In this week’s newsletter, we study stones with the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, visit a resplendent Tina Barney retrospective in Paris, bask in the lighting designs of Roman and Williams, and more.
Good morning!
In the fall of 2018, just as The Slowdown was getting up and running—we would publicly launch the next spring, with our Time Sensitive podcast—I happened to walk by 192 Books, on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and see the cover of a book called Timefulness staring right back at me. Its over-the-top (but actually pragmatic) subtitle? How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Naturally, I went into the store, bought the book, and read it that very week. I’ve wanted to have its author, the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, as a guest on Time Sensitive ever since. (Another book I read around then, also about time, is the Italian-born, Marseille-based physicist Carlo Rovelli’s brilliant, groundbreaking The Order of Time. Carlo, if you’re reading this, I’d love to have you on the podcast, too.)
The release of Marcia’s latest book, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (Flatiron Books), a sort of memoir, provided the perfect moment. This week’s episode, a fun, full-circle occasion, features her as the guest at last.
Surprisingly, perhaps, given that Time Sensitive is a podcast about time, Marcia is the first geologist we’ve ever had on. I did talk rocks (and fossils and meteorites) with the artist and jewelry designer Monique Péan on Ep. 41, but in terms of an actual stone scientist, having Marcia on the show marks a momentous occasion.
The conversation does not disappoint. Yes, Marcia’s a geologist and professor—and a well-published one at that—but I would go so far as to call her a geological translator, someone with eyes and ears finely tuned to both rocks and the English language. While her books can, at moments, verge on the technical, she’s always able to ground her writing in a way that is widely accessible and even, at its best, revelatory.
Those who know me know my love of rocks, and particularly the work of the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi, whose stone sculptures are, in my mind, awe-inspiring cosmic objects and profound portals across space and time. I’m also a big fan of the writing of John McPhee, who coined the term “Deep Time” in his brilliant 1981 book Basin and Range. These sorts of rock-adjacent affinities have led me to casually consider stones on the weekly, if not the daily.
Speaking with Marcia was an opportunity to geek out on questions that I’ve long had about rocks, and reading her books has been like taking a crash course into the biogeochemical nature of our planet. Her view of the world has reshaped how I think about not only time but practically everything around us. As she writes in Turning to Stone, “Rocks, whether one ever thinks about them or not, ultimately define reality for everyone who lives on this rocky planet.”
—Spencer
“We’re part of a continuum in time. There’s as deep a geologic future as there is a past.”
Listen to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud on Ep. 123 at timesensitive.fm or wherever you get your podcasts
Letters by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)
From the late renowned British neurologist, naturalist, writer, and self-described “philosophical physician” and “neuropathological Talmudist” comes this transportative collection of letters written throughout his life, to his parents, his beloved Aunt Len, and his friends and colleagues in London, Oxford, California, and elsewhere. Taking readers from his arrival in America as a young man through his career in medicine and writing—including nuanced details of his weight-lifting and motorcycle-riding years; his investigations into sight, hearing, and the musical brain; and his friendships with artists, scientists, writers, astronauts, botanists, and mathematicians—Letters peels back the layers of both the beginnings of modern neuroscience and of Sacks himself, unveiling an intimate portrait of one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.
“Tina Barney: Family Ties” at the Jeu de Paume
Tracing 40 years of her career and the largest European retrospective of her work to date, “Tina Barney: Family Ties,” on view through Jan. 19, 2025, presents a selection of 55 large-scale prints, including photographs from early in her career and unpublished productions, commissioned and personal works, and images of everyone from well-known figures such as Julianne Moore to family members (her sister, her sons), friends, and models. Organized by the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, the exhibition reinforces what Barney is perhaps best known for: her keen observations of family rituals, particularly in relationships between generations in the domestic sphere. As she says on Ep. 87 of Time Sensitive, “The gestures of the hand in the pocket, the way someone holds a cigarette—that, I think, is handed down from generation to generation: imitating subconsciously how your father stood, how your father held his hand.”
“A Certain Slant of Light” at 6 Harrison Street
Titled after an Emily Dickinson poem and on view in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood through Dec. 1, “A Certain Slant of Light” provides a career-spanning retrospective of 100 original lighting designs—12 of them new—for Roman and Williams Guild. Filling the hall of the historic former New York Mercantile Exchange, this constellation of designs by Roman and WIlliams’s founders, Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer, serves as an interrogation into the almost spiritual effects of light during the longer, darker days of winter. With metalwork done in France by the 150-year-old lighting fabricator Julien Gau, alabaster sourced from Spain, cast glass created between Milan and Venice, and subtle gradient glass hand-blown in Brooklyn, these objects embody an enduring commitment to craft and artisanal tradition.
“Design is about people, not about chairs,” the Italian curator, historian, author, and design scholar Maria Cristina Didero is fond of saying. Throughout her career, Didero has brought this human-forward mindset to exhibitions for institutions including the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., the Design Museum Holon, and the Design Miami fair. The Milan editor for Wallpaper magazine, Didero is also a prolific writer who has contributed to publications such as Domus, Vogue Italia, and Apartamento, and recently wrote a feature about the Portrait Milano hotel for the forthcoming book Design: The Leading Hotels of the World (Monacelli), with editorial direction by The Slowdown. Here, she speaks with us about the spheres of media that inform her and her work.
How do you start your mornings?
I start every morning Italian style: caffé e cornetto. Then I read the usual suspects: design news, online magazines. I like to combine fast headlines with more thorough articles, often related to the exhibition or project I am working on. Midmorning, around 10:30 a.m., I have a squeezed orange, and then I am already thinking about what I would love to eat for lunch.
Where do you get your news?
A bit of Corriere della Sera, a hint of The New York Times, and of course Instagram. Even if I have to rush out of the house to take my girls to school, or if I am busy traveling, I make sure to check the news somehow before starting my workday.
Favorite newsletters?
I like The Met’s newsletters and those of the Deste Foundation, initiated by Dakis Joannou in Athens. These are both great examples of informed institutional communication. Their way of communicating is both high and low, informed and pop—a combination that I feel matches our current time.
Favorite podcasts?
Time Sensitive! This is not to flatter you [laughs]—it is true. I have been following it from the very beginning. I love the unexpected mix of talented individuals that Spencer interviews, interestingly related to architecture and design, but never limited to these subjects. Most of all, I like the way Spencer carries the conversation, how he makes people express themselves.
What book or books are you currently reading?
This very week, I intend to start reading Design Science_01, edited by The Design Science Foundation, which the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa gave me this summer when I went to visit him in Tokyo. It’s about how the fields of design and science are intertwined and can help each other find creative solutions.
What’s an exhibition you look forward to visiting?
The “Elio Fiorucci” exhibition at the Triennale Milano [on view through March 16, 2025]. Fiorucci was one of the most incredible visionaries of our time; he opened Italy to the world and his way of looking at fashion was just unique.
Any guilty pleasures?
Any kind and any shape of milk chocolate and salted peanuts—including the American comic Peanuts by Charles Schulz, with Snoopy as the hero. But I don’t think this is so much a guilty pleasure.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Our handpicked guide to culture across the internet.
Kathryn Schulz reviews the five-book oeuvre of the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, this week’s Time Sensitive guest, nothing that she “has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English” [The New Yorker]
Artist-activist Molly Gochman’s new podcast, Monuments to Motherhood, explores motherhood, caregiving, art-making, and monumentalization [Monuments to Motherhood]
Painter Titus Kaphar talks with NPR host Tonya Mosley about his new feature film, Exhibiting Forgiveness; film as a “democratically accessible medium”; and why going into an art gallery is often an uncomfortable experience [Fresh Air]
The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2025 calendar, which includes a four-night Jamie xx residency and Yoko Ono’s participatory “Wish Tree” installation [The New York Times]
Model-activist Bethann Hardison (the guest on Ep. 65 of Time Sensitive) and artist Rashid Johnson (the guest on Ep. 25) will be among the honorees at next year’s Gordon Parks Foundation Awards dinner in New York City [Essence]