Good morning!
One of the questions I get asked the most about Time Sensitive is how I prepare for the interviews. Typically, it starts with a multipage research packet, compiled by our editorial assistant, Emma Leigh Macdonald, which gets delivered to me about a week before the recording. From there, I’ll read, watch, and listen to as much as I can about the guest—recent newspaper and magazine stories, archival articles and interviews, other podcasts or radio conversations. Many Time Sensitive guests are incredibly prolific, which means that I often have to limit the amount of research time; in certain cases it could go on for weeks. Preparing for an episode is, in a way, like cramming for a test. It’s also, appropriately, “slowdown time” for me, or, as the great theater director Robert Wilson would put it, time to think. There’s no exact science to it, but I’d say it usually ranges anywhere from four hours to four days, depending.
For journalist and author guests, I usually start a month or two out, reading their latest stories or books, and sometimes an entire stack of their writing. In the case of my conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri, in 2022, for example, I read Translating Myself and Others, In Other Words, and Whereabouts, and reread Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake—something like five or six weeks of reading. There’s a perpetually growing pile of books on my bedside table and next to the couch in my living room, and it’s safe to say that I probably read around 30 or 40 books a year, around two dozen of them specifically for Time Sensitive prep.
For this week’s guest—the historian and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis—in addition to delving deeply into her Vision & Justice work, reading her writing in The New York Times and elsewhere, listening to her interviews on other podcasts (Brené Brown, Guy Raz), and watching both of her TED Talks, I read her two books: an advance copy of the the extraordinary The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, published this week by Harvard University Press, as well as The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, from 2014.
What I’m about to say next deserves its own paragraph for emphasis: If there’s one book you read in the next year (though I hope you read many), make it The Unseen Truth.
A watershed book, The Unseen Truth is an astounding, eye-opening work of scholarship. I don’t think it would be too much to suggest that, in time, it will have the sort of catalytic impact that books by history-shaping writers such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks have had. When we look back on The Unseen Truth in the decades to come, I have no doubt that it will be viewed as an indispensable and central part of the canon of literature about race in America.
Through an exhaustive level of scholarship—there are 47 pages of footnotes, and Sarah spoke with nearly 150 people throughout researching and writing it—The Unseen Truth details the formation of what Sarah calls “conditioned sight” in the U.S., placing a particular emphasis on photography and visual culture. While at its core a book about history, it’s also one about dismantling the flimsy, fictitious foundations on which racial hierarchy in the U.S. was formed—and with this knowledge, laying the groundwork for a future of transformational change and justice.
I hope you enjoy our conversation, and for an even deeper understanding, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Sarah’s brilliant book. I know I’ll be turning back to it again and again.
—Spencer
