Immemorial by Lauren Markham
A beautifully wrought meditation on what it means to memorialize something—and what the point of a memorial even is in the first place—this slim volume, just 135 pages in length, packs a mighty punch. Exploring time, language, memory, and our rapidly changing planet with deep meaning and feeling, the California-based writer, essayist, and journalist Lauren Markham wonders: In our era of climate grief and eco-anxiety—a time in which, as the philosopher Glenn Albrecht has put it, the planet is changing faster than our language is—how do we memorialize the parts of the world that are disappearing before our very eyes? Contemplating grief as a portal, Markham considers memorial-making as an optimistic, forward-looking venture. “Memorials are forms of spatial storytelling about the past,” she writes, “but they can also be mandates to face the future and attempt its ethical redesign.” This remarkable, poetic, book-length essay makes abundantly clear that, as time flies by and increasingly speeds up, memorials can serve as much as tools for envisioning the future as much as reflecting on the past.

“Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved” 
In Renée Green’s “The Equator Has Moved,” visitors’ eyes are immediately drawn upward to see the colorful banners from the artist’s new series of “Space Poems” on view in Dia Beacon’s central gallery space. Typical of Green’s multidisciplinary practice, this spatial approach to her work can be seen throughout two of the museum’s central galleries and adjoining corridor gallery through August 31, 2026, and includes newly commissioned work alongside rarely seen installations and paintings from the 1980s and ’90s, employing archival, documentary, and literary references as well as personal ephemera, plus sound and video work. Her first solo museum show in New York, Green’s new installations are—rightfully, given that they’re at Dia Beacon—imbued with a sense of weight and gravitas. Because of the longevity that most exhibitions enjoy in its spare galleries and the pilgrimage many make to see them, any addition to the nearly 300,000-square-foot space, designed by Robert Irwin and Rice+Lipka Architects, holds a profound sense of presence. Bright and radiant, forming a sort of color field across the space, her work pops amid the museum’s trademark muted minimalism. 

Thrilled To Death: New and Selected Stories by Lynne Tillman
In Thrilled To Death: New and Selected Stories, the novelist and critic Lynne Tillman pulls from her decades-long career to bring together her writings on topics including life, anxiety, art, culture, sex, and death. With an afterword by the writer Lucy Sante (the guest on Ep. 108 of Time Sensitive), Thrilled to Death is presented as a retrospective of sorts, told through Tillman’s signature wit and ambivalence, and emphasizes her unmistakable yet understated evolution from the 1980s to today—though not necessarily in chronological order. As Tillman is quoted saying in the introduction, this is by design: “I wanted it to be more associative, thematic perhaps, and to deny the idea of ‘progress.’” The book includes two epigraphs, which each serve as hints for readers as to what to expect in the pages to come: “Everything starts in doubt,” from the Canadian poet and professor Anne Carson, and “You rest at the end,” from the late N.B.A. all-star Kobe Bryant. As the selected 41 short stories surveying Tillman’s own ideas about mortality make clear, Thrilled to Death isn’t just a clever title.

Glenn Pushelberg and George Yabu, of the namesake Toronto- and New York–based design firm Yabu Pushelberg, vibrate with personality. At 10 o’clock one recent morning—on a Monday, of all days—they were positively buzzing. This exuberance can be felt across all of the work of their multidisciplinary firm, founded in 1980, and its four-plus decades of projects, ranging from a debut Club Monaco store (1985) in Toronto; to the Hazelton Hotel Toronto (2008); to the smooth-lined Taylor sofa (2019) for Stellar Works; to the Parisian department store La Samaritaine, completed in 2021. Here, speaking with The Slowdown amid the opening of their most recent hotel-design project, the Raffles Sentosa Singapore, and Milan’s Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair, where they’ll introduce a smorgasbord of designs—seating for DePadova, Leolux, Linteloo, and MDF Italia; hardwares for Zucchetti; a portable lamp for Lasvit; a coffee table and floating console for Glas Italia; a bed for Molteni&C; sculpted stone trays for Henge; and the firm’s first-ever 19-piece tableware collection, for Noritake—the charming duo tell us all about the media that informs and inspires them.

How do you start your mornings? 
GLENN PUSHELBERG: If we’re in Toronto, I like to make breakfast. If we’re in New York, it’s slightly different. I’ll get out of bed and make coffee, and then walk the block and a half to The Elk and get egg sandwiches for us. 

GEORGE YABU: I try to be low-key and start my day working in bed, which is not a good idea. I do that to compress all my time. I don’t look at the next day’s agenda until I’m in bed, too. My days can be overwhelming, so I don’t “people plan” to get ready for the next day. If I anticipate it any sooner, then it’ll cloud what I’m doing in the moment, so I compress my strategy for the next day. I do whatever I can without anybody in front of me, answering messages, requests, and texts in bed. I edit my day before I go into the studio. It’s not what I love, but it is what I do.

Where do you get your news from?
GP: I read The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the CBC in Canada, and The New Yorker. Perusing all of that, you get a much more balanced view. You can form your own opinion. It’s important not to get information today from only one or two sources, because there’s so much bias in that.

GY: You see the current owner of The Washington Post compromising the ethos of what Katharine Graham built all these decades ago. Even with The New York Times, you see sensationalism. I tend to follow people like Adam Kinzinger because they’re saying, “Hey, this is not right. There is something else going on. We may be right, but there should be more dialogue, at least.” Glenn is interesting because he says he doesn’t use a computer, but in fact, that little device in his hand is a tiny computer. He’s quite savvy at digging up stuff on social media.

Any favorite newsletters?
GY: I like Adam Kinzinger. 

Any favorite podcasts?
GP: Time Sensitive!

GY: Design Your Life with Vince Frost. Fashion Neurosis, by Bella Freud—there’s an episode with Julianne Moore where she’s lying horizontally on a couch, and it looks like she’s talking to her psychiatrist or therapist. I find that interesting. It’s the stream of consciousness of it that appeals to me. And Modern Love by The New York Times.

Any favorite magazines?
GP: We’re really into niche magazines, like Sixtysix magazine and Subsequence, out of Japan. To be relevant, we’ve got to mine younger cultural magazines like that. Of course, there are also the classic trade magazines, but they’re a little bit self-serving.

GY: Document Journal. They interviewed Jodie Foster, but she also interviewed the interviewer. That was an interesting juxtaposition. And Ignant magazine, which is more rarefied. I like the rigor compared to the free-for-all that you see in other magazines.

What book or books are you currently reading?
GY: In Praise of Shadows, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

GP: I’m reading a comic book, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, by Maurice Vellekoop. It’s super sweet and beautifully done.

Any guilty pleasures?
GY: Guilt is a wasted emotion. 

GP: I think guilty pleasures can be a really good doughnut, a really good coffee, a painting, a car, or finding a new friend. That keeps us alive. What’s life all about if you don’t have guilty pleasures? 

GY: My pleasures are not internalized that way. If I don’t share the pleasures, then I feel kind of guilty. 

GP: We’ve spent our whole lives working on how to live in joy as long and as much as we can. That’s what everyone should do. 

This interview was conducted by Kylie McConville. It has been condensed and edited.