Person Place Thing
Fridays, 10:30 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Hosted by former New York Times Ethicist Columnist Randy Cohen, PPT features guests who talk about a person, a place and a thing they find meaningful. Randy pulls out the most interesting details from columnists to musicians, architects and ballerinas including Rosanne Cash, E. Jean Carroll and Gene Kohn. The results: surprising stories from great talkers.
To learn more about this program, visit presonplacething.org.
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This human-rights lawyer, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, was reluctant to embrace her Irish heritage. “I was never particularly interested in that identity because I had so many run-ins with the church.” She’s come around. -
Human rights lawyer and professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, Terry McGovern, tells us how she was reluctant to embrace her Irish heritage, Katrina Haslip and about a place in Howth, Ireland.
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In 1958, with Hamilton Holmes, she de-segregated the University of Georgia and went on to a distinguished career in journalism. Her early inspiration? Brenda Starr. “I read about her in the comic strips in my grandmother’s newspaper; she read three newspapers a day.” A star, a Starr, a low pun in the vicinity.
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Sreoshy Banerjea is executive director of New York City’s Pubic Design Commission, which oversees art on city property, including consideration of its removal. Banerjea joins us to share highlights of her career and of course her person, place and thing of choice.
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His Broadway debut, in "M. Butterfly," won every award going except the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. Fair enough: there is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. He renewed everyone’s admiration with "Law & Order: SVU," and that’s not the half of it, or even the quarter, but why be precise? It’s not like there’s a Nobel at stake. Produced with Materials for the Arts.
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Host Randy Cohen stumbled onto the short videos this Scottish comedian posts online and was immediately won over by her conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: she plays both of them. What comic does C.S. Lewis? Smart, dark, funny: the triple crown.
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This terrific comic actor started early: “At five-years-old, I used to sing ‘You Make Me Feel So Young,’ and it got a laugh, and I didn’t know why.” She’s learned, on TV, "Only Murders in the Building;" on Broadway, "Hairspray;" and off, "the Yiddish Fidler."
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On March 2, 2023, the acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly died suddenly, at 78, just two weeks before our scheduled conversation at the Center for Architecture. Rather than cancel, his son Román used the occasion to reflect on his father.
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When she enrolled at the Academy, she had a limited idea of the Coast Guard’s mission: “They save people and clean off oily ducks.” She’s since expanded her understanding, has served from Juneau to Miami, and is now Rear Admiral Bert. You live, you learn.
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For years, the obits she wrote for The New York Times were the first thing I’d read in the paper, elegant little biographies, exemplary work in a form that she says was once, “the scarlet O you wore on your dress that said, I’m a bad writer but the paper doesn’t quite have enough on me to be able to fire me.”
