Writer, Literary Translator, Book Critic & Host of Desi Books Podcast
People talk about the work life, the line between your work and your life and keeping them separate and keeping the balance. For me, it’s always been that my work defines who I am and who I am in my personal life also defines who I am at my workplace. I don’t know how you separate those identities because I take all my belief systems and who I am to my workplace.
MacArthur & ASCAP Award-Winning Composer, Conductor & Pianist
I try to preserve the Chinese music flavor. So, you imagine in Chinese band, the country music that people usually reserve for weddings or for big moments or for funerals. That kind of a feeling. Drums and music playing. I try to preserve it from my memory because what we have now is just a tune. You can probably recognize the tune, but the execution of translating that for a Western orchestra and make it sound like it’s a Chinese band playing Chinese instruments.
MacArthur & ASCAP Award-Winning Composer, Conductor & Pianist
I try to preserve the Chinese music flavor. So, you imagine in Chinese band, the country music that people usually reserve for weddings or for big moments or for funerals. That kind of a feeling. Drums and music playing. I try to preserve it from my memory because what we have now is just a tune. You can probably recognize the tune, but the execution of translating that for a Western orchestra and make it sound like it’s a Chinese band playing Chinese instruments.
Editor, Writer, Curator, Content Creator, Pianist & Composer
This particular exhibition definitely had to do with my close relationship to dance. I have collaborated a lot with choreographers for contemporary dance theater, and I was often advising collaborators, so we would create the tasks and the content of the choreography together. We would exchange the tasks. We would create the score and narrative together. Also, because I’m a pianist, which is a very physically demanding instrument, you have this geography of the piano. I think this exhibitions links to my own experience as a performer and composer for dance and the relationship that music has with the body.
Editor, Writer, Curator, Content Creator, Pianist & Composer
This particular exhibition definitely had to do with my close relationship to dance. I have collaborated a lot with choreographers for contemporary dance theater, and I was often advising collaborators, so we would create the tasks and the content of the choreography together. We would exchange the tasks. We would create the score and narrative together. Also, because I’m a pianist, which is a very physically demanding instrument, you have this geography of the piano. I think this exhibitions links to my own experience as a performer and composer for dance and the relationship that music has with the body.
Novelist, Playwright & Author of Most Widely Used Creative Writing Text in America
There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic because all the arts basically say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at it this way.’ And they allow us to see from some other vantage point than our extremely self-interested selves.
Novelist, Playwright & Author of Most Widely Used Creative Writing Text in America
There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic because all the arts basically say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at it this way.’ And they allow us to see from some other vantage point than our extremely self-interested selves.
Former Consultant for the UN, World Bank & US Department of Defense
Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Public Policy at University of Michigan
National Medal of Science Award-Winner
I think the most critical thing is education for critical thinking. The ability to listen to a political argument or an argument of any sort, on COVID, for example, or climate change, and not necessarily understand the science behind that, but to understand how to evaluate the credibility of the speaker, how to evaluate the logic of the arguments and to see whether a conspiracy theory is behind this that has no grounding… And so I think what’s especially important in would be an educational in critical thinking.
Former Consultant for the UN, World Bank & US Department of Defense
Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Public Policy at University of Michigan
National Medal of Science Award-Winner
I think the most critical thing is education for critical thinking. The ability to listen to a political argument or an argument of any sort, on COVID, for example, or climate change, and not necessarily understand the science behind that, but to understand how to evaluate the credibility of the speaker, how to evaluate the logic of the arguments and to see whether a conspiracy theory is behind this that has no grounding… And so I think what’s especially important in would be an educational in critical thinking.
Writer, Director & Composer
I think it goes to this feeling of freedom, looking how freedom changes as you grow, being a very particular type of freedom that children have just by the nature of not having learned what the rules are. As we grow, we start to limit what we believe is possible. When you’re a kid, there isn’t a delineation between this is real, and this is my imagination. It’s all real. That’s your life experience.
President & Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors
For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 to 85% underemployment rate. So you can see the unemployment rates whether you go to college or not are astronomical, but they’re even higher if you go to college, which is sort of counterintuitive.
President & Founder of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors
For autistic individuals, there’s really sort of two paths. There are those today, about 35% percent of 18 year olds with an autism diagnosis who do go on to college or some form of post-secondary education, and then those who don’t. Of those who don’t and want to work, there’s about a 55% unemployment rate. And those who go to college and then look for employment afterwards, there’s about a 75 to 85% underemployment rate. So you can see the unemployment rates whether you go to college or not are astronomical, but they’re even higher if you go to college, which is sort of counterintuitive.
Master Origamist, Physicist & Author
In origami design, historically people have always used their intuition. They probably started by folding traditional shapes or folding designs by others, developed an intuitive understanding of how the paper behaves and then from there they can explore that intuition to create new shapes. That was the way design worked for years and years, that was the way it worked for me, but I eventually hit a limit to what I could do with my intuition and so part of my motivation for exploring mathematical methods was to externalise some of the design process. If I could get some of the design process on paper in a meaningful way, then I could handle more complicated goals than I could just fit in my brain.
Master Origamist, Physicist & Author
In origami design, historically people have always used their intuition. They probably started by folding traditional shapes or folding designs by others, developed an intuitive understanding of how the paper behaves and then from there they can explore that intuition to create new shapes. That was the way design worked for years and years, that was the way it worked for me, but I eventually hit a limit to what I could do with my intuition and so part of my motivation for exploring mathematical methods was to externalise some of the design process. If I could get some of the design process on paper in a meaningful way, then I could handle more complicated goals than I could just fit in my brain.
Pushcart Award-Winning Poet
When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.
Pushcart Award-Winning Poet
When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.
Inaugural Director · UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace & Sustainable Development
I’ve always found that science and evidence has to be the guiding force in the way that we design our programs. Of course, understanding people as humans. People as not just rational human beings. That’s another thing that I also learned during my journey is that the whole notion of a rational human being is used as an assumption to make our economic models simple.
Inaugural Director · UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace & Sustainable Development
Jazz Harpist
The harp or the instrument that I play is a traditional instrument from Columbia (I’m from Bogota, Columbia). We have traditional music there called Janetta music. It’s the music from the plains of Colombia and Venezuala. It’s like the cowboy music… I met the harp when I was seven years old. That’s the first time I saw this instrument. I was like–Wow! I knew I was born to play the harp that day!
Jazz Harpist
The harp or the instrument that I play is a traditional instrument from Columbia (I’m from Bogota, Columbia). We have traditional music there called Janetta music. It’s the music from the plains of Colombia and Venezuala. It’s like the cowboy music… I met the harp when I was seven years old. That’s the first time I saw this instrument. I was like–Wow! I knew I was born to play the harp that day!
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
