A Life in Writing with T.C. BOYLE

A Life in Writing with T.C. BOYLE

Novelist · Short Story Writer

What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.

LOVE in a F*cked-Up World

LOVE in a F*cked-Up World

Conversation with DEAN SPADE about How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together

This book has a lot of the wisdom of things that feminists and queers have learned in the community about sexuality, but the book is really for anybody who is political, even those just starting out and beginning to realize that there is something wrong with the systems they live under. I want to be in movements. Our movements are made of relationships. So, if you're just getting into our movements, or if you've been here for years and have been watching the ways we hurt each other and fall apart relationally, this book is about identifying these common patterns.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist · NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Author of Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life · Coauthor of Half the Sky · Tightrope · A Path Appears

I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

Founder · Host · Exec. Director of First Voices Radio
Founder of Akantu Intelligence · Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute

We have not adapted to Earth. She needs us to do that. Instead, we've tried to adapt Earth to our needs. Which is always an extraction, take away. Earth doesn't exist because of technology. Earth will always be here. So when it comes to animacy, I think it's a Western term also, and so we get away from the Western terms. We start seeing that, oh, we are becoming Earth as we're born into this physical dimension. We are becoming Earth. And then as we are living during this time, we're alive. We are becoming Earth. And when we are finished with this body, we are becoming Earth. 

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

ATHLETE · ACTOR · AMERICAN · ACTIVIST
DIAN HANSON discusses photographic homage to ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

Why I was different from all the other boys in my town I cannot tell you. I was simply born with the gift of vision.
– ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

It's not just that he grew up in a rural environment too. He was born on July 30th, 1947. And most of us today don't have any understanding or relationship to what Europe was like right after World War II. The winter of 1946/1947 in Austria was the most brutal in decades. The people already had too little food. They were in an occupied country. The summer potato crops failed. As Arnold has said, his mother had to go from farm to farm to farm, begging for food to be able to feed her children. His father, like all the men in the village, was defeated by the war. And he saw them all physically, emotionally, intellectually defeated and taking it out on their wives and children, that he was beaten and his mother was beaten. All the neighbor kids were beaten, and they were beaten into a kind of placid defeat. And he alone would not accept that. He could not see that life for himself. And so he wanted out of that. And as a poor boy, he had nothing but his body to work with. That was it. There was not going to be any college. There was not going to be any of that. There was going to be some kind of menial job, or he could use what he had - his body - to get him out of there.

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

Academy Award-nominated Cinematographer
HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster · Kali Reis · Fiona Shaw

I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.

APRIL GORNIK

APRIL GORNIK

Artist · Environmentalist
Co-founder of The Church · Arts & Creativity Center
Co-director of Sag Harbor Cinema Board

I've chosen my work because I've loved the outside world. I love the things outside of myself. I love what isn't immediate to me. And I love projecting onto that as a way of kind of trying to reach the distance between my inner self and the vastness. To try to do that in a way that makes other people feel inspired by it, not be chided for not taking care of it. It's not something that I intend to be a message per se. I'd rather people look at the natural world and see the heartbreaking beauty of it and sense its fragility and its impermanence and their own impermanence and fragility and then have a response to that rather than say, you know, you have to act, you have to do something. I would hope that would inspire action rather than to cudgel them with a directive.

Special Earth Day Stories

Special Earth Day Stories

Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree

Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.