnson about Interface Culture. I know part 2 is coming, but I just want this interview to go on forever. p.s. Dean!
I could read interviews of Errol Morris all day long. “It became obvious that I was never going to be able to knock on the door of someone who’s committed some massive insurance fraud and stick a camera in their face and get them to talk. It’s never going to happen. The best you can expect is getting the shit kicked out of you.”
Robert Birnbaum interviews writer Gay Talese. “Look, if you want to make your living chopping people up, you will find an audience. You will, but it’s not me.”
Second part of a two-part interview with designer Michael Bierut. “I’ve found that any reluctance I’ve had to doing more of this ‘political design’ has to do with my own fear that things like T-shirts and posters are usually feeble tools to address the enormous problems we face as a society today.” Read part one.
Interview with writer Sam Harris on “why religion must end”. “People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.”
Interview with Thom Yorke about politics, his solo album, and Radiohead’s impending (yet distant) new album. (via dooce)
Robert Birnbaum interview with Susan Orlean. Here’s his first interview with her from 2001.
Update: I linked to this without reading it first, something I *never* do, but now that I’ve read it, there’s really some great stuff in there about the writing process, magazines (specifically The New Yorker), and editing. And great quotes like “I’d rather work for Drunken Boat than for Time magazine, to be honest with you”. Ouch for Time magazine.
Interview with photographer Chip Simons about inspiration and originality. “You can get work for fancy magazines with just a big ego.”
Interview with Jim Buckmaster, who gives us an update on what Craiglist is up to. “If I look across the Internet at the big Internet companies, there’s a large proportion of their staff that are devoted in various ways to trying to maximize revenue. Those employees I don’t think are delivering much bang for the buck to the end user.”
Interview with designer Michael Bierut. “The best thing design can do for a company is to express that company’s personality accurately and compellingly, and in so doing permit that organizations inherent strengths to prevail.”
Nice interview with 37signals’ Jason Fried by Khoi Vinh.
Quick interview with me over at leahpeah. “I was never one of those kids who had a ready answer for what they wanted to be when they grew up.”
Fine interview with Pixar/Disney’s John Lasseter, who is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. “I believe in the nobility of entertaining people, and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours out of their busy lives.”
Grist Magazine interview with Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth.
Interview with photographer Jay Parkinson about his aspiring model project. “I feel that it’s a photographic cop-out to take photos of strictly beautiful people because it’s hard to take a bad photo of a beautiful person, especially a very scripted portrait.”
Short interview with Chris Ware upon the occasion of a show of his work at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. “I’ve found that anything I do [to] carefully plan and pare down in advance feels utterly false and constructed once I actually do it, having nothing of the sort of accident and unevenness of real life that I hope to, at least, modestly edge towards.”
Conversation between filmmakers Errol Morris and Adam Curtis. “People criticized my film by saying things like, ‘Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?’ And my response was, ‘What if the other view is wrong?’ That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what’s called “perceived wisdom.” What if perceived wisdom’s wrong?”
John Hodgman comments on the first few “shuffled” tracks of his mp3 collection.
Review of Why? by Charles Tilly, in which he examines the four kinds of reasons people offer as explanations for things and under which situations they are used. See also an October 2005 interview with Tilly.
Trailer for The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) new film. Official site, interview with Aronofsky on the film, which was originally supposed to star Brad Pitt.
Interesting interview with Jonah Peretti about contagious media, business, and web media. (thx, carrie)
Interview with Amy Franceschini, founder of Futurefarmers. Franceschini also had a hand in Atlas Magazine (blast from the past!), which was one of my favorite sites back in the day.
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