In this week’s newsletter, we geek out on media with Debbie Millman as her Design Matters podcast turns 20, stop by Rashid Johnson's Guggenheim retrospective, contemplate four of Renzo Piano’s favorite books, and more.
Good morning!
This week, I’m excited to say, we released our latest “site-specific” episode of Time Sensitive. About a year and a half ago, I thought it would be helpful to get out of the studio once in a while and go directly to the source. Since then, we’ve recorded several Time Sensitive interviews at sites of architectural interest with meaningful connections to each guest. The first was with the theater director Robert Wilson, in his archive room at the Watermill Center on Long Island; the second was with the architect and furniture maker Mira Nakashima, inside the Sanso Villa at the George Nakashima Woodworkers compound in New Hope, Pennsylvania; the third, recorded last summer, was with the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, at the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.
For our fourth and latest, I headed to the Cotswolds, where I sat down with the British architect and designer John Pawson at his country home there. (A quick note here that you can find photographs from our visit on timesensitive.fm, as well as on our Instagram.)
Across his four-plus decades of design work, John has gained worldwide recognition and a cult following for making exceptionally simple—or what many would call “minimalist”—spaces. Through his meticulous, forensic-level approach to his work, John refines things down to their most essential and ethereal. At his home in Oxfordshire, via his light, sensitive, Modernist touch, he integrated a rhythmic composition of buildings—a farmhouse, a barn, and stables, mainly—out of a hodgepodge of 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century structures. Being there, a certain intensity of feeling overcame me. There’s a clarifying atmospheric power that reveals how much care and attention went into each and every detail and decision. Truly, it’s a sensation that’s hard to describe, even here.
I would classify much of John’s work as monastic, and perhaps not so surprisingly, monks have long been some of his primary clients. Since 1999, John has been building a city-like campus in the Czech Republic for monks of the Cistercian Trappist Order. He has designed other ecclesiastical spaces over the years, too, including a monastery in Burgundy, a basilica in Hungary, and a church in Germany. But this is just part of John’s journey: His practice largely took off with a commission in the early ’90s from Calvin Klein to design his brand’s New York City flagship store on Madison Avenue. It was a project that would alter the course of John’s life and career. On the episode, we get into this and much more—including his career-defining book Minimum, from 1996, which served as a manifesto for jump-starting what has come since.
As you’ll hear, the interview is John at his best, and by that I mean dry, British, witty, and beautifully spare and refined in his words and thinking. John may be the guest I’ve heard listeners request the most over the years, so I’m glad we finally made this long-overdue conversation happen—and in the monastic glow of his meticulously designed home, no less.
—Spencer
“Quiet time allows your mind to wander and think about what might be possible in the future.”
Listen to Ep. 130 with John Pawson at timesensitive.fm or wherever you get your podcasts
East Fork Pottery
East Fork, the North Carolina–based pottery studio whose chunky clay vessels have garnered a cult following among chefs, collectors, and discerning home cooks, has unveiled its latest collection: a line of plates and mugs that trace the lineage of the company’s founder, Alex Matisse, to his great-grandfather, the Fauvist French painter Henri Matisse. Through a collaboration with Les Héritiers Matisse—the family estate and foundation that licenses the artist’s work—East Fork just revealed the Matisse Collection, the summation of a two-year process to bring Matisse’s paintings to the tabletop. The collection includes a set of cake plates that feature elements from “La Perruche et la sirène” (1952); a generously oversize serving platter depicting the artist’s “Le Platane” (1951) drawing; and scenes from “Femmes et singes” (1952) that curve around the brand’s sturdy mugs. Each of the four figure studies of “Nu bleu, I-IV” (1952) appear on dinner plates, and Matisse’s aquatint portraits of “Nadia au regard sérieux” (1948) and “Bédouine au grand voile” (1947)—to name only two—are etched in black decorative detailing on a set of side dishes. The collection also serves as an opportunity for East Fork to release La Sirène, a striking new blue colorway—a nod to Matisse’s past and the brand’s present.
“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” at the Guggenheim Museum
For his newly opened, literally in-the-round solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” on view through Jan. 18, 2026, the artist Rashid Johnson (the guest on Ep. 25 of Time Sensitive) presents a sweeping study of his three-plus decades of art-making. Diving headfirst into Johnson’s nuanced, thought-provoking explorations of identity, anxiety, and cultural history, the show features more than 90 works and traces his evolution through a loose chronology that includes the large-scale steel outdoor sculpture “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (2008), alongside never-before-seen pieces that integrate live performance and activation elements. His well-known “The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club” (2008–2011) photographs, “Cosmic Slop” (2008) soap-and-wax wall works, “Black Yoga” (2010) and “The New Black Yoga” (2011) video pieces, and “Anxious Men” (2015–2023) and “Broken Men” (2018–2021) paintings are also among the works on view. Collectively, the presentation provides a wide-lens view into Johnson’s ongoing explorations of race, masculinity, parenthood, and vulnerability. Borrowing its name from the American poet and political activist Amiri Baraka’s 1977 work of the same name, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” invites viewers to consider the fluid connections that exist between self-contemplation and communal conversation.
“Olga de Amaral” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Highlighting the path-breaking fiber-based practice of the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, the just-opened “Olga de Amaral” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (on view through Oct. 12, 2025)—its second stop, after debuting last year at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, with scenography by the architect Lina Ghotmeh (the guest on Ep. 129 of Time Sensitive)—features more than 50 of her works across six decades. Among the intricate pieces on view at the ICA, alongside several never-before-seen works, are gold-leaf “Estelas” (1996–2018), geometric “Brumas” (2013–2018), and the textiles “El Gran Muro” (1976) and “Coraza en Morados” (1977)—each showcasing Amaral’s rare ability to interlace Indigenous weaving traditions, cultural symbolism, and Bauhaus-inflected modernism. Pushing the medium’s limits, combining braiding, knotting, and weaving to abstract effect, Amaral’s woven works transform the ICA’s galleries into a dense, garden-like setting where they can be viewed as meditative reflections of light and landscape.
Since launching as a “live internet radio program” in early 2005—months before podcast was named “Word of the Year” by the New Oxford American Dictionary—Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast has, over the past two decades, established itself as a centralizing platform for wide-ranging design conversations that span creativity and culture. Just weeks ago, Millman, herself an artist and designer (and the guest on Ep. 51 of Time Sensitive), marked the 20th anniversary of the series with the release of her eighth book, Love Letter to a Garden (Timber Press), a personal project that includes original recipes contributed by her wife, the author Roxane Gay (who has also been a Time Sensitive guest, on Ep. 75). Gardening feels like an apt metaphor for Millman’s thoughtfully cultivated career. From her role as co-owner and editorial director of Print magazine since 2019 to her and Gay’s recent co-acquisition of the online literary magazine The Rumpus, Millman tends to creative ecosystems with a deft hand and a clear vision. Here, she speaks with us about the media that fuels her days.
How do you start your mornings?
By very tentatively opening my eyes. I’m a slow person. I’m slow to wake up, and it is something that I always have a hard time doing. I should actually back up a little bit, because usually my mornings start around 6 a.m., when I hear my cats meowing—they want to be fed. I run downstairs, feed them, and then I run back upstairs and get back into bed so I can continue sleeping without having to worry about the cats disturbing Roxane.
Where do you get your news?
CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Borowitz Report. Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. I read all day long, when I’m taking breaks from things, when I’m germinating on something. I don’t only read news sites; I also look at the site that I run, Print magazine. I look at kottke.org every single day. I look at Autostraddle, Swissmiss [whose creator, Tina Roth Eisenberg, was the guest on Ep. 82 of Time Sensitive], and The Marginalian.
Any favorite newsletters?
I should go look at my Substack. Well, first of all, my wife’s, The Audacity. I read Zoe Mendelson’s Substack, How to Have Fun in the Apocalypse. I just recently signed up for Ann Telnaes’s Open Windows. She is the cartoonist who quit The Washington Post because they censored one of her cartoons. I read Amy Cowen’s Illustrated Life; Austin Channing Brown’s Wild Holy & Free; Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar; Jesse Paris Smith’s Substack—she’s the daughter of Patti Smith. I also read Patti Smith’s Substack. I read Liz Gumbinner—she’s got a really wonderful newsletter called I’m Walking Here. I read Elissa Altman’s Poor Man’s Feast—she was probably my very first Substack subscription, aside from Roxane’s. I also read old Stir magazine and Tiny Violences. Aubrey Hirsch makes wonderful comics, and I read a lot of her work.
Any favorite podcasts?
I’m still a die-hard This American Life fan. I still listen to Radiolab, though I really miss Jad Abumrad. I listen to We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, and Abby Wambach, and Song Exploder, because I love Hrishikesh Hirway. He has another podcast with Samin Nosrat, Home Cooking. The Sporkful. The Rachel Maddow Show. Ronan Farrow’s podcasts [The Catch and Kill Podcast and Not a Very Good Murderer], as well. Those keep me pretty busy. The Ezra Klein Show.
Do you have any favorite magazines?
I love everything about The New Yorker: the cover art, the caption contest, the cartoons, the fiction, Talk of the Town. It’s just such a great magazine. I read Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, which is somewhat surprising—I’m not a big fashionista, but I really love reading about fashion, looking at fashion, and being somebody that knows about different designers. I read a couple of industry magazines, more online than anything else: Ad Age, Adweek, and Fast Company. Every now and then, I’ll pick up an old issue of Martha Stewart Living because I still like Martha very much. I love Vanity Fair, but I read that online. Every now and then I’ll pick up an issue of Kinfolk.
Something that I subscribe to, which is extraordinary, is a service called Stack magazines, which was started by Steven Watson in the U.K. Steven curates new magazines and sends you a different magazine every month to become acquainted with new indie publishers. It is a gift to have to be able to see all of these new magazines coming out every month from all over the world.
What books are you reading?
I just started reading Carol Leifer’s How to Write a Funny Speech. She’s a comedian that Elaine on Seinfeld was based on. I’m in the process of reading Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I just finished Kevin Bethune’s book Nonlinear: Navigating Design With Curiosity and Conviction.
Next on my list is Amy Griffin’s The Tell. She’s a very successful entrepreneur who just came out with a memoir remembering some of her childhood trauma. I’m very anxious to read that. Roxane just came out with The Portable Feminist Reader, so I want to read that, too.
Any guilty pleasures?
I love that question. You asked me about my morning routine, and I would say that I have more of an evening routine, because I’m a night owl. Before I go to sleep, even before Roxane comes into bed, I have a ritual. It’s usually after midnight. I do my Duolingo exercises. I’m learning French. I started in December 2023, so I’m up to, like, day four hundred fifty. It’s very important for me to keep my streak. Then I do Wordle, and then I play Scrabble until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore.
This interview was conducted by Kylie McConville. It has been condensed and edited.
Our handpicked guide to culture across the internet.
The Pritzker Prize–winning Italian architect Renzo Piano reflects on four literary works that have shaped how he approaches light and lightness in his architecture [The New Yorker]
The travel writer Pico Iyer (the guest on Ep. 127 of Time Sensitive and the foreword author of the forthcoming Slowdown-edited book Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World) tees up a “50 Quiet Places From Around the World” feature by sharing how the absence of noise can make us wonderfully attuned to the presence of subtle sounds [Condé Nast Traveler]
The writer Lucy Sante (the guest on Ep. 108 of Time Sensitive) provocatively asks: What if we stopped categorizing writing—and writers—by genre and instead viewed all literature as a vessel for storytelling? [Lucy’s Substack]
In Madison Square Park, Gardens of Renewal, a collaboration between the artist Lily Kwong and the Madison Square Park Conservancy, explores the ecological potential for play and learning within the climate crisis [The Architect’s Newspaper]
The writer Bekah Waalkes believes that, rather than simply relegating reading to an indoor activity, it should be seen as an experience to be engaged outdoors—a ritual that heightens, rather than hides, the world around us [The Atlantic]