For Rita Sodi, cooking isn’t so much an art or a science, but rather an intuitive way for her to channel her Tuscan roots and provide a profound sense of home. Following a 15-year career in the world of fashion as a self-described “denim guru” for Calvin Klein Jeans, Sodi transitioned into the realm of restaurants in 2008, when she moved to New York City from Bagno a Ripoli, Italy, and opened the West Village establishment I Sodi. Soon after, Sodi serendipitously met her life and work partner, Jody Williams—the chef-owner of the French bistro Buvette—and the two went on to found the restaurant group Officina 1397. Now, in addition to I Sodi and Buvette, they also operate Via Carota, The Commerce Inn, and Bar Pisellino. Across all of Sodi’s undertakings, her motive is clear: to create dishes she loves with great care and rigor, and, at least in the cases of I Sodi and Via Carota, to share an abiding passion for Tuscan cooking.

On the episode, Sodi discusses learning to cook from her mother, her atypical journey from fashion to food, and some of the stringent rules she follows in the kitchen and in life.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Rita Sodi

[25:50] Tuscany

[4:50] West Village

[5:58] I Sodi

[6:47] Calvin Klein Jeans

[8:31] Jody Williams

[8:31] Via Carota

[8:31] Officina 1397

[8:31] Bar Pisellino

[8:31] The Commerce Inn

[8:31] Buvette

[20:29] Pete Wells

[23:22] “An Ode to I Sodi”

[23:22] “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City 2024”

[23:22] “When I Want to Be Alone, I Eat Dinner at the Bar at I Sodi”

[25:50] Bagno a Ripoli

[29:35] “The Laws of Tuscan Eating at I Sodi in the West Village”

[48:26] Emilia-Romagna

[53:53] Jeff Gordinier

To the landscape designer Edwina von Gal, gardening is much more than just seeding, planting, weeding, and watering; it’s her life calling. Since starting her namesake firm in 1984 in East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island, she has worked with, for, and/or alongside the likes of Calvin Klein, Larry Gagosian, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Annabelle Selldorf, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman, creating gardens that center on native species and engage in other nature-based land-care solutions. In 2008, von Gal founded the Azuero Earth Project in Panama to promote chemical-free reforestation with native trees on the Azuero Peninsula. Stemming out of this initiative, in 2013, she then founded the Perfect Earth Project to promote chemical-free, non-agricultural land management in the U.S. Her most recent effort, Two Thirds for the Birds, is a call-to-action to plant more native plants and eliminate pesticides, thus creating a greater food supply for birds.

On the episode, she discusses the meditative qualities of gardening; reframing landscaping as “land care”; and why she sees herself not as a steward of land, but rather as a collaborator with it.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Edwina von Gal

[15:32] William Cronon

[15:32] Changes in the Land

[15:32] Tiokasin Ghosthorse

[24:04] Carl Sagan

[24:04] The Demon-Haunted World

[26:07] Perfect Earth Project

[40:37] Two Thirds for the Birds

[42:41] John Fitzpatrick

[42:41] Cornell Lab of Ornithology

[42:41] Merlin Bird ID

[47:01] Garden Club of America

[50:21] Diana Vreeland

[51:09] Peter Sharp

[51:09] Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center

[54:46] Frank Gehry

[54:46] Biomuseo

[54:46] Bruce Mau

[56:32] Azuero Earth Project

[1:00:37] Doug Tallamy

[1:02:01] Nature’s Best Hope

[1:05:12] The High Line

[1:05:12] Brooklyn Bridge Park

[1:05:12] The Battery Conservancy

[1:05:12] Brooklyn Museum

While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-esque abstractions of the ocean that he has taken at roughly 250 locations around the world. In more recent years, Sugimoto has also built a flourishing architectural practice, designing everything from a café in Tokyo to the currently-under-construction Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. As with his subtly profound work, Sugimoto bears tremendous wisdom and is regarded by many as one of the most deeply perceptive minds and practitioners at the intersection of time and art-making.

On the episode, he discusses his pictures as fossilizations of time; seascapes as the least spoiled places on Earth; and why, for him, the “target of completion” for a building is 5,000 years from now.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Hiroshi Sugimoto

[5:10] Pre-Photography Time-Recording Devices

[39:05] “Theaters”

[15:06] “Seascapes”

[32:31] “Diorama”

[17:16] Caspar David Friedrich

[25:14] Odawara

[28:52] “Aujourd’hui le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive]”

[44:19] “Abandoned Theaters”

[44:19] “Opera Houses”

[44:19] “Drive-In Theaters”

[49:52] “Architecture”

[51:12] Le Corbusier

[51:12] Mies van der Rohe

[55:30] New Material Research Laboratory

[55:30] Tomoyuki Sakakida

[59:23] Enoura Observatory

[59:23] Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden

[1:00:48] Katsura Imperial Villa

[1:01:05] Bruno Taut

[1:02:14] Donald Judd

[1:02:14] “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Five Elements in Optical Glass”

[1:06:47] Mingei

[1:06:47] Isamu Noguchi

[1:06:47] Dan Flavin

[1:09:15] Sugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

[1:09:15] At the Hawk's Well

[1:09:15] W.B. Yeats

Soon to celebrate his 50th birthday by journeying from Paris to Tokyo by car along the Southern Silk Road, the French Moroccan creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami says he’s “thirsty for life like it’s just the beginning,” and it shows. Among his 17 (yes, 17) companies are the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, which he and his wife co-founded in 2014 and sold to LVMH in 2021; the Paris-based creative agency Art Recherche Industrie, whose clients include Christofle, Moynat, and Gohar World; and Hotel Drei Berge, which he opened in the Swiss Alps last year. With each of his enterprises, Touhami has proven, time and again, how much craft matters—that there’s a real demand for it in a streamlined world that prioritizes efficiency, and that it’s not necessarily at odds with turning a profit.

On the episode, Touhami talks about the parallels between Japan and Switzerland, business as a religion, and the healing power of mountains.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Ramdane Touhami

[5:29] Hotel Drei Berge Hotel

[5:29] Élisée Reclus

[8:36] Angelo Mangiarotti

[8:36] Tobia Scarpa

[8:36] Dieter Rams

[5:29] “Ramdane Touhami’s Peak Performance”

[17:12] Mos Def

[20:28] Henry David Thoreau

[28:16] Officine Universelle Buly 1803

[28:16] Cire Trudon

[1:00:35] Aman

[27:06] Ignacio Mattos

[28:16] LVMH

[34:54] An Atlas of Natural Beauty

[34:33] Bernard Arnault

[34:54] Izumi Aki

[41:54] Société Helvétique d’Impression Typographique

[43:54] Émile Shahidi

[44:30] Radical Media

[44:59] Tricontinental magazine

[57:24] “A Parisian Designer Builds His Dream House in a Former Brothel”

[1:00:35] Southern Silk Road

At age 4, following the fall of Saigon, in 1975, Viet Thanh Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam and came to the U.S. as refugees. Throughout the turmoil and its aftermath, neither he nor his family could have imagined that he would go on to not only become an internationally renowned novelist—winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015)—but also to serve as an executive producer of an HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, and become a widely respected voice on matters including anti-Asian hate, refugees and immigrants, war and genocide, and memory and memorials. In addition to The Sympathizer, Nguyen has written, among other books, the new memoir A Man of Two Faces (2023); The Sympathizer’s sequel, The Committed (2021); and the nonfiction title Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016).

On the episode, Nguyen talks about turning The Sympathizer into an HBO miniseries, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” and jokes as a form of truth-telling.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Viet Thanh Nguyen

[3:43] “An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine”

[3:43] Min Jin Lee

[5:48] F. Scott Fitzgerald

[7:11] The Sympathizer

[7:11] The Sympathizer HBO series

[7:11] Robert Downey Jr.

[7:11] Sandra Oh

[8:41] A Man of Two Faces

[8:41] Casualties of War

[8:41] Apocalypse Now

[8:41] Platoon

[8:41] The Deer Hunter

[11:48] Arundhati Roy

[14:18] 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

[21:33] Fall of Saigon

[33:34] The Great Gatsby

[37:26] Portnoy’s Complaint

[40:28] Great America amusement park

[47:24] Maxine Hong Kingston

[51:06] Chicken of the Sea

[51:06] Simone

[56:19] Operation Petticoat

[56:19] I Was a Male War Bride

[56:19] Catch 22

[56:19] Richard Pryor

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley has a deep and enduring obsession with wood. In his late 20s, he began to use the material for art, carving sculptures in his basement studio, and with his sculpture-making now spanning 70 years, his enduring dedication to his craft is practically unparalleled. Represented by Karma gallery since 2019, Mosley has only now, in the past decade or so, begun to receive the international recognition and attention he has long deserved. In his hands, wood sings; he shapes and carves trees into striking abstract forms that often appear as if they’re levitating while honoring and preserving their organic, natural character. As with the work of his two main influences, Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi, Mosley, too, strives to make sculptures that, in his words, beyond today, “will be interesting in a hundred tomorrows.”

On the episode, he talks about the language that poetry, music, and sculpture all share; his early years as a sports writer for a local newspaper; and his life-transforming relationship with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Thaddeus Mosley

[4:13] Sam Gilliam

[17:24] Carnegie Museum

[21:08] Carnegie International

[21:08] Leon Arkus

[21:08] “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest”

[21:08] “Inheritance”

[24:20] Isamu Noguchi

[27:53] Constantin Brâncuși

[28:28] University of Pittsburgh

[28:28] Martha Graham

[46:15] Floyd Bennett Field

[46:23] Ebony magazine

[46:23] Sepia magazine

[46:23] Jet magazine

[46:23] Pittsburgh Courier

[54:34] John Coltrane

[51:37] Li Bo

[51:37] Dylan Thomas

[56:21] Bernard Leach

[57:45] Langston Hughes

[57:45] Countee Cullen

[57:45] Harriet Tubman

[57:45] Fannie Lou Hamer

[57:45] “The Long-Legged Bait”

[57:45] “Air Step - for Fayard and Harold Nicholas”

[57:45] The Nicholas Brothers