October 1, 2021, NEW YORK — In March 2020, editor and journalist Spencer Bailey and photographer, filmmaker, and creative director Andrew Zuckerman were just beginning The Slowdown, a New York–based media company that aims to make sense of a world addicted to speed, advocating for a more thoughtful and considered approach to the moment. As Covid-19 emerged and lockdowns began, a global slowdown unfolded with an immediacy that neither of them could have predicted. Soon, they felt the urge to record what leading minds across various fields were thinking and feeling in real time. At a Distance, a podcast of conversations focused on long-view, planetary-scale concerns, was born.

Now organized as a book of these interviews (recorded between March 2020 and April 2021), At a Distance: 100 Visionaries at Home in a Pandemic (Published by Apartamento Publishing; November 15, 2021; $40.00) provides a curated selection of the wisdom shared by the podcast’s guests. Presented in short-form narratives that capture the best thinking in an easily digestible way, the book contextualizes the surrounding political, cultural, and social climate with revealing editorial commentary. The guests—including environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, food artist Laila Gohar, biologist Merlin Sheldrake, artist Sanford Biggers, novelist Hari Kunzru, philosopher Kate Soper, and landscape architect Walter Hood—offer a grounding sense of context and clarity, looking at the world from multiple angles, such as public health, the climate crisis, racial inequality, and Big Tech.

The book delves into and provides new perspectives on the most pressing issues of our time:

OUR ECONOMY
“The things we’re going to be looking for in an economy going forward are not what we’ve looked for in the past, which was basically speed. We’re going to be looking for resilience, reliability, heartiness—a draft horse, not a racehorse.”
—Bill McKibben, environmentalist, author, and journalist

“We’ve had an awakening that will change conversations about corporate governance, and will reframe what a good society is… This moment is illuminating the malfunction of the political economy. Nobody thinks the orthodox paradigm is sufficient any longer.”
—Rob Johnson, economist and executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking

CLIMATE
“We won’t go back to the temperatures from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We have to adapt to the impacts we’re seeing now, but it isn’t too late to limit future warming.”
—Dr. Friederike Otto, author, climatologist, and associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford

“The main story of climate change is about how we treat each other and the choices that we’ve made over hundreds of years to get to this point, because it wasn’t inevitable that we would end up here, just like it’s not inevitable that any vision of the future will happen... I think now, finally, in the last year or two, the environmental movement has started to tell stories about the future that are actually aspirational—that are things that we want to work toward and be a part of.”
—Eric Holthaus, meteorologist and climate journalist

BIG TECH
“Technology is optimized for speed, but companies aren’t thinking about that speed as a core ingredient of what makes our society operate.”
—Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, podcast host, and former Google design ethicist

FOOD SYSTEMS
“There needs to be a rebalancing. People who aren’t on the farm need to start thinking about what they can give back to the countryside and the people living in it.”
—Chris Smaje, author, farmer, and social scientist

“Post-pandemic, we need to build something better from the ashes. We need to think about community. That means less focus on fancy restaurants and more on resources like local food centers or food-waste redistribution facilities. There are so many things that could exist if we had the will.”
—David Zilber, chef, fermentation expert, and former head of the fermentation lab at Noma in Copenhagen

RACIAL INEQUALITY
“Equity is the superior growth model for the nation. If we get the equity agenda right, we get so much else right. If you try to solve problems with nuance and specificity, from the standpoint of those who were most targeted, most oppressed, most left behind—if you bring that perspective, you will solve the problem so effectively, the benefits will cascade out to everyone.”
—Angela Glover Blackwell, attorney, civil rights advocate, and founder of a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity

PUBLIC HEALTH
“We need a complete, wholesale change in the way we approach the human body, and in the way we approach the dignity of workers in our healthcare system. We need to think as a society that cares for itself, and as a society in which we care for each other.”
—Nikil Saval, writer, editor, activist, and Pennsylvania State Senator

Taken as a whole, the book captures the isolated, opaque quality of a period that was often defined by despair, and underscores the extraordinary capacity of people to persevere—and to rethink the world—in the midst of disaster. In the Afterword, Bailey and Zuckerman offer insight into their own respective experiences of the pandemic and the personal growth that emerged from it.

At once informative, intelligent, and deeply personal, AT A DISTANCE: 100 Visionaries at Home in a Pandemic explores the dramatic changes that could be possible going forward and provides a hopeful, rationally optimistic guide toward the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Spencer Bailey is co-founder of The Slowdown and co-host of the Time Sensitive and At a Distance podcasts. A writer, editor, and journalist, he is also editor-at-large of the book publisher Phaidon, and has written at length about architecture, art, culture, design, and technology for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Town & Country, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. From 2013 to 2018, Bailey was editor-in-chief of Surface magazine. During three years of reporting for The New York Times Magazine, from 2011 to 2014, he interviewed authors, celebrities, politicians, and cultural figures for the “How to…” column. Bailey is author of the book In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials (2020).

Andrew Zuckerman is co-founder of The Slowdown and co-host of the Time Sensitive and At a Distance podcasts. A photographer, filmmaker, and creative director, he has published multiple books and exhibitions, including Creature (2007), Wisdom (2008), Bird (2009), Music (2010), Flower (2012), and Designed by Apple in California (2016). Much of his work is concerned with the intersection of nature and technology.

For more information, visit www.slowdown.tv.

Published by Apartamento Publishing on November 15, 2021
Flexibound / $40.00 / 344 pages with 24 photographs*

*The images featured in the book were created by Zuckerman from Apollo-era NASA duplicate negatives. The photographs serve as an opportunity to pause, and to look at the Earth as a complete, dynamic system of which we—and millions of other species—are a part.

Media Contact: Christine Ragasa, 917-687-9858,
Christine@ChristineRagasaGlobal.com

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR At a Distance: 100 Visionaries at Home in a Pandemic

“The kind of whole-earth thinking we need now more than ever. This book is full of brilliant perspectives on how to make our planet stronger and more resilient. It’s destined to become my go-to resource for many years to come."
—Bjarke Ingels, architect

“To my mind, At a Distance was the most consequent and thoughtful response to the congealed awfulness and difficulty of the pandemic. I listened to it all the time, for insight and consolation. It slowed me down. Spencer and Andrew succeeded in getting the tone of the times exactly right, again and again. This book is a wonderfully pleasing and capacious panorama that captures the mood of that time, which was, lest we forget, a revealing, a stripping away, a taking account and responsibility for our action, that has to continue as we move into whatever is going to be our future.”
—Simon Critchley, the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and author of books including Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts and Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

“At a Distance reminds us that listening to big ideas and vulnerable introspection are essential tools for staying open-minded and gaining perspective. These interviews are as enlightening in their content as they are inspiring in their unique points of view. A go-to for me when I want to lose myself in the brilliance of some of today's most prescient thinkers.”
—Sanford Biggers, artist