In downtown Seattle, Colin talks with comic artist Peter Bagge, creator of the legendary alternative comic series Hate, contributing editor and cartoonist at Reason magazine, and author of such graphic novels as Apocalypse Nerd, Other Lives, Reset, and Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story. They discuss whether Seattle is still the place to be for the Buddy Bradleys of the world; the cheap "place to invent yourself" he first found there; the ever-increasing importance of place in his work, and its necessity in telling longer stories; how Seattle won out as a storytelling location versus the other "cities where hipsters gather"; what Seattle once looked like from his perspective in Manhattan; the feeling of a "pioneer town" then and now; how he found Seattleites who took the time to live elsewhere differed from Seattleites who'd never left, and what it has to do with the Seattle inferiority complex; the relationship between Seattle and the alternative comics scene; how he convinced his publisher Fantagraphics to come join him in Seattle, and how the town came subsequently to crawl with cartoonists; Buddy Bradley as a young cynic, and Seattle's accommodation of the young cynic; what the fictional life of Buddy Bradley and the real life of Margaret Sanger have in common, beginning with their premises of "doing exactly what they want to do"; which of Sanger's many accomplishments and battles (which she never fought on straight gender lines) he usually uses to explain her life; why Sanger's achievements in birth-control legalization became so important to all society; our transition out of "the age of stuff"; the probable fate of bookstores, and how they might succeed through the social dimension; why conventions have become more important than ever to comics, and why cities have become more important than ever to life; the impossibility of the Spokane swinger; what his visit to the depleted city of Detroit taught him, especially about the ways the government itself holds back a potential revitalization; where he thinks Seattle goes too far, politically; why he prefers the monorail Seattle might have built to the light rail system it is building; whether governments just can't build transit right, or whether specifically American governments just can't do it right; what happens when anyone's shovel hits an Indian artifact in Seattle; and how to win mayoral office by campaigning against the inevitable.

The Kickstarter drive for Notebook on Cities and Culture's sixth season launches now. If we raise its budget, we'll spend an entire year in Seattle: the city of grunge, Microsoft, Amazon, the Space Needle, Buddy Bradley, Archie McPhee, sleeplessness, Starbucks, and much more we'll discover through at least 52 in-depth conversations with its novelists, journalists, comic artists, filmmakers, broadcasters, explorers, academics, architects, planners, cultural creators, internationalists, observers of the urban scene, and more. Once we raise season six's full $6000 budget, the show will go on as planned. And for every additional $200 we raise, the season will include an additional episode. In other words, if we raise $10,000 rather than $6000, you’ll get 72 Seattle interviews rather than 52. Depending upon the amount you pledge to back Notebook on Cities and Culture's year in Seattle, you could get a mention at the end of each episode, postcards from the city, me talking about your project or message at the top of one episode and its associated post, or at the top of all of them. But do note that, since no one likes a long drive, we only have five days to raise the money. The Kickstarting ends on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, but before then, I’ll put up a special preview episode featuring a new interview with a favorite long Seattle-based guest from whom, if you’ve followed my interviewing career for a long time indeed, you’ve heard a couple provocative and funny hours of conversation before. Visit season six's Kickstarter page for details. Thanks, and stay tuned.

In an officetel in Seoul, Colin talks with Brother Anthony of Taizé, one of the most renowned translators of Korean poetry, president of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch, and naturalized citizen of South Korea. They discuss the frequency with which he's heard "Why Korea?" in the 35 years since he first arrived as a member of Taizé; the Korean lack of belief that anybody would actually opt for Korea rather than their own homelands; what fills Korean taxi drivers with strong opinions; Korea's aging rural population versus Japan's even more aging rural population; the Seoul he arrived in in 1980, and how it compared with the Philippine slum in which he'd spent years previous; the "trickery and violence" involved in the city's redevelopment; how a "shame culture" deals with modernization (and especially with thatched roofs); how Japanese society accommodates a kind of "nonconformism" that Korean society doesn't; how he began translate Korean poetry, and why he got into poetry rather than other forms of Korean literature; how Korean fiction came into being after the war, and what it often lacks; how the concept of separation has been expressed as "the great Korean thing," and younger Korean writers' desire to get away from it; why "Koreans can't speak Korean"; the endless pattern drills he endured while studying Korean at Yonsei University; how he began "doing tea," and where in Asia the interest has taken him; how China has used Korea as a developmental model; why he isn't sure he wants to live in a "fascinating country"; how some foreigners love traditional Korean music and architecture while most Koreans themselves don't; whether Korea can gain the confidence it has long lacked; why we should rightfully be able to ride the train from Busan to Paris.

In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Matt VanVolkenburg, author of Gusts of Popular Feeling, a blog on "Korean society, history, urban space, cyberspace, film, and current events, among other things." They discuss what it feels like to live in Seoul, of all places, without a smartphone; why navigating the city poses so much of a challenge to the newcomer; how he sees the relationship of the Korean media to foreign English teachers, "the new incarnation of the GIs"; what made it possible for the Korean media to talk freely about the acts of foreigners; the history of "Korea as a victim"; why non-English-teaching foreigners surprise Koreans; what makes some Koreans and foreigners alike see entry-level foreign English teachers as third-class citizens; the country's distinctive combination of overregulation and under-enforcement, and what it says about the difference between the legal cultures of Korea and North America; what he does on trips instead of hitting the beach; Isabella Bird Bishop, the 19th-century traveler and write from whom Gusts of Popular Feeling takes its name; why the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store didn't prevent the sinking of the Sewol; the writing of Percival Lowell and others who had more to comment on than dirtiness and superstition did about Korea in the late 19th century; the Chonggyecheon's very short history as a "clean stream"; James Wade, one of the more prolific English-language observers of postwar Korea; what he finds reading old Korean newspapers; his incredulousness at a foreigner's complaint that "you can't get cheese here"; the 1988 Hustler article on the easiness of Korean women; the importance of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to Korean relations with foreigners in the country; the fallout of "Dog Poop Girl"; the thorough change he's seen in the built environment of Seoul in his 13 years there, and what he notices about the less-developed cityscape revealed in old movies; Korea's relative lack of the geek and the nerd; and what word he really doesn't want to use when describing why he likes living in Korea.

In Seoul's Itaewon district, Colin talks with architect Minsuk Cho, principal at Mass Studies, designer of the Golden Lion-winning Korean pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. They discuss whether he talks about the use of space differently in English than in Korean; how copying, and especially while misinterpreting across cultural boundaries, counts as a way of creating; his earliest memories of Seoul's "building explosion" that grew the city tenfold over fifty years; the difference between current Seoul and the Seoul of his childhood; the "concrete utopia" in which he grew up, and how quickly it went away when the branded "high-density gated community" high-rises that now characterize the city rose; the book that set him on the path to architecture (even as his architect father didn't push him into the profession); the "toilet paper" life expectancy of Korean buildings; how he has reacted to the "bigger, higher, cheaper, faster" building ethos of Seoul; the "blessing" of so much building right up against so much nature; when Korea's dictatorship didn't want people to gather, and what effect that had on the built environment; his experience riding a Yellow Cab from LAX to Palm Springs; how Seoul passed through its "juvenile teenager phase," and what mistakes it made that compare to Los Angeles' onetime avoidance of density; the village fetish that has recently developed; what he felt in New York that made him cartwheel in the streets; why the flatness of Rotterdam bothered him when he worked for Rem Koolhaas; how Korea became, for him, a more appealing place to build things; Mass Studies' Pixel House in the recently developed city of Paju and the island of Jeju; the beginning of a reverse migration out of Seoul; Itaewon's varying role in the city as "a center that is also a void"; the importance of architecturally uniting North and South Korea in Mass Studies' Venice Biennale pavilion; and what he thinks of the prospects of actually reuniting, for architecture or otherwise.

In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Michael Elliott, creator of the English-learning site for Koreans English in Korean and the Korean-learning site for English-speakers Korean Champ. They discuss why Koreans insist on the difficulty of their own language; whether and why he considers Korean difficult; what it means that "there are so many different ways to say the same thing" in Korean; the perennial issue of saying "you" in Korean; the "native speaker's privilege" to go a little but out of grammatical bounds; why the Korean alphabet has displaced Chinese characters more or less entirely; why Koreans rarely acknowledge the language itself as a driver of interest in Korea; the different, more intense ways trends manifest themselves in Korea than in America; whether we can call English education in Korea a "craze," and why Koreans spend so much money on it to so little apparent result; the degree of parental involvement in English education and how "keeping up with the Joneses" drives it; the trouble with studying the languages of "poor countries" in Korea; the dominance of "the right way and the wrong way" in Korean thought; what it takes to make it to the highest level of Korean study, and why that sets off suspicion in Korean people; how tired he's grown of explaining to those "back home" why he went to Korea to study Korean in the first place; how he got an exemption not just from Korean trends but from American hipsterdom, or indeed any kind of "team"; how he came up with his new Korean Champ videos shot on the streets of Seoul; what would happen to the Cheonggyecheon Stream if built in America; how he studied multiple levels of Korean at once; the importance of observation when learning languages, and the general resistance to it; the "little bit of a scoff" with which Koreans sometimes correct Korean-learners; and the sleep he loses on the rare occasion he says something incorrectly in Korean.

In Seoul's Susong-dong, Colin talks with Andrew Salmon, author of To the Last Round: The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea 1951; Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950; and All That Matters: Modern Korea. They discuss how Korean culture has influenced the names of his cats; the dullness of London by comparison to Seoul, especially in drinking term; the provocative positions he has taken, such as finding the Koreans "a little unfair toward the Japanese"; how he sees the conflict between Korea and Japan over the Dokdo islets; the "drab, miserable-looking" Seoul full of "fierce" people to which martial arts brought him in 1989; the Korean shift from diligence as the sole virtue to diversity of lifestyle; how Korea came to look like a place he could live; why he "wanted answers" from Korea since his time here began; how everything Korean, in this land "ruled by the heart, not the head," opposes everything English; the meaning of the 1988 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup as the "signposts" of modern Korea; the opening up of Korean national markets and Korea itself to international markets, resulting in the improvement of such native products as makgeolli; Korean sensitivity toward the awareness of "the Korean brand"; to what extent outside interest has shifted from North Korea to South; why editors don't tend to ask for the North Korea stories that matter; what happens if reunification day ever comes; what Korean students "simply don't learn" about their country's history; why plaques in Korea give dimensions of bricks rather than tell stories; what the Korea neophyte should know in order to contextualize everything else they learn about the country; the mismatch between Korea's "hardware" and its "software"; whether he hopes for a grand Korean deceleration; and what he's stopped dreaming about quite so much before his trips to Europe.

In Seoul's Hongdae district, Colin Marshall talks with Daniel Tudor, former Economist correspondent in Korea, co-founder of craft beer pizza pub chain The Booth, author of the books Korea: The Impossible Country, A Geek in Korea, and (with James Pearson) North Korea Confidential. They discuss the difference between Gangnam and Gangbuk style; the recently emerging trend toward Korean nostalgia, and what happens when you pull out an two-year-old mobile phone; what he discovered in Korea during the time of the 2002 World Cup; his time among the "studying machines" that constitute Korean youth, and why so few want to break from that hard-driving mode; education, especially abroad, as a means of "jumping the queue" back in Korea; the greater progressivism he's found among Koreans who've never left the country; why it matters when a foreigner voices the same criticism of Korea that Koreans think; whether he felt any fear of legal action when he publicly stated that Korean beer sucks; why Korean beer has continued to suck for so long; what it takes to get decent beer into Korea today; the "emotionalism" of Korean conversational style, and whether it plays in the wider world; to what extent Korea may westernize, given the presence of a certain "spineless love of all things American"; whether Korea's narrative of weakness can accommodate the country's new strength; what it was like writing for The Economist, a magazine newspaper given to short sentences, cynical humor, and an interest in "North Korea, North Korea, and sometimes North Korea"; where he still feels the presence of dictator Park Chung-hee, and the backlash to his "developmentalist" mindset that seems to have begun; the possibility of "de-Seoulification"; what he experiences on train trips that tells him too much has concentrated in Seoul; the parallels between Park Chung-hee and Margaret Thatcher; Korea's nature not as a conservative country, but as a country with a conservative veneer; the "natural socialism" that coexists in Korea with extreme capitalism; why Koreans believe their food too spicy for any foreigner to handle; why he hates even to hear the Korean term for "foreigner"; whether Korea can afford to continue burning so much energy on purely internal competition; the parallels between the chaebol system and North Korea; how soon a Pyongyang branch of The Booth would open after reunification; and what the English could stand to learn from the attitudes of the Koreans.

In Changwon, "Environmental Capital of South Korea," Colin Marshall talks with Coby Zeifman, former outreach coordinator for Nubija, the city's bike share system. They discuss what makes Changwon a cool town; why a feature like Nubija, despite its impressiveness, needed the kind of outreach he has tried his utmost to provide; Changwon's history as a manufacturing town for the conglomerate LG; what makes it a "Young City," including its plan modeled after Canberra; how the city expanded, and how Nubija expanded along with it; how he got to Korea in the first place, on nothing more than the advice of two friends who already lived there; how "livable" he found Changwon even at first; what makes Nubija inconvenient for foreigners; why so many services in Korea require a Korean cellphone; how Changwon's Nubija compares to Daejeon's Tashu; when he started to get the sense that he could not use Nubija, but contribute to it; how he began Changwon Bike Party (by "Tyler Durdening it"); where he's gone with the Bike Party he might not have gone otherwise; the scrutiny he underwent before Nubija let him help out; his experience learning bicycle repair, a subject he didn't know well, in Korean, a language he didn't know well; what Nubija's "smart" information technology architecture does for the system; whether Seattle, where he came from, has got ready to become a 21st century; the glories of the T-Money card; the assumption that certain public conveniences "wouldn't work in America"; Mia Birk's theory of shining a light and scattering the cockroaches; what we can learn from New York City's solution to graffiti in subway cars; his imminent return to the United States, and the reverse culture shock for which he has prepared himself; his hopes for sustained carless "freedom and happiness" in America, and the multimodalism that still requires; how Korea's cycleability ranks overall; and what it takes to complete the country's Four Rivers Tour and receive the best souvenir of all of his time in Korea.

At a coffee house somewhere in Busan, Colin talks with Sofía Ferrero Cárrega, film critic and enthusiast of Korean cinema. They discuss whether she'd recommend other movie-lovers move to Busan; how the Busan International Film Festival attracted her to the city (and the importance of its parties); why, in Busan, "everybody says yes"; the state of Korean film criticism in Spanish; how she first encountered Korean cinema, and how its auteurs got her to know Korea; the bad first impression Korean culture can sometimes give on film; what happens when you mention kimchi in Argentina; why her move to Korea became inevitable; her experience of understanding nothing in Korea even after having studied the language for years before arriving; what makes the dialogue in Hong Sangsoo movies easier to understand than the dialogue in other movies (and why Korea struck her as a real-life Hong Sangsoo movie when she arrived); whether she feels a kinship with Isabelle Huppert's character in In Another Country; the shock of finding out that, in Korea, she's white; the understanding she gets by standing outside society, and the "healthy jealousy" she feels for those inside; the difference between Korean conception of history and the Argentine conception of history; how Korea's heavily advertised matchmaking services speak to the cultural importance of marriage; why to learn about a culture from its independent films, not his mainstream one; how Korean social life "flows" from one place to the next; the role of the Seoul International Women's Film Festival; what happened in the world of Korean film festivals in the wake of the Sewol disaster, and how all the elements aligned to match the national mood; what it felt like to live in a silent Korea; the strong identification within Korean generations; her critical interest in connecting Korean film to the conditions in Korean society; why she waited on reading about Korea until she'd lived here a while, then picked up Michael Breen's The Koreans; the difficulty of explaining Korean food and drink to friends and family back in Argentina; the Korean penchant for "crowded" food and "crowded" web sites; how the culture has turned her "no"s into "ne"s; and what hour she (as well as the Argentine ambassador) woke up to watch the World Cup.

Near Busan's Kyungsung University, Colin talks with Jeff Liebsch, managing editor and partner at the magazine Busan Haps. They discuss what makes Korean baseball games more fun than baseball games in the West; the Toronto-Detroit sports divide in his hometown of Windsor; why a disproportionate number of the Westerners in Korea seem to have come from Canada; the difficulty of understanding Busan, and of leaving it; the traces of "country people" Busan's population has retained, even as it has supposedly turned international; the funniest Korean-film subtitle he's ever seen; how he learned to speak Korean without studying; how Busan Haps got started, and how he got involved; some of the strategies the magazine has used to attain prominence in the English-language media in Korea and abroad; how he observes people he spots reading the magazine; the importance of "beautiful pictures of food" to their Korean readership; the changing coffee situation in Busan, and what else has evolved since he arrived; the time when bars closed at midnight, and what it illustrated about how Koreans find away to get around everything; the mystery of how Busan once had seven beaches and no outdoor seating anywhere; what happens in Korean when someone gets a good idea for a business; the changes he now observes in the Korean beer scene (in all settings but the baseball stadium); Korean sports teams' ties to corporations, not cities; the reputation of the Lotte fan; his experience in Korea during the 2002 World Cup, when he first saw the Koreans "let loose"; how he felt during the "IMF" economic crisis, and what he thought when he saw Koreans turn in their own personal gold to save the country's economy; the Korean sense of collectivism versus the Western sense of collectivism; why Psyworld couldn't go international, and what its problems represent to him about Korea's "lack of a global vision" in some respects; what happens during the Busan International Film Festival, his favorite time of the year; the push to transform Busan into Korea's film center; the film events that go on in Busan even apart from the BIFF; the way people living in Busan tend to stick to ten percent of the city, and visitors tend not to see the "real" parts of it; how he makes sure to get the feeling of "actually being in a different country"; his experience working in Detroit, and whether it felt like a city with a future or a city without one; how he pronounces "process"; and what he likes about observing North America from a distance.

Colin sits down at Busan's eFM with broadcaster, teacher, rapper, and television star Chad Kirton, also known as Fusion. They discuss whether the setting gets him into Korean or English mode; how he came up with his show segment "Don't Trust the Dictionary"; what a "bunnyhug" is; how the Korean desire for perfection affects their acquisition of foreign languages; the danger of agreeing in Korean when you have no idea what people are saying; what he seeks out in Busan when he goes on television; what powers burnt eel can supposedly give you; why many Koreans seem to forget Busan exists; the perpetually educational nature of Korean media; how he travels for hardworking Koreans live vicariously through television; what constitutes his 16-hour workday; when he first came to Korea, studying tae kwon do in Pohang; how Korea sometimes brings out in the Westerner the desires they might not have let out at home; how bilingual broadcasting became his speciality, beginning with the English-learning show for which he phonetically memorized his Korean lines; his first night as The Midnight Rider; how his version of "Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner" works; the diversity of age he's discovered among his listenership; how he began rapping — in Korea, freestyle, on the air; how he keeps learning Korean when many long-term expatriates plateau; his first home in Korea, with frozen pipes and above a river of raw sewage; the way that Koreans seem able to feel each other's feelings; what it meant to him when he first experienced Busan's T.G.I. Friday's; what counts as Canadian food; how he answers questions about how Canadians do things; what he tells people who want to come to Korea and teach English; how you still have to start at the bottom in Korea, but why the bottom isn't so bad; the need to understand how to "think like a Korean"; his encounter with Koreans who lived in, of all places, Medicine Hat; how much time to spend in a foreign country to really internalize the culture; the similarities and differences between his radio, television, rapping, and teaching personalities; and the difficulty of avoiding all forbidden words (in both the English and Korean "swearing Rolodex") while freestyling on the radio.

In Busan's Daeyeon-dong, Colin talks with James Turnbull, author of The Grand Narrative, a blog on Korean feminism, sexuality, and popular culture. They discuss what Westerners find so unappealing about Korean plastic surgery; the associations of the "double eyelids" so often surgically created; why he used to believe that Koreans "want to look white"; the meaning of such mystifying terms as "V-line," "S-line," and "small face"; the uncommon seriousness about the Western-invented concept of the "thigh gap"; how corn tea became publicly associated with the shape of the drinker's jaw; Korea's status as the only OECD country with young women getting thinner, not fatter; Korean advertising culture and the extent of its involvement with the "minefield" of Korean irony; the prominence of celebrities in Korean ads, and why the advertisers don't like it; how long it takes to get tired of the pop industry's increasingly provocative "sexy concepts"; the result of Korea's lack of Western-style reality television; how making-of documentaries about 15-second commercials make the viewers feel closer to the celebrities acting in them; why he doesn't want his daughters internalizing the Korean sense of hierarchy; why an expat hates Korea one day and loves it the next; how much homework his daughters do versus how much homework he did; the true role of private academies in Korea, and what he learned when he taught at one himself; the issues with English education in Korea and the oft-heard calls for its reform; the parallels between English test scores and cosmetic surgery procedures; the incomprehension that greets students of the Korean language introduced to the concept of "pretending to be pretty"; and how to describe the way Korean superficiality differs from the Western variety.

At Busan's Dongseo University, Colin talks with North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers, author of such books as A Reader's Manifesto and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. They discuss why South Koreans don't care about the Sword of Damocles that is North Korea; how Korea's capital-centricity looks from relatively far-flung Busan; why Koreans from outside Seoul seem to lack "local patriotism"; why Busan feels, to him, more like an "aggregation of apartment buildings than a community," but nevertheless like home; the benefits he enjoys of his outsider status in Korean society; the intellectual questions he can ask about Korea that a Korean couldn't; what makes the Koreans as an "ahistoric people," like the Greeks and unlike the Egyptians (and more Confucian societies); why he thinks Koreans should learn Indonesian, and why they refuse to; the difference between what Koreans tell themselves and what they tell the world; why so many fewer expatriates in Korea learn the language than in Japan or China, and what makes it so hard; how he got his Soviet Studies degree just before the Berlin Wall came down; what the reunification of Germany has to teach us about the reunification of Korea; how he became well-known among arch-conservatives for a piece on Korea's lack of "state spirit"; why he got his higher degrees in Germany, where they didn't make him go to classes; his arrival in Korea in the time of 9/11, and what took the most mental readjustment from then on; his trial by fire of lecturing at length about North Korea, in Korean; what South Koreans seem to think America is, and why it still attracts them; what it means to "behave like an American" in Korea; the "expiration period" on a foreigner's respectability; what he has come to value about Korean "flexibility"; the free-floating aggression he dislikes about America but doesn't sense in Korea; how he sees the literary pretension situation as having changed in the years since A Reader's Manifesto (and since e-books have taken off); why he hasn't fully engaged with Korean literature and cinema; and one of the highlights of his time in Busan, meeting Isabelle Huppert on the street; and whether he sees more differences or similarities emerging between North and South Korea in recent years.

Near the University of Seoul, Colin talks with Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia and, with his wife Ju-chan Fulton, half of an acclaimed Korean literary translation team. They discuss when Korean writers get too good at reflecting their own society; his first experience with Korea in the Peace Corps in 1978; his window past the military culture onto the rest of the culture; what he gained by his host family's running a restaurant; how the divide between city and countryside has changed since first he observed it from North Jeolla; when Korea's literature entered his life; how quickly world-class Korean stories started appearing in publication in the 20th century; why authors have had to "check in" with traditional subjects; the extent to which the Peace Corps expected him to learn Korean; why Koreans study english, and why that reason doesn't help them learn English; where you can still spot neo-Confucian tradition in Korean literature; what it means for a writer to "take the stage," and the contests they have to win to do it; what makes a writer like Kim Young-ha an anomaly; how much of a Korean connection Seattle and Vancouver have; the increasing number of non-Koreans he sees in his classes at UBC; whether and how Korean food has come up alongside Korean literature, and how their richness may have made them difficult; the iceberg whose tip current K-pop culture represents; the changes he notices between the Seoul he first saw and the one he sees today (and the things he notices haven't changed); whether Korean literature can help one understand Korea today; and which parts of Korean life Korean literature still captures well today.

In Seoul's Seodaemun-gu, Colin talks with Krys Lee, author of the story collection Drifting House. They discuss the impression of Korean life as a living hell; the way she prefers to mix the light and the dark; the "obsession with violence" that led her to write about a woman who longs to be beaten; "Koreanness" as Drifting House's accidental unifier; what brought her to identify with "the outsider"; her suspicions of "socialization in general"; why she thinks about what it would be like if one person simply told another, "I wish I were a raccoon"; whether one can keep a foot in reality and a foot "somewhere else" through solitude; the surprising presence in Korea of "ideas, strangeness," "girls who wear dog collars," and at least one person with a pet squirrel; her problem with genre boundaries; what makes her focus on "individuals both of and not of their culture"; her own pathway from Korea, then around the world and back to Korea again; the importance, in her time in the United Kingdom, of meeting not just other Koreans but artists; how she came to write about Korea's IMF period, one instance of her writing "driven by anger"; education as, at least theoretically, Korea's "grand equalizer"; why some Korean families who go to America pretend they aren't in America, and what Korean disasters observed from afar might make them feel; how she thinks about "getting it right" with North Korean characters; what surprises Koreans who leave and come back; the condition of the stranger in Korean culture; why some readers thought Drifting House must have had a "really good translator"; and whether a writer can use the western fascination with North Korea to pull them deeper into a real story, one that tells the "grayness."

In Seoul's Yangjae station, Colin talks with Barry Welsh, host of the Seoul Book & Culture Club and Seoul Film Society as well as professor at Sookmyung Women’s University. They discuss what Koreans know about the Isle of Man, the last place he lived; how he founded his now well-known book club; his literary encounters with the concept of han; how Kim Young-ha's I Have the Right to Destroy Myself introduced him to the real Seoul; how little time people have to waste in Korea versus how much they have on the Isle of Man; how his life in various parts of the British Isles prepared him for the kind of regional differences important in Korea; whether he endorses the view of Koreans as "the Irish of Asia"; what got him out of his homeland in the first place; the rich mundanity he experienced when he first came to Seoul; who turns up when the Book Club talks about North Korea; how Korean movies, especially older ones by auteurs of previous generations, have helped him get a grip on things in the country; howe he learned to interview writers; the first things he noticed about Seoul, such as the number of shops still open at 10:00 at night (and how that differs from his hometown of Auchterarder); with what authority he can speak on the matter of where "Scottish people eat spicy food"; how Koreans talk about "our country," but Scots don't; the stylistic difference in questions about books asked by Korean readers versus foreign readers; the feeling of safety of Seoul versus the ambient threat of Glasglow; the commonalities between "Cool Britannia" and the "Korean Wave"; his non-fandom of haggis; his perspective on the issue of Scottish independence from all the way over in Korea; the advantages of book club operation as a foreigner; and his impressions of the Korean generation represented by his students.

Right across the street from Seoul's Insadong district, Colin talks with Daniel Gray, creator of the site Seoul Eats, proprietor of craft beer restaurants Brew 3.14π and Brew 3.15π, and for four years a partner at O'ngo Food Communications. They discuss his weariness of the term "Seoul food"; what part of Korean culture happens around the table; what goes into "Daniel Gray's Ultimate Food Tour"; the pre-existing perceptions food tourists bring about Korean cuisine; the two senses in which Koreans "eat everything together"; why Koreans ask not if foreigners want to eat Korean food, but if they can; how he grew up adopted in Delaware and decided to explore Korea only after college; his first encounter with Korea in adulthood, attempting to find breakfast in Gyeongju; whether any remnants of the Korean language remained in his mind from the first five years of his life; how he got started writing not about food, but about his experience seeking out his biological mother; the meals that made him realize he loved Korean food; the dishes that took him the most getting used to, especially Korea's "nostalgic foods" from the 1960s and 70s; the way Koreans use American cheese; the sugar on Korean garlic bread; the importance of balancing all the flavors; whether the average Korean has a higher awareness of food than the average Westerner; what happened to a pizzeria in Korea when it didn't serve pickles; what makes Brew 3.14π's pizza different; what a Korean gets when they want American food; why you can't badly criticize a restaurant in the Korean media, and how that made Seoul Eats a refreshing read; the difference in attitude toward (and ease of) opening one's own restaurant in Korea and America; how restaurants show their generosity with their side dishes; the foreigner's search for "real Korean flavor" and "authenticity" in general; where to go first to get a handle on eating in Seoul; why Korean food hasn't taken off in the wider world to the extent that, for example, Japanese food has, and what that might have to do with its lack of a unifying idea; the international barriers to entry of 떡볶이; the food experiences without which you cannot understand Korean food; what he learns about international Korean food from the stream of food tourists he's met; and how he introduced his American parents to Korean food.

In Seoul's Itaewon district, Colin talks with Alex Jensen, host of weekday news show This Morning on TBS eFM. They discuss whether he envisions who he's talking to when he's talking on-air; what first strikes him about the Tube whenever he goes back to London; when he very first took to the airwaves; how much he knew about the existence of English broadcasting in Korean when he headed there in pursuit of the probable love of his life; how he developed his professional broadcasting life in Korea through "friends of friends"; what put him off music radio, and "the full breadth of life" offered by current-events radio; his grasp of the "raw emotions" of Korean, and how they came into play when he reported the sinking of the Sewol (and how it compared to his newsroom experience during the London bombings of 2005); his preference of fairness over neutrality; how the movies introduced him to the depth of Korean sentiment; why Seoul doesn't confront you with packs of drunken fifteen-year-olds on the way home; what Korean freedom consists of today; whether he, too, has a "Korean dream"; his very first impressions of Seoul, and how he sought out similarities to London while receiving them; the utmost importance of simply getting to know people; how much an English-speaking job impedes the learning of Korean; why Korea has so much English radio in the first place; the culture that develops in major media not in a country's dominant language; the questions he can ask that a Korean might hesitate to; the sensationalism over North Korea in foreign media versus the shrugging in South Korea; how different Itaewon, where he lives, feels from the rest of Korea; where he sees the emergence of a more international Korea; where to find the best British food in Seoul; and how having a long, large-scale media conversation with Korean society has helped him integrate into it.

In Seoul's Haebangchon district, Colin Marshall talks with Charles Montgomery, professor in the English Interpretation and Translation Division of Dongguk University, editor of the site KTlit.com, and global ambassador of Korean literature in translation. They discuss the first Korean books that excited him; the mistakes he made in choosing his first works of Korean literature to read; the significance of bestseller authors Kim Young-ha and Shin Kyoung-sook; the impossibility of getting around the literary prize system, and how that suppresses genre; how the substantial literature of the Korean War compares to what literature America has of its own Civil War; how his Korean best friend influenced the course of his professional life; why he burnt out as a marketing director and how it led him to Korea; the intense nature of Korean emotional bonds (and the intensity of their absence); why you have to treat everyone in the United States as a "potential shooter"; what happens when you read Korean literature with an understanding of the culture; whether Americans can ever internalize the Korean sense of obligation to society; how much Korean literature makes it into English; the idea that, to write for foreigners, a Korean writer somehow becomes less Korean; the popularity of Haruki Murakami in Korean translation; how he got "inside the elbow"; America and Korea as cultural antidotes to one another; why cities back in the U.S. seem to lag so far behind those of Korea; how one translated bestseller "drags" the rest of its country's literature behind it; how Dalkey Archive handled Korean literature; the Korean preference for short stories and novellas over full-length novels; the insights into Korean society that literature still gives him; why Korean characters seem to lack agency; what Western literature he likes; which Korean writers have a tantalizing amount of work still untranslated; why Koreans have considered so many elements of their culture unknowable to foreigners; the exalted status of the 작가님; the signs that will let us know Korean literature has made it; and what stands a chance of becoming Korea's geisha, chrysanthemum, sword, sushi, and Shinjuku.

In Anyang, Colin talks with Steve Miller, creator of the Asia News Weekly podcast, and the vlogger formerly known as QiRanger. They discuss whether he notices what goes on on around him has he records himself on video on the streets of various countries; the suburbs of Seoul versus the suburbs of Phoenix; the possible pronunciations of "QiRanger"; why he lives in Asia, and in this moment Korea; whether he researched Korea beforehand or just plunged in; when and why he made his first video ever; how his travel videos came as a natural extension of old family slideshows; the origin of his "walk-and-talk" videos, in which he does exactly that; the usefulness of neighborhood maps in Korean subway stations, especially when they got calorie counts added to them; why he enjoys Korean food in the Philippines so much; his experience as a tall white guy with a shaved head in a homogenous Asian country, and how his youth at a black school prepared him for it; how he got into news podcasting; the cafe street in Dongtan, where he lives, and how business models become brief crazes in Korea; the planning for failure Koreans don't tend to do; his Korean foods of choice; the difference between 신천 and 신촌; his success rate with Mexican cuisine in Korea; how to think about the Philippines; the inevitable video-making that happens on his vacations; what a GoPro actually is; they myth about foreigners in Korea he'd most like to explode; the motivation his Star Trek-watching childhood instilled in him; why he wants to stop teaching basic English in Korea, and why students of English there rarely learn to communicate well; why he thinks Asia is so important, and how he thinks it enriches those who come to it.

In Seoul's Hongdae district, Colin talks with Keith Kim, creator of the travel and culture site Seoulistic. They discuss how Birkenstocks became the dominant Korean trend in the summer of 2014; what a gyopo is, and what it means to live in Korea as one; his ability to present himself as both a Korean and a foreigner; the Korean expectations to which he can least adhere; how little the old and the young understand one another in Korea; how the tattoo and smoking situation has changed in society since he first arrived; what he found when he first visited Korea during the celebratory time of the 2002 World Cup; the difficulty of finding a coffee shop in Apgujeong not attached to a plastic surgery clinic; why Koreans assume certain personality traits correlate with certain facial features; why you can do "Humans of New York", but you couldn't do "Humans of Seoul"; the advantages of "not counting" in Korean society; the power of "Korean stink eye"; why he chose to live in Japan as well; the old people who freely touch foreigners on the train; what most clashes with his American side, especially in the realm of dating; what makes more sense in Korean society than in American; the varying attitudes toward parental wisdom in Korea and America; how a foreigner can know Seoul better than a Korean; what foreigners tend to do wrong in Korea; the difference between American and Korean suburbs; why he wants a back yard; the death of "the American dream," and why his Korean-born Americanized dad wants to return to Korea from his own; his desire to live in Thailand; the single idea of beauty that has taken hold in Korea, and why the population may, ultimately, just want to look the same; his coterie of "international people" in Seoul, and how much they usually like the city; the Korean demand for opinions; how to avoid becoming a bitter expat in Seoul; why he folds his clothes like a Japanese housewife; and whether he'd base himself in New York, Seoul or Tokyo if he had to choose right now.  

In Seoul's Hongdae district, Colin talks with Chance Dorland, radio- and podcast-hosting expat in countries like Germany, Colombia, and now South Korea, currently of Groove magazine's Groovecast, TBS eFM's "Chance Encounters" segment, and Chance and Dan Do Korea. They discuss the one thing that unites Americans; the origins of his Korean podcasting career; whether people knew what the Peace Corps was after he got out of the Peace Corps; why he rejected both Los Angeles and New York; how he made peace with growing up in a small Iowa town, despite what he never got to learn there; mudding; what it felt like, growing up, to meet someone who had been to a major city; how he acquired a "fake family"; what, in adolescence, he somehow "knew" America had more of than any other country; the affliction that made class attendance difficult; when he realized Boston, where he went for college, doesn't count as a big city; the enthusiasm for World War II that got him applying to go to Germany; the comparative lack of user-friendliness in major American cities; what he doesn't have to deal with in Seoul; the simultaneous fall of traditional media and rise of new media; how Korea opened the opportunity to form band after band; the general low quality of so many people working in the American media; how he got out of English teaching and into radio; where his desire to work with poor people led him; why the Peace Corps lies, and how he wound up getting the wrong medication in their time with them; where to find Korean food in Des Moines; why he wants to do radio "in a booth," and why that may prove more attainable in Korea than elsewhere; how he started reporting for TBS eFM; the obstacles to getting a job as a foreigner with no Korean wife or Korean heritage; and how foreigner occupational diversity might benefit Korea.

On the Seoul Floating Islands, Colin talks with Nikola Medimorec, co-author of Kojects, an English-language blog on transport, urban planning, and development projects around Korea. They discuss the first Korean city he ever experienced, and what introduction it gave him to both the country's festival culture and its development culture; what makes the transit different in Asia than in elsewhere; the installation he witnessed of glass panels on the subway platforms, and how that not just prevents suicides but improves the riding experience; the question that got him studying geography in the first place; the success of his posts on KTX stations he wrote in his first, German-language blog, and how that led to Kojects; why he most enjoys writing about Korean bicycle infrastructure, now that it has become possible to bike there; the difference between cycling in Korea and cycling in Germany, where he grew up; how old Korean men all listen to the radio on their bicycles; how he plunged right into his studies at Seoul National University, including a statistics class in Korean; how the Suwon EcoMobility Festival took over his life; the cities that most fascinate him outside of Seoul; his impressions of the new-built "city from scratch" of Songdo and the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, "an alien spaceship landed in the middle of Seoul"; the current Seoul mayor's aversion to all big projects, especially the "ugly" DDP; the ongoing controversy of the Cheonggyecheon Stream; whether a project like the Yonsei-ro Transit Mall can allow for commerce on the street (and especially street food); his initial surprise at all the people on the streets in Seoul, and the changing reasons they've come out to the streets; where to look for a pojangmacha, and why having to search for them is a problem in itself; the domestic culture of  Germany versus the urban culture of Korea; what impresses German friends when the come visit Korea; what Korean cities could learn from European ones; whether Korea has any more large-scale projects remaining in the future; how older European buildings have become favored, while even 25-year-old buildings in Korea have badly deteriorated and await redevelopment; what the new "phallus symbol" of the Lotte World Tower (in which he once saw a fire) demonstrates, and why he doesn't care about that kind of skyscraper; whether Korean 빠리 빠리 culture results in a shoddy built environment; why he couldn't do a Kojects-style blog in Germany; Kojects' reliance on Korean sources, and how that separates it from other English-language sites observing Korean cities; how much of his mastery of Korean comes directly from reading about transport and urban development; his preferred methods for first exploring a city; what you notice when you walk in Seoul; and the story behind the Seoul Floating Islands on which they sit.

At a bar by the train tracks near Yongsan, Colin talks with Jon Dunbar, urban explorer, editor of long-running Korean punk zine Broke in Korea, and author of Daehanmindecline. They discuss the difference between a Korean abandoned place and a Canadian abandoned place; how Seoul got re-inhabited after the war; the development of poor "moon villages" on the hillsides; how he defines "urban exploring," and why he dislikes that name; the urban renewal process that causes the abandonment of neighborhoods; the hired goons who harass people to leave areas slated for demolition; how big a city all the abandoned buildings he's visited would constitute by themselves; his experience in the tunnel from The Host; what it means to explore Korea's abandoned/disputed/places as a foreigner, and the difficulty of getting Koreans interested in urban exploration; the time he ran into a man collecting scrap metal, and why that man felt embarrassment for his country; the difference between the Korea he came to, which had both grass huts and high-rises, and Korea today; why so many buildings in Seoul have reached such an advanced state of decrepitude so quickly; what he prefers about North Korean architecture to South; what most high-rises in Seoul stand on the ruins of; his discovery of the Korean punk scene, and why he needed to confirm its existence before he came to live; the lower level of violence and higher level of musicianship in Korean punk; how he got to work for an organization like the Korean government; the ominousness of a presidential promise to promote "the happiness of the people"; the meaning of han, why the government now wants to eradicate the concept, and how pansori reggae expresses it; the change in Seoul mayors that brought about a change in major Seoul building projects; the significance of the new Dongdaemun Design Plaza and the politics involved in building it; how, rather than declining, Korea has "improved in every way" since he turned up; his life in Bukcheon hanok village, and how its old-style houses have become more coveted in recent years; whether Korea can shake the idea of "old = bad"; where in Korea he witnessed a funk brawl; and the way to "use your unfamiliarity as a tool" in a place like Korea.

In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Stephane Mot, "conceptor," writer of fiction, nonfiction, "nonsense," and author of the blog Seoul Village as well as the collection Dragedies. They discuss Paris as a "recurring hero" of literature and Seoul as a "shapeshifter" glimpsed from different angles in different stories; how he got involved in the early days of internet gaming, surviving three startups in three years; the French embassy job that brought him to Seoul in 1991; why he prefers winter in Seoul to winter in Paris; the difficulty of walking in Seoul when first he got there; the first of the city's "villages" that convinced him to explore more; what kind of relationship with Paris he has as a ninth-generation Parisian, and what it has gained by his becoming a partial outsider; when he first began writing about Korea; why of the two important subjects of love and death, he sticks to death; his "Borgesian experience" of discovering the internet; the subjects to which he finds himself returning in Seoul over and over again; why he writes in both French and English; his definition of a city as a scar; what he sees happening to the Korean social fabric, and how it works differently in France; the difference between the new-built urban places of Songdo and La Défense; what happens when a city has "no place for storytelling"; why he searches maps for crooked streets; what got the cars out of Sinchon; his "biggest shame," his relationship with the Korean language, which keeps its learners thinking they've never learned enough; his skill with "Korean silence"; the Seoulite's constant grieving for what has disappeared, or what will soon disappear; why he writes about the "gaps" on the maps; how having one's own fictional Seoul prevents insanity; how more people now really come from Seoul, resulting in new senses of belonging and identity; the emerging schizophrenia between the "Korean wave" and Korean tradition; what remains unformed in Seoul to keep him awake; the reasons to hope offered by the increasing consciousness of and affection for Seoul; and the possible end of the "lemming race" to the capital.

In Seoul's Garosu-gil, Colin talks with Darcy Paquet, critic of Korean film, founder of koreanfilm.org and the Wildflower Film Awards, author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, teacher, and occasional actor. They discuss why movies have a hard time capturing Seoul; the unusual way the Park brothers' Bitter, Sweet, Seoul captures the city; how Cold Eyes relocated a Hong Kong story into Seoul; how, after arriving in Korea in 1997, he got to know the city in step with getting to know the cinema; how he knew Seoul would grow dramatically as soon as he got there, but how nobody expected the Korean film industry would grow so much; why, right when Korean culture started going worldwide; Korean filmmakers were ready; which Korean movies Koreans tried to steer foreigners away from, and which they themselves have returned to more recently; what strengths older Korean films whose makers had to "fight the system" have that modern ones don't; how effectively one can ready oneself for Korean life with Korean film; the size of Korea's cinematic iceberg beneath the tip of Oldboy, Shiri, Snowpiercer, and the like; the less-defined border between Korea's mainstream theaters and its "art houses"; what happens when Korean directors go Hollywood to make movies like The Last Stand and Stoker; what part movies (and associated pursuits) have played in helping him master the Korean language; the kind of diversity Korea has as revealed in cinema; the meaning of modernized hanok; why the last twenty minutes of Korean movies are so often just crying; the importance of Chilsu and Mansu, the first film that stepped in after the relaxation of censorship to make a political point; the sort of political criticism expressed in more recent movies like The President's Last Bang and The Attorney; whether he feels more critical freedom than would a Korean; how Korean producers have done less to "protect directors from the money" these days; the "difference of opinion on objectivity and subjectivity" between Korea and the west as expressed in documentaries and their switch from "we" to "I"; what filmmaking techniques work on him now that wouldn't have when he first came to Korea (and which still don't); whether films have yet begun to take him back to his previous years in Seoul; what he sees when he revisits Christmas in August, one of the first Korean films he ever saw; how much of the Korea ahead, the country his sons and their generation of Koreans unlike those the world has known before will grow up in, he can see in the movies.

In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Danny Crichton, researcher and writer on regional innovation hubs and a contributing writer for TechCrunch. They discuss the hardest thing about being a Korean entrepreneur; what the concentration of Seoul has facilitated about Korean innovation; how he got from an interest in China "because it's China" to a more fully developed interest in Korea; what happened to Sony, and thus Japan; how he responds to the current Korean of question, "Is this really a developed country?"; how people have stopped putting up with the country's corruption, perhaps one of the drivers of its astonishing growth; how the ideas of the "heterodox" economist Ha-joon Chang apply to all this; why the concept of the subway-station "virtual grocery store" caught his eye; why Silicon Valley is so much more boring than Seoul; the significance of Kakaotalk and its abundance of purchasable "culturally ambiguous stickers"; why so many things, like playing Starcraft in stadiums, seem only to work in Korea; how Korea got a highway torn down in eight weeks; what thinking led to the new city of Songdo 43 train stops outside Seoul, and what it proves, negatively, about how "people want to live near other people"; why you can't just "build innovation"; how he found both Hello Kitty Planet and a giant Bible; organic agglomeration versus the deliberate agglomeration the Korean government has tried to incentivize; the country's distinctive capitalist-socialist "hybrid model"; whether the government can really pick winners; how much advantage hugeness gives a country these days; what he learned from Singaporean entrepreneurs, who have to go straight to the global market, and why the United States hasn't had to think globally; his early exposure to Silicon Valley culture, and how he got interested in the connections between universities, industries, and government; how the strength of America's universities, even today, remains the country's strength; how the idea of "what Korea needs" still has more traction than the equivalent in the U.S., though less than it did in the past; whether Americans have begun to realize that they can find opportunities in other countries; why Americans cling so tightly to the decade or two after the Second World War as if it were the rightful state of things; what comparisons he can make between the challenges facing San Francisco and those facing Seoul; the "pragmatic urban development philosophy" in Seoul versus the "almost religious zealot" one in San Francisco; the difference between cities that think of the future as good, and those that don't; why he thinks "a little bit about Thailand"; why strategically wrong choices don't persist in Korea quite as long as in America; whether Korea can cure it's "education fever" and resultant title culture; and the greater effect Korea's laws have on its entrepreneurs than its culture does.

Not far from Seoul's Anam station, Colin talks to Charlie Usher, author of the blog Seoul Sub→urban and the book 찰리와 리즈의 서울 지하철 여행기 (Charlie and Liz's Seoul Subway Travelogue). They discuss the first subway stations his life in Korea revolved around; the identity of Liz, the photographer in Charlie and Liz; what makes the Seoul subway system the best framework in which to get to know the city; the impressive integration of the subway with the city itself, meaning that city life doesn't stop at the station entrance; whether he began with any methods and systems for documenting his subway travel; how the whole project came about through "a sense of guilt"; which stations, in and of themselves, make for cool Seoul places; why the concept of shopping in a stations surprises Americans; where, and whether, urban Seoul ends and suburban Seoul begins; how he came to understand Seoul's role as the focal point of Korea; when he realized Seoul Sub→urban had taken him where he wouldn't have gone before, and not into the Seoul repetitive blandness of stereotype; when he realized his work interested Koreans as well; how Korea has made him appreciate the diversity of the United States, even in his home state of Wisconsin, and how he has come to appreciate the "deep sense of community" in Korea; why public transit never took hold in the same way in America as it did in Asia; how much of a longing he can develop for whatever lies beyond the train lines; the different Seoul you see depending on the mode of transportation you use; the lack of any good reason for which he first came to Korea after graduation, except for the teacher-exchange program at his university; how his aunt and uncle preceded him to Korea by coming to the more "brutish" Seoul for the 1988 Olympics; what he's noticed about which languages subway announcements come in at which stops; the change in ridership demographics and advertisements from line to line; why you see white guys on Line 6; whether he uses subways as the framework for understanding other cities as well; his short but extremely deep experience on the Pyongyang metro; what about Seoul still surprises him after seven years there; how many of greater Seoul's 500-ish subway stations he's explored; the newly built lines whose openings he even now anticipates; the distinctive bouquets that appear whenever anything has its ribbon cut; when not exploring Korea through its transit, how he explores it through its food; the recent explosion in Seoul coffee shops, which more than freed him from the need to board a train to get to one; and what it felt like to see the fruit of his labors become a Korean-language book.

Above Seoul's Itaewon district, Colin talks with Open Books acquiring editor Gregory Limpens. They discuss what kind of foreign literature Koreans like to read, and their loyalty to authors they've already enjoyed; how the mission of Open Books fits into shaping that taste; how he got from growing up in Belgium to bringing foreign literature in Korea (and practicing trademark law somewhere in the middle); what about his first, traveling impressions of Seoul stoked his desire to live there; his impression of the future-orientation of Korea versus the historical orientation of Belgium; the nature of "Brusselization"; how he discovered the traditional Korean sensibility of not showing off (and how he sees that changing); whether the multilingualism of his homeland helped him get in the frame of mind to learn Korean; the widening vase as a metaphor for language acquisition; whether Koreans have any particular expectations of Belgians, and where they fit into the apparent hierarchy of foreigners in Korea; what happens at the Seoul International Book Fair, and why Belgium may never get an invitation as its guest nation of honor; what happens when he tries to recommend a browser something at the Open Books booth, and why that can be a discouraging practice in Korean culture; what he knows about translation that makes him always want to read books in the original language; how "l'exception française" has produced a great deal of literature; how often he meets Korean French-speakers; how a Korean Belgian waffle differs from a Belgian Belgian waffle; his sole moment of homesickness in a decade of life in Korea; the changes in his responses to his own periodic assessment, "Why do I like it here?"; what has made him lose confidence in his grasp of Korean literary taste; why Hitler remains a big thematic name in Europe, but probably wouldn't play in Korea; the success of Korean "fables for adults"; his pride in Open Books bringing out titles like Michel Houellebecq's Atomized, and the literary aejeong he feels for ones like his countryman  Dimitri Verhulst's The Misfortunates; how writers react to seeing their novels in Korean translation; how much Korean readers care about book design; how Korean bookstores feel different.

In Seoul's Itaewon District, Colin talks with Stephen Revere, CEO of 10 Media (producer of Chip's Maps), co-founder and managing editor of 10 Magazine, author of two Survival Korean books, and for three years the teacher on Arirang television's Let's Speak Korean. The Seoul in which he arrived, and which amazed him, in 1995; how quickly he decided to master the Korean language, and the dearth of tools he had back in those days, such as the Korean Through English books; where the Defense Language Institute's hierarchy of difficulty discouragingly ranks Korean; the frustrations of studying Korean alongside Chinese and Japanese classmates; why students on Let's Speak Korean had to pretend to speak Korean poorly; his days with the "한외모" speaking group; what he enjoyed most about Korean life that convinced him to learn more and more about it; what got him from subscribing to 3-2-1 Contact as a kid to starting 10 Magazine as an adult; what a foreigner should know to make best use of a city like Seoul, or a country like Korea; what remains "hidden" about Korea in this era of the "Korean wave"; why so many Koreans dismiss their hometowns, if they don't come from Seoul; what he does when he heads out in to the provinces; the "massive" generational difference between older and younger Koreans; what his life in Korea has taught him about America; what positive aspect of Korea it reflects that you can easily get into shouting matches there; how the size of your vehicle determines your right-of-way on the roads of Seoul; the unique role Itaewon, home of 10 Magazine headquarters as well as "Hooker Hill", "Homo Hill", and a mosque, plays in Seoul, and why it inspires a song like "Itaewon Freedom"; whether more Korean teaching lies in his future; when he knew he would't be going back to America; when he realized he'd attained fluency in Korea, and what it means to be fluent anyway; why you've got to join the group for eating in Korea (and possibly turn ex-vegetarian because of that); why the markets provide the purest experience of the culture; and whether he still  considers mastering another language.

In Seoul's Insadong district, Colin talks with Michael Breen, author of The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies as well as other books on Kim Jong-il and Sun Myung Moon as well as founder and CEO of Insight Communications Consultants. They discuss what you can infer about Korean society from the way Koreans drive versus now versus when he first wrote wrote The Koreans; the difference in the role of the law where it has traditionally oppressed people, as in Korea, and in society like the United States; the permanently red traffic lights in front of the president's house, and how you get through by "looking at the man"; what effect the sinking of the Sewol and the "third-world accidents" that preceded it had on the country's psyche as a developed nation; why those from already-developed countries have a hard time advising less-developed nations on matters like corruption; how "the politics lags behind the quality of the the people" in Korea, why the skills of rhetoric matter less there than elsewhere, and what the situation might have in common with Yes Minister; the dictator Park Chung-hee, "son of a bitch, but our son of a pitch" who ordered the country into development; why the South Korean government has no long-term plan for unification with the North; what sort of country he thought he'd got into in 1982, the extent of his ignorance about it at first, and the theoretical frameworks and attitudes he thereby escaped; the moment he found himself taking the side of journalist-beating cops; how Korean dictators, not just "random brutes" who rose to power, got put there by a particular system; why the potential "Seoul Spring" after the fall of Park Chung-hee didn't immediately lead to democracy, but to conflicts between the citizenry and the police; what he heard (and couldn't hear) in North Korea; how many branches of Starbucks he could hit with a stone (and how different were the old coffee shops in which dissidents met); what got stamp collectors arrested in the "old" South Korea; what lengths the South Korean government goes to not to allow its citizens their own judgment on North Korea; the lingering sense, in South Korea, that the North may have taken the high road; the issue of how unbroken Korean history really could have remained over the millennia; the Korean lack of an idea of Korean philosophical tradition; what got him interested enough in the Koreans to write The Koreans; the traditionally condescending (if thoughtfully condescending) attitude foreigners had toward Korea; what may change in the next edition in The Koreans, especially its coverage of culture; whether modern Korea remains recognizably the same place he came to in 1982; and what issues might make the most impact on the country soon.

In Seoul's Arirang building, Colin talks with Adrien Lee, host of Arirang TV's Showbiz Korea and Arirang radio's Catch the Wave. They discuss how he first reacted to the sight of all the branches of Paris Baguette, Tout les Jours, and Ciel de France in Seoul; how he got from industrial engineering studies in France to television and radio in Korea (and why he isn't looking back); what Korean culture he could get exposure to growing up in France; how few complications his background introduced into his childhood; how his French mom met, and learned to speak Korean before meeting, his Korean dad; the Korean dream of Paris, France, and Europe; the constant change in Korea, the "exciting hell," versus the unchanging stability of France, the "boring heaven"; what Koreans ask him when they find out he comes from France; how he grew up speaking a mother tongue, a father tongue, and a school tongue; how he teaches Korean language with Hyunwoo Sun, and why he finds people start studying it; how Korean people make the study of Korean interesting (in slight contrast to the situation with French); how he adapts his behavior to different cultures; the elements of Korean popular culture he personally enjoys, even when he doesn't have to talk about them for work; the sort of Korean food you get in Paris; the things you wouldn't expect that Korea, but not France, puts into bread; what has surprised him about the strengths of Korean culture, including the Korean women's golf performance; the convenience of Seoul's safety, 24/7 culture, and ease of leaving your laptop out at the coffee shop when you get up to use the bathroom; whether Korea and France can learn from one another's priorities; whether Seoul has become an international city in the Parisian manner; where he takes visiting friends and relatives in Seoul; what first steps to take toward Korean culture before coming here; and how to keep up with his broadcasts, wherever you may live.

On a rainy day in Seoul's Garosu-gil, Colin talks with Marc Raymond, film scholar, teacher at Kangwoon University, and author of Hollywood's New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese. They discuss how much you can learn about Korean life from Hong Sangsoo movies; what Hong has in common with Martin Scorsese; how the two directors relate differently to their "outsider" status; the international code Hong seems to have cracked, and why the rest of Korea covets that; Hong's probable place in the Criterion Collection (or at least the Eclipse Series); how, exactly, he would describe what a Hong Sangsoo film is; the rarity of the intersection between talky relationship cinema and formally experimental cinema; the importance of drinking, smoking, and improvisation in not just Hong's method but in Korean culture itself; how he first discovered Hong, and how he discovered Scorsese shared his enthusiasm; how Hong illustrates the breakdown of the social rules Korea doesn't expect to break down; why his Korean wife laugh at different moments in the movies than he does; whether straight-up critiques of Korean masculinity have remained central to Hong's work; Hong's less-discussed critique of Korean femininity; whether he finds, given his experience with Korean life, that Hong's criticism of Korean society hit the mark; how Hong's films have become linguistically easier as he has gained larger international audiences; why, between degrees, he came to Korea in the first place; his early impressions of the familial attitude and reliance on authority that penetrated all environments; the reductiveness he dislikes in the scholarship of both Korea and Scorsese; where his native Canada's lack of popular cinema drove him; whether Koreans expect him to exemplify Canadian virtues; the hockey comedy that outgrossed Titanic in Quebec; what it felt like to go from a huge, thinly populated country to a small, thickly populated one where his first apartment complex had more people than his hometown; the importance of a career that allows you to pick and choose where you go and when in a big city; what films, besides Hong's, have helped him integrate into Korean culture, like Oasis and Secret Sunshine; the difference between Korean melodrama and other countries' melodrama; who we can call "the Korean Martin Scorsese"; and whether Canada has, or could use, a Scorsese of its own.

In Seoul's Gangnam district, Colin speaks with Mipa Lee, proprietor of Itaewon's vegan cafe and bake shop and café PLANT and author of the blog Alien's Day Out. They discuss the unlikely country in which she became vegan; her journey from Korea to England to Africa to the United States and back to Korea again; her constant expectation of a move that had kept her from putting down roots or buying furniture; how her parents became early international Koreans; how her boarding school gave her blog its name; how much distance she now feels from "Korean Koreans"; PLANT's role as a kind of international waters in the international neighborhood (and tourist space for Koreans) of Itaewon; how her return to Korea initially happened against her will, but how she then turned it to her advantage; how Korea's advanced delivery infrastructure aided her initial baking ventures; the way to integrate into Seoul's vast ecosystem of coffee shops, in which many Koreans want to participate at least once in their life; why you don't get tainted for life here if your business goes under, unlike in Japan; when vegan desserts became widely viable, and which desserts quickly became successful for her; how exotic Koreans find "comfort food for foreigners"; when she discovered the fact that people want to indulge in "heavier and heartier" foods, vegan or otherwise; why, in Korea, she often has to "explain exactly what meat is"; the challenge of finding even kimchi in vegan form (and her memories of the kimchi situation in Ghana);  the popularity in Korea of Ghana brand chocolate; the "laid-back culture" she misses from Africa; the search for Ethiopian food in Seoul, and how seeking out vegan cuisine in general got her exploring the city, even in places she'd never go otherwise; the difference between Seoul and her birthplace of Busan; how she might one day balance her culinary, artistic, and exploratory interests; the way Korean eminence leads to more work, not less; where she dreams of traveling while spending six weeks at the shop; the contrast between her childhood memories of Korea and her experience of it today; whether the world might inevitably turn vegan; how she deals with eating vegan amid Korean social culture (by, for example, hanging out with foreigners); how different Seoul looks from the vantage of Itaewon; what she learns from getting to know, and in a sense "traveling" through, her international clientele; what art she dreams of creating while spending six weeks at the shop; what advice she gives to other vegans and vegetarians about existence in Seoul, such as how to obtain kale.

In Seoul's Hongdae district, Colin talks with Mark Russell, author of the books Pop Goes Korea, K-Pop Now!, and the coming novel Young-hee and the Pullocho. They discuss what unites Korean pop culture other than having made by Korean people; the tendency toward mixture that characterizes so much of the country culture; his early experience with Korean culture practicing tae kwon do in high school; where the "if this doesn't work, I can go teach English in Korea" took him, how he envisioned that prospect, and how he found himself on a plane to Korea the same week he brought up the idea; the "completely different" Seoul of today from the "bare" one he found in the nineties, where Pringles could excite him; what in Korea doesn't change, amid all the change that has gone on; the European look backward, and the Korean look forward; how Korea makes the impossible possible, but sometimes takes the possible and screws it up; the bygone days when every foreigner was assumed to be an American; whether K-pop saturates Korea more than American pop saturates American; what, exactly, makes pop music uncool; the consequences of the fact that "most people don't live at the PhD level; what makes Korean blockbusters more interesting than American ones, including not having quite cracked the "scientific blockbuster code"; the Korean popular culture his first discovered; what happens when you go drinking with a favorite director; what happens when you look too closely into the "sausage factory" of art production; the pop golden age people remember from three years ago; when he realized his own life in Korea had taken shape; his plunge into the Seoul alternative music scene; when Busan, not Seoul, had the best music in Korea; the role Hongdae has played in Korean music, having become the Korean music scene itself; why groups have trouble touring the country; Korea's lack of unconventional "slots" in which to live, especially outside Seoul; when he began writing fiction, and how he wrote a novel set in Korea while in Spain; the all-important "de-terriblization" process in art; how much insight traditional Korean folktales give him into the culture today; the foreigner's freedom to "get things wrong in your own way"; his years in Spain, and the difference drinking wine there versus drinking wine in Korea; what he began to miss about Seoul while away; his impressions of the Spanish economic crisis; his sense of Korea getting better and better, economically as well as culturally, despite the fact that he "wants to be as cynical as everyone else."

In Seoul's Gangnam district, Colin talks with Laurence Pritchard, writer, teacher, and enthusiast of Korean literature. They discuss the Korean phenomenon of the "English gentleman" and the presence of English culture in the country; the idea that westerners "are all incredibly promiscous"; the expectations of an Englishman; the constant hurry of Seoul; his experience in France versus the Korean France of the imagination; the importance of swirling with the biggest wine glass you can get; the "disaster" of Korean bread the better part of a decade ago, and how it comes up against the English refusal to mix the sweet and the savory; what exposure to Korean culture he had before meeting his Korean wife in Paris; how he tuned into Korean film's tendency to mix styles; what literature has taught him about the central idea of han; Dalkey Archive's library of Korean literature; how he has come to get a handle on Korean class distinctions and intergenerational conflict; how his unhesitating decision to move to Korea came about; when he realized the true strictness of the hierarchies here, especially through how they manifest in novels; the greater importance of the president of Samsung than the president of South Korea; what it's like teaching English to high-powered executives; the drinking habits in Seoul (such as going straight to hard liquor and falling down escalators) versus those seen in English pubs; the failure of the "hipster" or "bohemian" idea, let alone irony, to penetrate Korean dress; the expatriate tendency to demonstrate they know more about the culture than you do; the ways that people in Korea don't connect; the parallels between attitudes toward Park Chung-hee and Margaret Thatcher; the default business of the fried-chicken shop; the difference between getting into French culture with French literature and getting into Korean culture with Korean literature; what goes into a "Gangnam novella"; the advantage of writing about Seoul rather than writing about Paris; what he gains by having a life and family established in Korea, and the prospect of doing a language exchange with his own daughter; how you don't go up to someone in England and say, "Hey, I'm from England"; the promising Korean literature translations of Deborah Smith; whether you can work with the "great truths" imparted by literature when plunged into a foreign culture; the necessity of assuming the impossibility of knowing about the foreign culture you plunge into; and his experience in a Seoul "bullet taxi," just like the ones Kim Young-ha describes in I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.

In Seoul's Garosu-gil, Colin Marshall talks with Korean music industry expert Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a creative agency that provides digital media, marketing, and distribution services to Korean pop music artists. They discuss why the world now knows what K-pop is; how Korean youth culture, pop culture, and digit culture have become one in the same; Psy as outlier and representative of K-pop, "the bad boy who became the golden boy," who put a dent in the industry's pursuit of perfection; how "made in Korea" can work, internationally, as a label; whether the concept of "crazy Korea," like "weird Japan," has any traction; the big technological differences between the time of the 1990s J-pop boom and the modern K-pop boom; the musician's perceived need to break out of Korea for success; how, growing up in the United States, he became aware of Korean popular culture; his disenchantment with the "boo-hoo session" of Asian American studies; the accidental meeting that got him into music television; what he discovered in Seoul's Hongdae neighborhood; the Korean government's investment in internet technology, and the digital and cultural revolution that followed; why Korean pop artists have, in the recent past, made so little money; the use of music not as a business, but as a business card; Korea's other DMZ: the closed-garden "digital media zone" of Korea-only technology; how he first saw the seemingly wholly under-construction Seoul almost twenty years ago; how the vibe of the 2002 World Cup has carried over into the present; what Los Angeles and Seoul have to learn from each other; how his advantage in coming from America has gone away; how K-pop has become "sonic bibimbap," uniquely Korean in its mixture of various ingredients; what Koreanness internationally-marketed Korean music retains; his "What am I even doing?" moment on a flight from Los Angeles to Seoul; why the origin of the word "piracy" reveals it as a good thing, and how it sparked the British Invasion; what he makes of the return of the 1960s and 70s "golden age" of Korean pop and R&B; and why he tells artists they shouldn't do everything in English (and why he plays them Sigur Rós).

In Seoul's Mapo-gu, Colin talks with Hyunwoo Sun, founder of the Korean language-learning site Talk to Me in Korean. They discuss whether a space alien with no knowledge of any human language should first study English or Korean; how he got into teaching his native language; how the strangeness of seeing foreigners speaking Korean has disappeared for him; the state of Korean English education, and how he managed not to get permanently put off language study by it despite the fact that "everything I learned about English was wrong"; how he corrected his own English by re-studying sounds first, going to Telnet for help, recording his own voice on audio cassette, and finding pen pals; the satisfaction of perceiving the lack of humor in Korean subtitles to English-language movies; why foreigners in Korea speak less Korean than foreigners in Japan speak Japanese or foreigners in China speak Chinese; how Koreans secretly all pay attention to any interaction between a foreigner and another Korean; what changes in his personality depending on the language he speaks, such as his Korean sentimentality or his English logic; the advantages he has realized his own language and culture has, such as the tight bonds that they form between individuals; why so many young people in Korea have the goal of going to Seoul; the luxurious dorm he got to stay in during high school by being one of the top hundred students; the battle that went on in Gwangju, his hometown, in 1980, the year he was born, and how it strengthened his family; the kind of confidence it took to start a language podcast; what he's learned about how foreigners learn Korean, and some strategies he recommends to any language-learners; why he has now spent most of his life in Seoul; the other cities in which he'd like to live his same lifestyle, but in other languages; how he plans to raise his baby son multilingual; and the coming generation of international Koreans who, like the buskers who have appeared over the past few years on the streets of Seoul, have the confidence to use their dormant language abilities.

Beneath the rock of Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Colin Marshall talks with documentarian Doug Pray, maker of such films as Hype! on the Seattle 1990s grunge scene, Infamy on graffiti artists, Surfwise on Doc Paskowitz's traveling family, and Art & Copy on the advertising industry. His new Levitated Mass examines the complicated movement of the rock all the way from Riverside to its site at LACMA. They discuss how often he's stood under the rock since making the movie, and what he hears when he does; how his projects all look at misunderstood subcultures; how he thinks about giving voice to critics of his subjects, be they rocks, art movements, or industries; the importance of "lifting the veil" in a documentary; how it takes "a disaster or something great" to bring Los Angeles together, and the way this great thing found have turned into a disaster; the similarities between the time of the rock's movement through town and that of the 1984 Olympics; the comparison between the movement of the rock, and the movement of the space shuttle Endeavor several months later; the agonizing formation of the rock's route; how a large-scale art project like this compares to a large-scale public works project like the subway; the "absurdity of the ask," and the work's resultant "extreme permanence"; why its being a rock bothers people; the way that not just the artwork but "the happening became its own thing"; how he became aware of Heizer's art, and what he thought about his piece in Seattle when he saw it during the Hype! era; how East Lansing got, and lost, their own Heizer; the current debate over permanence and impermanence in Los Angeles; how the best cities anthologize all their eras, and the way this city has found its mixture; why "the ideas about Los Angeles didn't update," how the city "can be so hated that I actually enjoy it," and why he finds arguments about it versus New York "hysterically stupid"; what it meant to him when he saw a duplex driven town the street in X: The Unheard Music; his interest in people who feel the entire world has turned against them; what makes Heizer "the real deal"; how, in this era, Los Angeles "just has more intention"; and its conversion from a city that supposedly "has nothing" to one that "as everything."

In a pub in Toronto's Swansea, Colin Marshall talks with novelist Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, Sarah Court, and most recently The Fighter, all under his on name, and author of horror fiction under the pseudonyms Nick Cutter and Patrick Lestewka. They discuss Toronto's distance, geographical and in sensibility, from Niagara falls; his potential attraction to desperate settings; modern man's longing for "the test" to be put to; how he came to write books containing no pursuit more genteel than factory labor; Niagara Falls' national bisection, with the black-and-white divide on one side and red-and-white on the other; the effects of the possibility stream into which we each are born; his use of pseudonyms, and whether readers cross over from one to the other; his writing, no matter under which name, novels of the visceral; what Stephen King knows about putting the grotesque right up next to the mundanities of the working class; the decline of boxing, and its continued importance as a stage for pure conflict; the way a fight lets you answer the question "Who am I?", and what he learned when he lost two of them in the name of promotion for The Fighter; the 90-percent female fiction-buying audience, and how he writes for the other 10 percent; how we love wrestling as kids for its moral clarity, then come to see "the general patina of gray"; what counts, in his books, as purely Canadian; and the one simple thing you must do if you don't love your job.

At the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks with Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy and author of such books as A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism, The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, and most recently the collection Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination. They discuss how the "ongoing argument" that is Canada manifests in Toronto; the University of Toronto's thorough integration into the city itself; why outsiders think of Toronto as a kind of idea of the city made concrete; the many parallels between Toronto and Los Angeles, including the derision both cities draw; a "walking city" as a city where you can walk not just in but between places; where the Torontonian's perception of distance doesn't quite match the geography, as in the crossing of the Don Valley; what got him thinking about the city as a problem of consciousness; the "great stumbling block" of the "world class" designation, which probably means nothing; how to use philosophy and cities as nexuses of subjects, and the benefits of dispensing "mind candy" like Simpsons references in the process; public spaces from the impossible-in-this-century Central Park to the counterintuitively functional Nathan Phillips Square; the Toronto sub-industry of assigning grand names to alleys; quasi-public private space, and how the nicer you dress, the more of it you find; America's legal piety versus its misbehavior; Canada's respect for authority versus its explosions of passive-aggression; what you don't see when you walk through Toronto, such as any element of the erotic; this city as "a whole bunch of silver medals that add up to a pretty nice tally"; the distinction between politeness (which he doesn't actually find among Canadians) and civility; why Torontonians think Rob Ford became mayor; whether a city needs a center, and whether that center must be a public space or a monument of some kind; what it means that the CN Tower represents Toronto; and whether Toronto will keep playing its role as the "real archetypal city."

In Toronto's Christie Pits neighborhood, Colin Marshall talks with Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic, who also writes for such publications as Dwell, Wallpaper, Toronto Life, and Spacing. They discuss whether Honest Ed's has any architectural significance to go with its social significance, and what its imminent disappearance says about the urbanism of Toronto's future; its Los Angeles-like interest in becoming a "more walkable, more urban, more interesting" city; how it nevertheless went high-rise early on, even in its suburbs; the cognitive dissonance of Canada, an urban country that insists upon its rurality; whether the critics of downtown condos have it right when they call them dull; the ways Jane Jacobs' spirit still animates Toronto; its reputation as a city of "great second-rate buildings"; the deal with the Castle Frank station; whether Frank Gehry counts as more of a Torontonian architect, or more of an Angeleno architect; what it means that Toronto will soon get its own high-profile Gehry project, commissioned, no less, by the family of Honest Ed himself; the struggles of a new-wave coffee shop to get permission to open in a "quiet" neighborhood like Christie Pits; how he got interested in both architecture and the city itself at the University of Toronto; what to keep in mind for an architecturally rich view of the city; whether Canadians believe their culture, cities, and neighborhoods more fragile than they really are; what he learned from his time in New York, the city where "public space is the most robust"; the "anti-urban resentment" that holds back Canada and other countries as well; who fights for the preservation of the Sam the Record Man sign; the nonexistence, in Toronto, of "a magical place you drive to"; Toronto as "a bit of a mess," aesthetically; the important difference between prettiness and vitality; how Toronto  has only just entered its "greatest point of relevance"; and how complaints indicate a city's greatness.

Out with the raccoons on the closed second-floor balcony of a Toronto bar, Colin Marshall talks with Keith McNally, the podcast auteur behind the shows XO, I Have a Ham Radio, and The Vinyl Countdown. They discuss the function and imminent disappearance of Honest Ed's; podcasting as a 21st-century means of hanging out with "friends" and having man-to-man conversations; why he felt such elation at leaving New York, and how a combination of Keith and the Girl and Ayn Rand drove him there in the first place; how he felt/feels that, in Canada, "we're just not driven"; what forms ambition does take in Toronto; his discovery of the disorder known as misophonia, his own probable misophonia, what misophonia does to urban life, and how he came to make an elaborate podcast about it; Toronto as a 20-percent Japanified New York; his hometown of Frederickton, New Brunswick, how it now looks like a disused movie set, and what it means when you start calling it "Fredeekton"; how his projects run the gamut of podcast production, from tossed-off to made like a watch; which of his fixations have become XO episodes; the lowbrow manner in which he discovered the tragic tale of Roger Swan, an American in Japan; how and why he turned Adam Cadre's piece of interactive fiction Photopia into an XO; his attraction to extremely personal works that he can convert into his own, even more personal works; Youtube bodybuilder Eliot Hulse's advice about getting over a breakup; the Canadian secret about Nickelback; how "there's no shortcut" out of hard work, so you "might as well do what you want to do"; and the search for mementos mori that keeps on drawing him to the stories of those who die young.

In Toronto's Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of Imagining Toronto, a study of the city as depicted in its literature. They discuss the psychedelically-illustrated, Toronto-centric poetry of Dennis Lee with which so many Torontonians grew up; how it took her thirty years from her Lee-reading days to come to understand the full scope of Toronto literature; In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje's much-named, little-read novel of city-building; how she first went about creating a university course on Toronto literature; her "personal fetish," the narrative of place; multiculturalism as Toronto's foundational myth; why Torontonians falsely believe the United Nations declared their city the world's most diverse; the "eternal haggle" of life here; how she's come to agree, at least halfway, with the description of the city as "a place where people live, but not where things happen"; why, in Canada, everyone has a hyphen; her non-Canadian-born husband's appreciation of the country as one where "people have nothing to declare"; Torontonian manifestations of Stanley Fish's "boutique multiculturalism" and Charles Taylor's "inspired ad-hocing"; why hating Toronto became such a literary and social tradition; no longer talking about achieving "world class" status as a sign of having achieved it; what about Toronto architecture makes people call it ugly, and why buildings that make people talk have already succeeded; the significance of the ravines in the Torontonian consciousness; 1960's suburban satire The Torontonians and the Canadian "flourishing of cultural production" that would come later that decade; Canada's thoroughgoing urbanness against its imaginary self-conception as a rural country; and the important elements of Toronto — remaining, vanishing, and gone — identified in one particular Dennis Lee poem.  

Near the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks to Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director of Coach House Books and author of the novel A Grammar of Endings. They discuss the past twenty years' boom in Toronto writing; what factors, including an embarrassing mayor in the nineties, made "mythologizing our own city" possible; why Coach House prints right there on premises, "giving cultural producers access to the means of production"; the technological palimpsest of Coach House's offices; the origin of their uTOpia series, which envision the Toronto of the future and which began when "you simply didn't publish about Toronto"; the broadness of the ideas about the city that surprised her, as well as the number of its "civic nerds"; how Coach House pushes for "adventurous" writing, such a recent book on surveillance, a novel about Andy Warhol's Sleep, and Christian Bök's Eunoia; their shifting relationship over the years with the printed book; how she got interested in Toronto herself; what she shows students who turn up on field trips; her lack of worries about the future of the printed book, and how she finds readers process information differently depending on the physical medium of the text; their paper equivalent of 180-gram vinyl; how dominant bookselling chains have persisted in Canada, and the effects of that; Coach House's own books involving the city, like Maggie Helwig's blind-photographer novel Girls Fall Down and an upcoming study of the Ward, Toronto's first slum; her first novel, the second novel she put away, and what writing taught her about publishing; Coach House's "Exploded Views" series, which includes Shawn Micallef's book on all-consuming precarity The Trouble with Brunch and David Balzer's Curationism; shopping by publisher, and how she started doing it herself almost right away, acting as a consumer on her "publishing crushes"; how much of an enemy to consider Amazon; the literary figure from whom Coach House's bpNichol Lane takes its name; her lack of fascination with "CanLit"; the multiculturalism she doesn't see in Toronto; and how the city has lately tired her out.

In Toronto's Kensington Market, Colin Marshall talks to Corey Mintz, author of the Toronto Star column "Fed" and the book How to Host a Dinner Party. They discuss what makes a dinner party a Torontonian dinner party; the city's "uptight" reputation; how he bottomed out in his initial cooking career, winding up working the kitchen at a dinner theater; how he converted to writing and also found a way to take a friend's advice that he "should host dinner parties for a living"; the time he made lunch for Ruth Reichl, and what his editor appreciated more about the blog post he wrote about it than the actual column he did; his dinner party with the disgraced head of the District of Toronto School Board, pre-disgrace; what it means when some like what you do and some dislike it for the same reasons; the art of mixing personalities at the table; why to recognize that "important people can be blowhards," and indeed that blowhardiness often makes them important in the first place; how he keeps the smartphones in peoples' pockets; "Toronto" versus "Toronno"; how he came to regularly invite the city, whatever the pronunciation of its name, into his home for dinner; his food-paradise neighborhood of Kensington Market, which through accidents of history now exists "outside reality, a little bit"; his questioning of his Councillor at dinner about why the neighborhood doesn't have trash cans, and what he learned from the attempt; how Torontonian multiculturalism translates into food; what took him into the secret VIP room of a suburban Nigerian restaurant; and whether he considers his dinner parties the revival of a lost art.

In Toronto's Church-Wellesley Village, Colin Marshall talks to Shawn Micallef, editor and co-owner of Spacing magazine, Toronto Star columnist, and author of such books as Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and The Trouble with Brunch. They discuss his first "long, deliberate" walk in Toronto, which happened by accident; what, exactly, caused this trouble with brunch; his youth in Windsor and his discovery of the middle class in Toronto, which brunches routinely; the death threats his anti-brunch stance has drawn; the difficulty of knowing what class you fit into in the 21st century; choosing flights over children; how Oz-like Toronto looked from back in Windsor; those who stayed behind for the "good money," and what potential they may not have realized as a result; how he began "unpeeling the layers" of Toronto, and how he discovered that infinite peelability defines a great city; the "magical lightness" he discovered upon leaving his car at home; how Toronto doesn't quite know what it has, thinking of itself as a midwestern city more along the lines of Indianapolis; how he developed his obsession with Los Angeles (and how Toronto's 401 freeway surpassed any of Los Angeles' for congestion); why Torontonians insist upon Toronto's and "do not own their Toronto-ness"; Toronto and Los Angeles as cities without stories written in stone, because their people write them even now; the ten-year project behind Stroll; why he finds strip malls the most interesting places in the city, and what drove "actual multiculturalism" out to them; Rob Ford as the "kick in the ass" Toronto may have needed; what you learn when you explore a city at walking speed; and his personal mission to get to know his hometown again, not by car, but on foot.  

At Toronto's Queen and Logan, Colin Marshall talks with Denise Balkissoon, co-founder of The Ethnic Aisle and writer on a variety of Torontonian subjects from multiculturalism to real estate for publications like Toronto Life, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and The Grid. They discuss her reputation as an astute observer of the multiculture; what happens at the intersection of multiculturalism and real estate; the wealth flowing into downtown, and the resulting push of "racialized communities" toward the periphery; the formerly working class neighborhood around Queen and Logan and its current, rapid gentrification; the appeal of "tiny little backyards"; how the real estate market's "ferocious competition" made it an interesting beat, but may yet make it boring; on what levels Toronto has lived up to its multicultural promise, and on what levels it hasn't; what her Trinidadian family of engineers, lawyers, and medical professionals thought of her choice to go into journalism; exploring neighborhoods through one's own social links to them, or, alternatively, through the oft-joked about "festival every weekend" Toronto offers; the city's reputation for a lack of physical beauty, and what preservation problems have to do with it; what you find "out there" in the suburbs, an essential part of modern Toronto's multicultural experience; the nature of "Toronto's moment," including but not limited to residents' newfound happiness living there and their enjoyment of the Malaysian, Uighur, and Tamil cuisine on offer; what count as things truly Torontonian, if anything does; the always-personal nature of Toronto's appeal, and what a moment like her husband not eating the heads of shrimp and getting made fun of for it says about that; the Toronto articles she fantasizes about writing, such as studies of housing as a whole, a look at the emergence of "generation rent" as a political force, and the interactions between different waves of immigrants; and whether, after the election, people will still feel like they live between "two Torontos."

In Toronto's Bloordale, Colin Marshall talks with Russell Smith, author of such novels as How Insensitive, Noise, Muriella Pent, and Girl Crazy, as well as style and culture columns in The Globe and Mail, the book Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress, and the e-book Blindsided: How Twenty Years of Writing About Booze, Drugs and Sex Ended in the Blink of an Eye. They discuss whether characteristically Torontonian style choices exist apart from women with business clothes and incongruous running shoes on the way home from work; what got him writing about his cases of retinal detachment; how and why, years before that, he became the novelist who defined young urban Toronto in the 1990s; the internationalist element of Toronto that still remains "electrifying"; whether anyone still longs for the crack-dealing days of gentrifying neighborhoods like Bloordale; the effect of a Starbucks location on house prices (and his own presence as an indicator of coming price hikes); how he got from the academic track, writing on "feminist approaches to symbolist poetry," to the nightlife track; his brief time as a "terrible restaurant critic"; his readers' eagerness to hear him correct common men's style blunders; how much the Toronto of 2014 resembles the one he first came to from his native Halifax; the rise of private, members-only clubs in the city and the importation of "wealthy urban anywhere"; Toronto as Canada's magnet, challenged only by Montreal at first and only by Vancouver now; his view of thus "spectacularly ugly" city and his years in the presumably more attractive Paris; why he thinks hipsters inspire such ire; fiction's near-entirely female readership, and the problems that poses for the "ardent heterosexualist"; the unwritten Toronto books he'd like to read; and what stories don't get told because of the "prim politics" instilled in university-educated writers.

Near Toronto's Danforth, Colin Marshall talks to Dylan Reid, senior editor at Spacing magazine, former co-chair of the Toronto Pedestrian Committee, and co-founder of Walk Toronto. They discuss whether the term "pedestrianism" has become as unappealing as the term "classical music"; the nature of the Danforth and its Greek roots; spatial ways to think about one's walks; the quintessentially Torontonian things he's noticed only while walking; the controversial practice of "façadism" and what it offers the city; the slow process by which Toronto offers up its joys, none of which seem apparent across the rest of Canada; what someone eager to grasp Toronto will find when they open Spacing; how to photoblog in a "not obviously beautiful" city; how he got to know Toronto by talking group walks by night, seeing such sights as a still-active slaughterhouse; how the city represents, in some form or another, every current of the modern conversation about developed-world urbanism; how Spacing got its start in the argument around an anti-postering bylaw; walking as the fabric that connects all modes of transportation; what Toronto's lately ever-more-robust downtown population has meant of walking; what makes him ask "Why is this here?" and who he asks for the answer; the fifty objects that symbolize Toronto; the city's relative lack of empty spaces and "dead zones"; what walk to take that can help you most quickly understand Toronto; and why one might visit Toronto Island.

Above Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop, Colin Marshall talks to Jaime Woo, writer, game designer, co-founder of the Toronto video game festival Gamercamp (the next edition of which happens this month), and author of Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect. They discuss taking the measure of a city by firing up Grindr and examining its men; things people have figured out how to use the app for other than hooking up and sending "a slew of dick pics"; how such apps have illustrated the decreased yet increase importance of living in particular places; the changing signifiers of queer culture, offline and on; how he views the must-touted "multiculturalism" of Toronto; what his 13-year-old self growing up in the suburbs would have thought about Grindr; the app's stark limitations as advantages that counteract our impulse to too-narrowly define our desires; how to learn about Toronto by observing the couples in its advertisements; the ever-present "distance" in the city, which guards against trends that miss but also prevent the ones that make homeruns; Grindr as a video game, his history with gaming, and what let him to co-found Gamercamp; his mission to bring the novelty and "whimsy" back to gaming, included but not limited to his creation of a new physical game based on the idea of social distance"; how a set of rules forms a system, how that system makes an experience, and when we call that experience a game; and the strategies one can follow to better understand the "rules" of a system like Toronto.

Colin Marshall sits down in Studio City with Mark Frauenfelder, founder of the popular zine-turned-blog Boing Boing, founding co-editor of Make magazine, and author of Maker Dad: Lunch Box Guitars, Antigravity Jars, and 22 Other Incredibly Cool Father-Daughter DIY Projects. They discuss whether he still thinks about Los Angeles dingbat apartments, and the extent to which their owners have customized them today; all barriers falling for the modern maker except for the one asking who's interested; how his daughters' fascination with card tricks preceded their interest in making things; what kind of project kids can complete under their own steam; Los Angeles as a place for makers, the current state of its maker spaces, and the making heritage offered by its historical hot-rod culture as described in Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby; his history with this city, which goes back to 1987, albeit one interrupted by periods in Japan, on a South Pacific island, and elsewhere; the semi-agricultural life- and making style Los Angeles affords him; how growing your own food allows you to think more clearly about food, and making your own media allows you to think more clearly about media; how his grasp of media improved as he engaged in every stage of the D.I.Y. publishing revolution; learning through mistakes, as opposed to school's pressure not to make mistakes in the first place; the debilitating world of the "smart kid"; the "freedom to be foolish" offered in Los Angeles; the dueling temptations of broadminded generalism and singleminded obsession; his role in the cyberpunk culture of the 80s and 90s, and to what extent we live in the utopian and/or dystopian future it envisioned today; his hope for an increasingly tech-focused San Francisco to continue exporting progressive ideas; the rise of meta-making, and the promise of large-scale decentralized making of solving some of "the world's problems"; how he deals with the firehose of amazing stuff to feature on Boing Boing and in Make; and what his daughters have taught him about making while he's taught them about making.

Colin Marshall sits down at the University of Southern California with School of Architecture professor James Steele, author of many books on architecture and architects, including, just over twenty years ago, Los Angeles Architecture: The Contemporary Condition. They discuss the how the city's conflict with "autopia" has gone since then; the obsolescence of not just the freeways, but the city itself; whether Los Angeles has gone from too architecturally crazy to not architecturally crazy enough; the evidence for downtown's non-revival, and what a fatal inertia and incrementalism may have to do with it; the Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (BANANA) mentality as expressed not just in Los Angeles but the whole of America; how creative individuals can somehow add up to an uncreative city; what the Case Study houses meant to Los Angeles architectural history, and why they failed; whether the "L.A. School" of architects like Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Eric Owen Moss every really cohered into a movement; how current Los Angeles architecture doesn't express the zeitgeist, possibly because the city no longer has one; what he would change in a new edition of Los Angeles Architecture (and how much more grim his assessment would become); the emergence of a dense, connected city within a less dense, less connected one; the most fascinating architectural ideas to come out of USC; what he sees in his students' attitudes toward Los Angeles' built environment; the "excitement combined with confusion" he feels on his increasingly frequent trips to Asia; popular fantasies of changing Los Angeles, like halving distances or vastly increasing its transit; and how we nonetheless feel curious about what lies ahead in the city's future.

Colin Marshall sits down in Pasadena with Pete Mitchell, visual artist, game designer, zombie enthusiast, and lead singer and co-founder of the band No More Kings, whose latest album III came out this year. They discuss now as an opportune time to be into zombies; how his mom got him into not just zombie movies but Dungeons & Dragons; the "love letter to the 1980s" he wrote with the first No More Kings album; his early forays into game design, typing in code line-by-line and saving it on a tape drive, later struggling against the limitations of software like Game-Maker; Game-Makerish limitations as the true drivers of art; the experience of growing up in Rhode Island, and who thrives there; being a big fish in a small pond, being a small fish in a big pond, and the appeal regardless of the ultimately more interesting big ponds; the eternal struggle to finish projects, and what we can learn from the examples of such "obsessive" creators as Francis Ford Coppola, Shane Carruth, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jiro Ono; the things you make as diamonds compressed from the coal of your time; the wide reach of No More Kings' "Sweep the Leg" music video, which reunited the cast of The Karate Kid and continues to win the band most of its fans; his anxiety about becoming an "80s pop culture" act; specialized interests and the even more specialized places they overlap as the new stages for subculture; his time in Japan, motivated by the thought that he "can't be the guy who only knows one language"; how, to learn languages or make things, you have to give yourself no choice in the matter; the "electric sense of potential" and "ambient ambition" in a city like Los Angeles, not often felt even in "nicer" places; this city as the most internet-like actual place yet established; and the reasons not to want to go back to Old Economy Steve's economy, or to the days of a powerful cultural mainstream — even if, as in the 80s, that mainstream produced a lot of neat stuff.

Colin Marshall sits down in Highland Park with Javier Cabral, the "food, booze, and punk rock" writer formerly known as The Teenage Glutster, and currently known as The Glutster. They discuss his mission to change the official punk rock food of Los Angeles from the Oki-dog to the taco; the reasons for the taco's current surge of general popularity; the reputation Mexican food has, even among the otherwise culinarily aware, as "just Mexican food"; the humbling his Mexican-food expertise received at the hands of his girlfriend; the singular form of "tamales"; what the bean-and-cheese burrito stands for in Los Angeles Mexican cuisine; his Korean food outing with Matthew Kang; how punk rock got him exploring Los Angeles first, and how looking for punk show listings exposed him to the food writing of Jonathan Gold; what kind of music develops in the backyards of east Los Angeles; the pots of food his mom made for the attendees at his free 21st birthday punk show; how much he enjoyed comped meals (and drinks) on La Cienega as a young, broke food writer, and why he swore off them; why the eastside and westside continually accuse one another of having no food; the cultural overlap he's found between food and punk rock in the most logical city for those two to come together; his long-form Saveur piece "Mexico Feeds Me", which took him back to his family's home state of Zacatecas (and which finally got his parents understanding his job); his love of street food, and his refusal to write about it for fear of getting its purveyors shut down; how both street food and punk rock always come back, no matter who tries to stamp them out; the burden of listicle-writing; and the etymology of the word "Glutster".

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz with artist, filmmaker, and writer William E. Jones. They discuss what one learns by viewing a city through the prism of its gay porn; how Los Angeles gives away the least of itself in that form as in others; home he introduced Fred Halsted's "gay porn masterpiece" L.A. Plays Itself to Los Angeles Plays Itself maker Thom Andersen, and how the movie helped fund Chantal Akerman's first projects; Selma Avenue, once the "hustler central" of Los Angeles; the city as he came to know it in the movies before he came to know it in real life; the Los Angeles tendency to identify with specific neighborhoods; how truly coming to know the city somehow requires both driving and not driving; what made he and Thom Andersen decide to make a "useful" book of their conversations; his examination of the nonsexual elements of the gay porn, and the other work that got him a reputation for a time as "the porn guy"; his resolution not to create around any obvious unifying concept; why Morrissey's robust Latino fandom confounds people, and how it ties into Los Angeles' long strain of musical Anglophilia; the similarities between the industrial decay of northern England and the forlorn provinciality of Southern California suburbs; how city centers, to an extent excepting Los Angeles', have fallen to "fabulous wealth and enormous corporate power"; the way places never turn out quite as intended here, and what it means for civic pride, the force that begins a city's slide into decadence; what kind of a town Los Angeles has become for experimental film; the city's ability, now at stake, to nurture "something like a bohemia," which Glasgow has done where London hasn't; and what traces of Fred Halsted's Los Angeles survive today.

Colin Marshall sits down in Koreatown with Noé Montes, photographer and publisher of El Aleph Books. They discuss what MacArthur Park, that place "beyond any laws or organization," means to him; what difference the much-discussed light of Los Angeles makes for a photographer; the city's sunsets, beaches, palm trees, and the ultimate fact of its being "kind of ugly"; the New Yorker who told him he "just doesn't get" Los Angeles; the pleasures of living in a city that doesn't need defending; the impossible task he once considered upon photographing each and every block; the "synoptic vision" he gained upon seeing Los Angeles as a Borges-style "aleph"; when the LAPD took him up in a helicopter, and what understanding of the city he gained thereby; how Los Angeles works best at two levels, the very macro and the very micro; the "layering of information" in the city's built environment; his work with Metro, an organization now in the process of "actually connecting the city"; how he first gained an awareness of Los Angeles. growing up in the agricultural parts of California, as a place from which others fled; the importance of the desert, not just as a photographic subject but as a boundary to the city; the contrast in pace and sense of possibility he found upon coming here from New York; the feeling that the definition of Los Angeles is happening right now; his realization, after becoming a full-time photographer, that "this is all I could have done"; the "extraordinary access to be nosy" provided by photography (and indeed interviewing) that allows him to discover the unknown "great work" going on in the city; the vast amounts of money he's seen poured into photographic ephemeralities; the African family he once saw holding hands before a giant pyramid of cereal; the "failed modernism" and other supremely photographable qualities of Mexico City; and what we can learn about Los Angeles from the photography it produces.

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Jason Boog, former publishing editor a Mediabistro and author of Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age. They discuss what freaks us out about the idea of a baby with an iPad; his project's venerable predecessor The Read-Aloud Handbook; the importance of the very act of reading aloud, and especially what he calls "interactive reading"; the fallacy equating amount of books read with intelligence or even knowledge that plagues children and adults alike; how reading became a proxy for well-being; his new appreciation of Los Angeles libraries developed while taking his daughter around to them; how he introduced Mark Twain to the baby; how our generation seems to have proved that kids don't get wrecked by unlimited access to content; when, exactly, digital reading became acceptable; his move from New York to Los Angeles, and the cities' comparative reading cultures; his interest in Depression-era writers, and why on some level we still believe that to become a writer means to become poor; how we've become "cyborgs, in a real, genuine sense"; what we can learn by watching the first generation who could say no to books grow up; and what culture his daughter has already started introducing to him.

Colin Marshall sits down in Culver City with Matthew Kang, food writer, editor of Eater LA, author of the blog Mattatouille, and proprietor of the Scoops Westside ice cream shop. They discuss the difference between eating on Los Angeles' west side and elsewhere in the city; how he manages to sell that health-conscious region on ice cream; the willingness of eaters, nowadays, to get back to the occasional bit of unhealthiness; how he prides himself on introducing unusual flavors to the public through the friendly medium of ice cream, even when kids' parents insist they "just get the chocolate"; how he got into food writing through Yelp during his previous career as a banking analyst; his explorations of Los Angeles through the Zagat guide and as a "hugely involved commenter" on Eater; what he experienced on his Koreatown days in childhood, an ideal place for him as it provides "Korea, but not in Korea"; what it meant to him when he discovered a time capsule of a greasy spoon buried in a Beverly Hills office building; the parts of town that put up with "a little less B.S." from customization-crazed customers; the balance between "I want it the way I want it" and "Just give me what's best"; the conversations he had with his parents and fellow Asian Americans when he left his banking career behind for a live of travel and food; the shift in downtown's Grand Central Market, and what it says about Los Angeles' wider social and food cultures; how your background matters less here, and how long that might last; food as his conduit for understanding not just Los Angeles but Seoul, Istanbul, Chicago, and Nagoya; how the current coffee-culture boom manifests itself here, where he divides time into two eras, before Intelligentsia and after; how Angelenos can make sure not to provincialize themselves; the exhilaration he feels at certain perfect "Midnight City" moments in his car; and how Los Angeles offers a seemingly infinite variety of places you should eat, but no one place you must.

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Jim Benning, travel writer and co-founder of World Hum, home of "The Best Travel Stories on the Internet." They discuss why Mexican food on other continents sucks so bad; the nature of a "weather lifestyle" site he previously edited; the old question of travel versus tourism; his relationship to the label of "travel writing"; whether hatred or love for a place can produce anything but uninteresting writing; our need for "hidden gems"; how Los Angeles offers the world within it, yet rewards travel outside of it; that feeling you get upon first waking up in a completely unknown city; the American traveler's anxiety about entering a foreign McDonalds; his multimedia production "Starbucks Versus the Traveler"; the English and American traditions of the travel writing of ignorance; the rant for a single-language world he found in his old diaries; the lost world of the Pan Am vacationer and the United States' "new humility"; LAX and the many other ways that Los Angeles seemingly hasn't internalized its own status; the obsessions, like surfing, that take you places you wouldn't have known to go otherwise; having a relationship with a place as you would a person; his mid-1990s Orange County "Drive-Thru Life"; his search for the stories that make him feel like he feels when he's traveling; and where in town he currently goes for his tacos.

Colin Marshall sits down in the Hollywood Hills with Geoff Nicholson, author of such nonfiction books as The Lost Art of Walking and its more recent follow-up Walking in Ruins as well as novels like Bleeding London, Gravity's Volkswagen, and the new The City Under the Skin. They discuss which cities contributed to his concept of "the city"; the resonances between the novel's fictional Telstar Hotel and the LAX Theme Building, as well as the significance of their restaurants, revolving or otherwise; the failure of our intention to "build our way out of any problem"; when he first saw the "fading Hollywood" of the late seventies, and its process of de-ruination; how to take the "subway" to Stonehenge; whether cities ever develop except through bubbles and busts; how The City Under the Skin dramatizes the ever-present struggle for a city's future form; what everyone would draw if everyone had to draw a map of Los Angeles by hand; when all the murders, tattoos, and kidnappings got into the novel; his time at the glorious ruins at the Salton Sea; the "haunted house" nearby that turned new again; how elevation became an advantage in Los Angeles, at least notionally; what kind of building you get under the ideas of the American dream and "the Englishman in his castle"; why the deed to his house includes the phrase "no Hindus"; and whether he envisions even new developments as the ruins of the future.

Colin Marshall sits down at UCLA with Jon Christensen, editor of Boom: A Journal of California, the recently re-launched magazine from the University of California Press. They discuss the meaning, if any, of the phrase "he lives in California" in an author bio; whether California's east-west divide bleaches out its much discussed north-south one; why we think so little about water, and whether Los Angeles actually has a problem with the stuff; how to see the world not just in this city, but in the whole of California; Boom's "What's the Matter with San Francisco?" issue; when a city's insecurity becomes useful; the axiomatic "brokenness" of Los Angeles, but the frequent elusiveness of that alleged brokenness; why Californians feel so pessimistic about high-speed rail; why it has become so difficult to sell the future to Californians, and indeed Americans; the changing idea of the role of the state, and what that would mean if California became its own country; the peripatetic life that led him to jump into Los Angeles, "the ne plus ultra of global cities"; why the true dream of the Southern Californian megalopolis feels so long deferred; how he chose Venice as a place to live, and whether it can remain weird; and whether California could use twice as many people — especially twice as many urban people.  

Colin Marshall sits down in Culver City with Matt Novak, author of Paleofuture, a blog that looks into the future that never was. They discuss what goes through is mind when he sees LAX's Theme Building; why 1960s visions of jetpacks and flying cars have kept their hold on the American imagination; whether we only remember the wrong predictions of the future, or whether all predictions got the future wrong; why you always have to hedge about who predicted or invented what; how a society's visions of the future reveal that society's vulnerabilities; the problematic notion of "invention" itself; why we love the Nikola Teslas of the world, who give us a chance to tell "great stories" instead of messy history; Uber and Lyft as symptoms of a "broken society"; how their generation seems to have grown up on dystopias, not utopias; the technological signs of a new Cold War in the news; how "face-burning" technology ends up working for us in consumer electronics; Los Angeles' as a "city of reinvention that can somehow feel stale" full of freeways as works of retrofuturistic sculpture; his three carless years here; whether current visions of future Los Angeles seem more plausible than past visions of future Los Angeles; his search for the "relaxed version" of the city; and how he deals with "a society that does not consider itself a society."  

Colin Marshall sits down in Sawtelle (also known as Los Angeles' "Little Osaka") with Eric Nakamura, founder of Asian-American aesthetic culture and lifestyle brand Giant Robot. They discuss the differences between the Sawtelle he grew up in and the Sawtelle he finds himself in today; how and where he got his doses of Japanese pop culture growing up; Los Angeles as a "gateway to Asia" then and now; the days when Giant Robot began as a photocopied zine, and what zinemaking means in 2014; Giant Robot's various manifestations, from shops to galleries even to a restaurant; the local titles applied to him including "Mayor of Sawtelle" and "Sawtelle Shogun"; what he learned about other cities like San Francisco and New York from operating Giant Robot branches in them; the first trips to Japan he remembers, and the American cultural exchange he saw going on in them; his "just hanging out" style of travel, sometimes with stray cats; how Los Angeles' lack of connectedness may have made it a more interesting place; (former Sawtelle resident) Shunji Iwai's Vampire, Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights, and what happens when Asian directors work in the West; how Asia has come together in films like Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe; what it means that more artists want to depict Los Angeles these days; and his preference of a role as new guy over a role as elder statesman.

Colin Marshall sits down in Venice with Geoff Dyer, author of books all across the spectrum between fiction and non-fiction on such subjects as jazz, photography, travel, World War I, and Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. His newest book Another Great Day at Sea follows his two weeks aboard the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, and his first two novels The Color of Memory and The Search have just received their very first American editions. They discuss why America needs to land planes on boats; the call he received from Alain de Botton asking what institution he'd like to visit as a writer in residence; place as the nexus of interests on which his diverse body of work converges; his specific desire to write and reside on an American military ship, a place not full of Englishmen already "born worn down"; The Color of Memory's late-1980s London, "oily, dark, and full of harm"; the idyllic Brixton life he once led amid the city's near-total brokenness; how many "Geoff in Venice" jokes he's heard since moving from London to Los Angeles; the contrast between his Venice life and his last extended American experience, which offered "blissful months in Iowa city"; the comparability of Venice and Brixton's ramshackle countercultural years; when, exactly, the personnel on the aircraft carrier started talking about Jesus; what Effra Road feels like today; his uncanny knack for living in the right place at the wrong time; how he would write The Color of Memory today, and whether he would feel quite so afflicted with a need for "ideological soundness"; the system of discipline he forced upon himself in his twenties, and the system the soldiers on the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush sign up to have forced upon them; when Another Great Day at sea "became a Geoff Dyer Book"; and what comes of the collision between his sensibility and that place, including the ability to ask. at the right moment, if the whole enterprise means anything at all.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Streetsblog Los Angeles founder Damien Newton (and his young daughter). They discuss what Los Angeles transportation culture looked like from a distance before he came here (nonexistent); how he found himself covering the city's "turning point"; the advantages to getting around from just where chose to make his home, and the disadvantages that include having to take "the bus to the bus to the train to the train to the train" to Pasadena; the Expo Line's approach to his neighborhood, and what it has made him think about the ways communities can take advantage of new transit; Santa Monica as "basically paradise" (despite the rumors floating around there of  coming "soul-crushing traffic"); the relative prevalence of "kind-of car-freeness" in Los Angeles, and what makes the difference between it and other cities allowing absolute car-freeness; the city's early attempt at a bicycle network, like the time it put down "twenty miles of weird sharrows" over a weekend; the benefits of stoking a pretend infrastructure rivalry between Santa Monica and Long Beach; why Los Angeles simultaneously produces complaints about "being forced to drive" and "being forced out of our cars"; the importance to no longer building based on the effects on cars, but the effects on actual people; the generational change that has led some commentators to label young people unmotivated for their lack of driver's licenses; what has made bikes so much cooler today; Los Angeles' first Ciclavia, the initial dread that nobody would show up to it, and the instantaneous dispersal of that dread; the questions of how many times you can just report "This is awesome!" about an event like Ciclavia, and whether its future routes can "give South Los Angeles its due"; the difficulty of every firmly saying "this is Los Angeles," and the non-existence of most Los Angeleses seen in popular culture up to now; and the availability of something culturally new to learn every day in the city, even just on its surface.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mar Vista with Edward Soja, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA and author of such books as Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, and now the new My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization. They discuss downtown's Bonaventure Hotel back when he sat for a BBC documentary on it and now; how all of us may only ever talk about "my Los Angeles" when we talk about the city; why it surprises people to find Los Angeles has become the densest urbanized are in America; how the "metropolitan model of the city" became so deeply ingrained in our culture, and how that model itself now undergoes changes; how Los Angeles missed out in the 19th's century's phase of centralized urbanization, and what that means for the city today; what he's noticed by keeping an eye on the cross-streets; the "hot-bedding" going on at all those small motels nobody seems to use, and how that fits in to the wider scheme of survival techniques used by informal urban populations; how he discovered in Los Angeles the "largest industrial manufacturing center in the United States," and indeed "the largest job machine in the world"; why observers outside and the inside the city suffer so many blind spots regarding it; Los Angeles as "a kind of laboratory for understanding urban dynamics all over the world"; Jorge Luis Borges' "El Aleph", and how that story's central concept of a point that contains all points helps us understand Los Angeles; seeing the spatial aspect of all things as of equal interest to the historical aspect of all things; his current "weird book," neither quite a novel nor an academic work, dealing with the ultra-spatially just first city in civilization; when people began noticing that "something is happening in suburbia"; and what it means that greater Los Angeles has developed a suburban Chinatown — especially to those with adventurous palates.

Colin Marshall sits down under the cafeteria at Santa Monica College with beloved Los Angeles radio personality Madeleine Brand, now host of Press Play on KCRW, formerly of NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Day to Day, KPCC's The Madeleine Brand Show, and KCET's SoCal Connected. They discuss how much easier she has it waking up for noon radio nowadays instead of morning radio; what to call her format, a popular one in Los Angeles, where one host talks to a series of people, each with their own thing going on in the news; the distinctive difficulty of finding subjects that interest a large percentage of Los Angeles; her first decade in Southern California, and her later college years in Northern California as KALX's "Madame Bomb"; Los Angeles' unusually close relationship with the radio; the east-coastification she experienced in her years amid the "visceral humanity" of New York; how the heightening, densifying Los Angeles we see on the way (and imagined in Her) strikes her inner New Yorker; her lingering nostalgia for the sense of "peace, openness, and quiet" that formerly characterized this city; how we might allow Los Angeles to both define itself and not define itself, retaining its borderlessness with the rest of the world; how she's solved part of the hours-in-the-day problem (and the traffic problem) by hiring a driver; the asshole each and every one of us turns into when we get behind the wheel ourselves; what, exactly, makes for a "news story"; her task of making a subject meaningful beyond the first thirty seconds; the grim public radio listener's moment of realization that they're trying to guess what interests you; the mechanics of a five-minute interview (featuring an actual, table-turning five-minute interview); how often complaints come from a legitimate argument, and how often they come from a bad life; how easy Los Angeles makes it to live a bad life; the missing types of public discourse she'd like to hear in Los Angeles; the sorts of problems that public discourse can help to solve, such as school segregation; and whether to call him "Smokey Bear" or "Smokey the Bear."

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Miracle Mile district with photographer Mark Edward Harris, author of such books as Inside North Korea, Inside Iran, The Art of the Japanese Bath, and Faces of the Twentieth Century. They discuss filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's introduction to his Iran book, and his rule about always excluding people from his own photographs; the importance of children in images of Iran and countries like it; how Bruce Lee may or may not have started his interest in Asia back in his San Francisco childhood; how his job on The Merv Griffin Show came to an end, leaving him free to travel the world and build up his first real portfolio; how he once processed film while traveling, and the lasting thrill he got from first seeing an image appear in the developer; when and how digital cameras first became acceptable; what he learned from Stanley Kubrick's early journalistic work with Look magazine (not to mention from Dr. Strangelove); the countries, of the 90 he has visited, that he finds himself returning to again and again; the restrictions he has to work under when shooting in North Korea; whether the two Koreas still feel in any way connected to him; his interest in revealing the realities of the nations once named as members of the "Axis of Evil"; why Iranian men tend to look like they stepped out of the 1970s; his relationship with the "discipline and quiet fortitude" of Japan; how he managed to get into Japanese baths with a camera; whether America's center of Asia gravity has shifted to Los Angeles, a city friendly to the internationalist; how little work he thinks he's done here, and how much he actually has;  and late May's Fotofund campaign for his new Iran project.

Colin Marshall sits down at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law with Ethan Elkind, an attorney who researches and writes on environmental law and the author of Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System and the Future of the City. They discuss the reason visitors and even some Angelenos express surprise at the very existence of the city's subway; the roots of the assumption that Los Angeles would always have a 1950s-style "car culture"; why something as essential as a rail system has required a "fight"; the persistent Roger Rabbit conspiracy theory about the dismantling of Los Angeles' first rail transit network; why so may, for so long, failed to consider the city's inevitably dense and increasingly less car-compatible future; Los Angeles' long-standing anxiety about joining the ranks of "world-class" cities, and how the absence of a subway fueled it; how Californian rail systems, Los Angeles' especially but the San Francisco's Bay Area's BART as well, physically embody the compromises of consensus-based politics; what some Angelenos mean when they talk about "Manhattanization"; the similarity between a city's expectation that its citizens all own their own cars and an expectation that they all own their own power generators; how much the conversation about rail in Los Angeles has to do with, simply, density in Los Angeles; why Metro pretends not to know about its own problems and resorts to "corporate PR-speak"; whether those who lament the limitations of Los Angeles rail can blame individuals (such as Henry Waxman); whether anyone can change the minds of Angelenos who want the city to return to 1962; the demoralizing effects of such far-flung completion dates as 2036 for the Purple Line subway to UCLA; and how every voter can come to consider the Los Angeles Metro rail system "a precious thing."

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with architect and urban designer Doug Suisman, author of Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, soon out in a new 25th anniversary edition. They discuss the difference in cycling to his office on Wilshire Boulevard versus Venice Boulevard; the conceptual importance of "path" and "place" in any urbanism-related discussion he gets into; his arrival in Los Angeles in 1983, after years spent in Paris and New York, and the mixture of disappointment and fascination he first felt on the boulevards here; what it meant that he sensed movement as well as abandonment; how Los Angeles wound up with the its destructive-car-culture rap, and how its freeways have less to do with that than the way its boulevards also became a kind of freeway system; the mistaken notion that the city "doesn't have transit," and what specific kinds of transit it actually does still lack; his work with the design of the Metro Rapid buses, and why they've struggled so long just to get a dedicated lane; the combined optimism and complacency of Los Angeles in the 1980s, before any rapid transit had appeared; the excitement he first felt at the the city's private architectural boom, despite its seeming lack of a public realm; how Los Angeles has begun to overcome its "enclave instinct" and find an "urban public language" as Amsterdam did in the 1930s; the importance of the Olympics, MOCA, LACMA's Anderson Wing, and now the Ace Hotel's opening in downtown, that "50-year overnight sensation"; what caused Wilshire's "wig district"; what his childhood trips from his suburban home to downtown Hartford, Connecticut taught him about city life; coffee shops as harbingers of human connectedness; the basic differences between "apartment cultures" and "house cultures," and how a city moves from one to the other; and the way the boulevards fit into the psychological framework of Los Angeles alongside the mountains and the ocean.

Colin Marshall sits down at Monocle magazine's offices in Marylebone, London with Andrew Tuck, editor of the magazine, host of its podcast The Urbanist, and editor of its book The Monocle Guide to Better Living. They discuss how the London experience for a Monocle reader differs from that of others; how the magazine came to view the world through the framework of cities, and what they look for in a good city experience; the importance of aesthetics in all things, when aesthetics means stripped-down, timeless vitality rather than whatever more and more money can buy; the importance of slowness in everything Monocle touches; the magazine's launch in 2007,  the global economic crash that happened soon thereafter, and why it began to matter even more that they covered "tangible things"; his notion that every Monocle reader has a business in them; what he found when he first came to live in London at eighteen; what he sees on his 40-minute walk to work each day, always on a different route; the city's internationalism, and what it affords an outfit like Monocle; how the prediction that the internet age would render it no longer necessary to meet people has turned into "nonsense"; the origin of the Urbanist podcast, and the episode of that show which reversed interviewer and interviewee; the "terrible trend of thinking all cities are kind of the same"; why the likes of Copenhagen, Melbourne, and Zurich rank so high on Monocle's quality of life survey; urban "wildcards" like Naples, Beirut, and Buenos Aires, which have the advantage of the "intangible"; what, exactly, the magazine has always seen in Japan; the cities that continue to generate questions, such as New York (and not "the New York people pretend they loved in the seventies"); the charge against Monocle's "aspirational" nature, and why anyone would think that a liability; the more established media companies who have stopped doing journalism in favor of "navigating the downward spiral of their titles"; the organic, human-like nature of London that still surprises; and how he wants to see whether the city grows old with him.

Colin Marshall sits down in Knightsbridge, London with Jacques Testard, founding editor of the quarterly arts journal The White Review. They discuss the re-issue of Nairn's Towns featuring past guest Owen Hatherley; London's surprisingly small literary culture and what, before founding The White Review, he didn't see getting published; the "deeply stereotypical Williamsburg existence" he once lived in New York (in an apartment called "Magicland", no less); his path from his hometown of Paris to London, and what those cities throw into contrast about each other; the conversations he's had with his also-bilingual brother about the differences between reading and speaking English and French, and the fact that they can take both languages "on their own terms"; the lack of genre distinctions in the French literary market; the amount of material The White Review publishes in translation; how a 21st-century magazine must, above all else, avoid disposability; the interviews they run, with Will Self and others; a "good writer's" ability to transcend subject matter; the engagement and/or existence strategies that apply in New York versus those that apply in London; class in Britain as tied to education, and class in America as tied to money; his experience at the Jaipur Literary Festival; and what to expect in The White Review's current issue.

Colin Marshall sits down in London's West End with Melvyn Bragg, Lord Bragg of Wigton, host of Sky Arts 1's The South Bank Show and BBC Radio 4's In Our Time as well as the writer of many works of fiction and nonfiction including, most recently, The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible and his latest novel Grace and Mary. They discuss when he began seeing culture as a whole, unstratified entity; what he learned in his working-class northern upbringing;  his brief days with his own pop group; his first getting an arts program on BB2 "almost by accident," and the opportunities he realized it gave him to showcase a "rainbow" of arts, rather than a "pyramid" with opera, no matter how lousy, ever at the top; when he began as a writer at Oxford, the institution that gave him his first "proper free time"; his enjoyment of not just the act but the discipline of putting pen to paper; how he gives In Our Time an edge by doing it live, with a minimum of beforehand interaction with his invited experts on the topic of the week; how his writing feeds ideas into his radio work; why, despite losing belief in "the finer points of Christianity," he felt nonetheless compelled to write a study of the importance of the King James Bible; his love of television and radio as "scatter media," offering an education at the push of a button; how he realized culture seemed to have displaced class as a means of identification; the benefits of not worrying about what you personally like or dislike, believe in or don't believe in, but the "why" of it, understanding making for a much more interesting experience than condemnation; what he found in the stratified London in which he first arrived in the early 1960s making thirteen pounds a week; how, subsequently, "people became the culture" there; and how London, in its current cultural moment, retains its status as "quite a city."

Colin Marshall sits down in Hackney, London with Iain Sinclair, author of numerous books, all rooted in London and all operating across the spectrum of fiction to nonfiction, including Downriver, Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, and most recently American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light. They discuss the momentarily impossible-to-define issue of Hackney's identity; the need to walk the neighborhood to know it — but to then do it your whole life; the re-making of the landscape in Hackney as elsewhere in London; the surprisingly functional London Overground's only partial integration into the city's transport consciousness; the way commemorative plaques "fix history," which forces you to find the reality for yourself; the operation of London hierarchies as he witnessed it in his book-dealing days, and how he then came to see uniformity set in; why students today never seem to get all the way through his books, drawing instead "a series of cultural cartoons" from excerpts and immediately applying them to their own project; why he's never had the sense of writing about London, per se, a subject to which he'd never expected the public to connect; the way the city's irrationality tends to drive those who write about into the realms of fiction; the criticism he takes for including "too may references" in his books, and his readers' freedom to pursue those references or not; the involved pub conversation that ensued when a Frenchman walked up to him and asked, "Is this London?"; what might have counted as the center of London in the seventies, and what might now; what results from asking, "What is this the center of?"; Geoff Dyer's years on Effra Road, and the associations its very name brings to mind; how he knows when one of his books  (or the latest continuation of his "one big book" of a career) has come to an end; taking on another country in American Smoke, and discovering the disappointing London in the mind of the Beats; and his notion the he has only ever "articulated aspects of place," still the most robust nexus of interests and influences available.

Colin Marshall sits down in Winchester, England with PD Smith, author of books on science, literature, superweapons, and, most recently, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. They discuss whether London has all the elements of the archetypally ideal city; the essential quality of "a place where you meet strangers"; the need to avoid writing only about buildings; the recent moment when half the world's population found itself living in cities; the factors that have made city life more possible today than ever before; what on Earth Prince Charles talks about when he talks about architecture and urbanism; the enduring impulse to knock cities down and start them over; the un-knocked-down city as a palimpsest-like store of knowledge, perhaps with its own "latent consciousness"; Tokyo and the metaphor of city as body; whether, in experiencing cities or writing about them, to focus on one element at a time or to try to take them whole; what Germans get right about city-building; when and where Starbucks starts to seem like the most foreign place you could go; the globe-spanning "cities" of the airport, the high street, or any other non-place; what it takes to make London strange again; the detective as a quintessentially urban figure exhibiting a mastery of his sensationalistically grim, dark, troubled environment; and the challenge any interesting city issues its resident: "Figure out how to live in me."

Colin Marshall sits down for bangers and mash in Woolwich, London, England, with writer on political aesthetics Owen Hatherley, author of the books Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, A New Kind of Bleak, and Uncommon, on the pop group Pulp. They discuss the relevance of the combined sentiments of the Pet Shop Boys and the Human League to his critical mission; his sickness of "where's my jetpack"-type complaint; the new limits of the possible; whether one more easily sees politics expressed in architecture in England that elsewhere; the coincidental rises of the welfare state and modern architecture; the nature of England's north-south divide, one starker than that between the former East and West Germany, the unexpected tasteless drama of northern building, and the "ruin porn" richness of towns like Bradford and Liverpool; housing as the chief political issue of modern Britain; the shamefacedness of new English building, and the tendency of it to bear little relation to its own location; his view of buildings like the now-demolished Tricorn Centre in childhood, before he'd internalized "what architecture should look like"; how the still-standing Preston Bus Station demonstrated that a provincial city wasn't parochial; the long-gone heyday of the City Architect; his upcoming book on architecture and communism, and what he's discovered in his exploration of eastern Europe; why he might feel the need for a disclaimer stating that he already knows about the gulag; and how he found that the Soviet regime generated much more nostalgia, in its buildings and otherwise, than people think.

Colin Marshall sits down in Canterbury, England with Jack Hues, founding member of the rock band Wang Chung and jazz band The Quartet. Wang Chung's latest album Tazer Up came out in 2012, and The Quartet's next album Collaborations Volumes 1 & 2 comes out this fall. They discuss what makes the "Canterbury sound"; the differences between Wang Chung's "English" and "American" albums; what recording in another city or country, and drawing in its "vibe," gives a project; music as a language, and how different styles of music feed into each other as do different languages; the "librarian mentality" that has many of his students talking initially about musical genres rather than about musicians; what growing up with the Beatles made possible; his Haruki Murakami reference in Wang Chung's "City of Light", and how he works into songs other things simply happened upon in life; his formation of The Quartet after 9/11; how he gets to balance teaching, The Quartet, and Wang Chung now that the latter doesn't demand an all-consuming lifestyle; how only his American students ask about Wang Chung, and how nearly all of them have internalized the form of the "pop song" unconsciously; critics' misguided fixation on lyrics; Wang Chung's use of unusual chords, and what makes some music generally more interesting than other music; whether the world of 1980s pop music could accommodate the darker side; art's emergence from constraints, and how he goes about imposing them on The Quartet; the experience of revisiting "Dance Hall Days" for a remix; whether Wang Chung would play "Rising in the East" if someone shouted it out; the musical place where Wang Chung and The Quartet meet; how to enjoy feeling like an outsider yet use roots as an artist; and the reaction drawn at a recent Wang Chung show: "Wow, you guys are real musicians!"

Colin Marshall walks through Stratford, London with John Rogers, author of the blog Lost Byway book This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. They discuss how one should approach one's first London shopping mall, a built phenomenon that has changed dramatically over the decades; his memories of playing soccer with rotten fruit in the older of Stratford's indoor shopping centers; whether knowing the "other" London requires you to first know the standard London; how "ramble books" got him writing about unwritten-about places; the importance of feeling proud of wherever you live; the unshrinking "London Book" industry, whose robustness possibly owes to the difficulty of pinning the city down; comparisons with Los Angeles, where myths and easy definitions go uncontested; when Leytonstone went from part of Essex to part of London, and what that meant; the historical John Rogers, who got burnt at the stake; what constitutes his walking "practice," which has earned him a reputation as "the drinking man's Iain Sinclair"; the richer connection to the environment you feel when walking, and the aid to thinking it provides; how he first began blogging about his walks, and how the activity took on elements of journalism; his curiosity about London places and place names, and how walking facilitates the accretion of related facts into knowledge; his use of pubs as "third places," and his use of samosas as walking fuel; the Orwellian enjoyment of hardship; and his memories of riding the Docklands Light Railway into the sunset when he first came to town.

Colin Marshall sits down in Marseille, France, specifically in the Le Corbusier-designed Unité d'Habitation, with Jonathan Meades, writer and broadcaster on architecture, culture, food, and a variety of other subjects to do with place. In his latest film, Bunkers, Brutalism, and Bloodymindness, he looks at architectural styles once- and currently maligned. They discuss how much his residence in Marseilles has to do with his residence in the Unité d'Habitation, to which "caprice" brought him not long ago; unapologetic building versus pusillanimous building; the lack of centralized planning that afflicts France, and what kind of built environment it has brought about; what makes Marseille "no longer the city of Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey"; the phases of the Unité, from its rejection by the workers for whom Corbusier intended it onward; the larger reaction to 20th-century social housing in France and Britain, and what it means that those countries have no taste for the sublime; which European borders he crosses and most immediately notices that "someone cares" about the buildings; what you miss by never having seen Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre, which rose in a rebuilt city in a time when "new meant better"; how he finds no place boring, an attitude for which he may have received inadvertent training traveling through England with his salesman father; places as gardens of forking paths, leading to all manner of other things; real places, and the fiction places you by definition invent when you try to describe them; the "persona completely apart" he uses to contrast against the variety of places on display in his films; his ideal of satirizing everything; what went into his upcoming book An Encyclopedia of Myself, beginning with the "lie" of its title; whether he has ever felt fascinated by American places; what the French consider too "difficult" about his un-methodical work; and what hope we should hold out for a future Jonathan Meades film on Buenos Aires.

Colin Marshall sits down for a pint at Nelson's Retreat, a pub on London's Old Street, with Neil Denny, host of Little Atoms, a show about ideas and culture on Resonance FM. They discuss whether beer improves or degrades the quality of ideas discussed; how the show's concept has changed over time, differently involving notions of science, culture, atheism, the Enlightenment, and the left; how he began podcasting, and then had to stand out from the sudden morass of skepticism-themed podcast; the different role of religion in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the difficulty of making any untrue statement about America; what effect the events of July 7, 2005 had on the formation of the show; how he conceives of his interviews as encounters with authors you read at the pub; the early inclusion of Jonathan Meades on the guest list, and how he represents the show's ever-growing interest in place; whether you must polarize to truly gain popularity; the Little Atoms American road trip, and what it taught him about how best to think about America's dually prominent scientific and religious enterprises; the American sense of place and the built environment versus that of England; how he sought out the semi-secret public gardens in the skyscrapers of San Francisco; how both of them changed the way they frame their core interests on their shows, but not the interests themselves; how he feels when he listens to his own early interviews, from back when he labored under the feeling of fraudulence then inherent to working outside the "legitimate media"; guests' welcome yet troubling compliments of, "You actually read my book" or "You really listened to me"; and friends' equally telling questions of, "Can you really talk to somebody for an hour?" 

Colin Marshall sits down in London's Tower Hamlets with composer and artist Robin Rimbaud, better known as Scanner. They discuss the usefulness of a new place's disorientation; the fun of grasping that new place's systems and making its connections; other skills in the set gained from a lifetime of travel; the "great change" he has observed living in east London for fourteen years, where he arrived in search of "light and high ceilings"; the value of his work's taking him to places he doesn't choose; what he learned long ago when his visiting American friend's girlfriend reflexively called every difference in England "really stupid"; the ease of complaint and the difficulty of embracing these differences; the importance of pattern in all areas of life; the complex question of how to cross a street in Vietnam; travel as a means of seeing your own home; photography as a means of notetaking; his shelves of diaries, kept every single day since age twelve, and what it says about his overarching skill of discipline; self-documentation's need of a system to give it meaning, and how his famous early Scanner work gave meaning to other people's phone calls; the intriguing question of how, exactly, you ended up interested in something, friends with someone, or in a place; whether not liking a piece of culture just means you can't connect anything else to it; the greater fascination of why others love something you don't love, and the need to experience it all in order to value what you do love; why we had such strong allegiances to music as teenagers; Nick Drake, B.S. Johnson, and the non-connected creator alone against the world; how he facilitates connections himself by staying available at all times; what he listens to in London, especially the local accents and terms of address like "mate," "love," and "boss"; how friends visit London and fail to connect to the west end, whereas he remains excited by the rest of the city; and the joy of walking by the historic site of George Orwell's arrest.

Colin Marshall stands around Hackney, London's "Tech City" with urban designer Euan Mills. They discuss how to tip in a London bar and how to cross a London street; when he realized he has become an urban designer, and what that entails; the hugeness and non-understandability of the spread-out, car-dependent, crime-fearing São Paulo, where he grew up hating cities; the development of his interest in people, not buildings, and cities as networks of people; how he came to London, a city of paradoxes that still gives him the sense that anything exciting that happens will happen there; what, exactly, makes a "high street"; how zoning differences between the U.S. and the U.K. affect neighborhoods, and the sorts of changes he's seen in London's in the 21st century; This Isn't F***ing Dalston, and what it told him about the edges of neighborhoods; how long a place takes to gentrify, and how it then matures, coming to embody all its eras at once; what bars, and the price of a pint of Guinness, tell you about a neighborhood; how everybody likes "authenticity" and nobody likes to feel like a target market; the test of a business you feel uncomfortable entering; what it means then the charity shops, 99p stores, and betting offices start showing up; the change in places like the growth in our hair, so show we don't notice it; the necessity of combining local experience with placemaking expertise; São Paulo as a repeat of  London in the 1960s, and the bad reputation top-down planning developed in that era; what to look for in London, like the intentions of a place or its people; the importance of thinking about who owns the land; and what effect the London weather might have on all this.

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo with Dan Kuramoto, founding member of the band Hiroshima who have now played for 40 years and recently released their 19th album, J-Town Beat. They discuss what he sees around him in the Little Tokyo in transition today as opposed to the one he grew up in 40 years ago; what it means to play "Los Angeles music" in this multi-ethnic city; how the band's koto player June Kuramoto learned her classical instrument while growing up in a Los Angeles black ghetto; the question of whether you can build a modern, western band around the koto, which Hiroshima has always tried to answer; how musical traditions with deeper roots cooperate better together; making their musical mixtures work as, in microcosm, making America work; making the still mutable Los Angeles work as, in microcosm, making America work; his time as an Asian-American Studies department chair at CSU Long Beach, and what he found out about Japanese-Americans there; music as a "way of healing" from the self-hate he once took from the media; his lunch with Ridley Scott and Hans Zimmer; how it felt to become part of a group considered "the bad guys" again in the 1980s, just as Hiroshima really took off; the band's first trip to Japan, and the visceral feelings it brought about; the universality of craft as an integral part of Japanese identity; the difficulties companies have had categorizing Hiroshima, and the  special problems of the "smooth jazz" label; his lack of desire to play music for secretaries who just need their afternoons to pass more quickly; how they honed their chops in the Los Angeles black communities, and how black radio gave them their first big push; and the composition and meaning of the striking cover of their second album, Odori.

Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Frederiksberg with Melanie Haynes, author of the blog Dejlige Days. They discuss the Danish national virtue of hygge (and the also important quality of dejlige); how she came to leave her native England for Denmark; the Copenhagen system of smiley-face food sanitation ratings; the Danish habit of both asking "Why are you here in my country?" and personally receiving her praise for the country; why she writes about festivals, eating, design, and "the relaxed life"; how the British operate in fifth gear at all times, and the Danish in third; her popular post on "becoming Danish," and Denmark's concept of immigration; the necessity to learn Danish so as to avoid perpetually apologizing all the time for your non-Danishness; her troubled period in Berlin, a city with which she could never really engage; how Danish society frowns on ambition versus how British society does; scarves and the way Danish women wear them; what pregnancy taught her about Danish life; the relative perception of taxes, and how her work in government public relations sheds light on it; how she intends to help her young son become a citizen of the world; what she wished she'd known about Denmark before coming; and her immediate feeling that she "should've always been here."

Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Vesterbro with Per Šmidl, author of the bestseller Chop Suey, the essay Victim of Welfare, and the new novel Wagon 537 Christiania. They discuss the surprise foreigners, and especially Americans, feel upon discovering that a self-governing commune like Christiana has existed for over forty years in the middle of Copenhagen; how Christiana began as "a spiritual venture" and became "the last and greatest attempt Western man made to rid himself of the shackles of capitalism"; the criticism Danish society allows, but the price you must pay if you make it; how his speaking out resulted in his "confinement" to unpublishability; normal society as a corset, and the way life in a place like Christiana releases it; what it means when the protagonist of Wagon 357 Christiana discovers he can't urinate; the question of whether one moves into Christiana because of an awareness of wanting to live differently, or simply because of a diffused feeling of something having gone wrong; the difference between short- and long-term Christianites, and the results they get from their respective stints there; how Henry Miller revealed to him "the importance of personal liberation"; how he wrote Chop Suey while keeping his contact with the Danish state to a minimum, and the Czech exile he moved into after he completed it; the societal "lie" he felt he had to expose by writing Victim of Welfare; the state as an eternal parent who considerers unacceptable the individual's desire to live; how Christiana could possibly have survived as long as it has; what his time outside the Danish state taught him; and the importance of living a live between countries.

Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Nørrebro with Louise Sand (and her baby daughter Alice), who teaches the Danish language on the Copenhagencast. They discuss why the Danes speak English so well, yet still feel shy about speaking it; her experience teaching Danish to classrooms of foreigners; her original studies to become a Spanish teacher; her inspirational friendship with Japanese-teaching podcaster Hitomi Griswold of Japancast.net; how she learns one language after another, like a musician addicted to learning one instrument after another; the importance, and difficulty, of giving up goals like perfect fluency; how podcasting lets her approach Danish education in a "modern," less traditionally academic way; that thoroughly satisfying moment when a native speaker of a foreign language first understands you; the cultural lessons you find your way to when studying language, such as the existence of the onsdags snegle; how the Danish language enriches Danish life, especially its sense of humor; why to study subjects you love in other languages; the last twenty years you spend mastering the last ten percent of a language; the surprising directness of Danish in contrast with other languages, and the elements of life evoked by its idiomatic expressions; what she's learned watching her young children acquire language; how flash cards "increase the storage space in your brain"; and the new expansion of the Danish language, as manifested in the signature expressions of a well-known traffic broadcaster.

Colin Marshall sits down in one of Copenhagen's many storied serving houses with Thomas E. Kennedy, author of the "Copenhagen Quartet" of novels In the Company of Angels, Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story, Falling Sideways, and the forthcoming Beneath the Neon Egg. They discuss whether one can truly know Copenhagen without knowing its serving houses; the drinking guide from which Kerrigan in Copenhagen takes its "experimental" form; his mission not just to know all of the city's serving houses, but to incorporate as much of its culture as possible into his books and to capture the "light of the four seasons" which first captivated him in 1972; how he came to live in Copenhagen, and the breakthrough as a fiction writer the act of leaving his native America brought about; how he overcame his fear of writing Danish characters; what happens after the first toast at a Danish dinner party; how he managed to take notes for the corporate satire Falling Sideways during dreaded office meetings; what it means that Danes tend to greet everyone in a room in rank order; his immersion into the Danish lifestyle, and to what extend the much-touted Danish happiness comes out of reduced expectations; whether he counts as an American, mid-Atlantic, Danish, Irish-American, or American European writer; how one society's clichés, such as the Danish expression "to hang your pictures where your nails are," offer bursts of insight to another; the American tendency to cling to differences and identity; the noir Beneath the Neon Egg, which explores Copenhagen's underbelly of violence, crime, drugs, sex clubs, and its famous commune Christiana; how his conversion into a full-time novelist fits in with his habit of "living life on fortune" (and why he may have written more with a day job); how Danes react to his depictions of them; and what his life in Denmark has taught him about the importance of taxes. 

Colin Marshall sits down at Copenhagen's Husets Biograf with Jack Stevenson, programmer of the theater and author of books on both Scandinavian and American film. They discuss Lars von Trier as the world's representative of Danish cinema; the difficulty of creating scandal within unshockable Denmark; revival theaters across the world as a nation of their own; the film education he drew from haunting the revival houses of Boston; his plan to serve ten White Russians during a screening of The Big Lebowski; Copenhagen as Scandinavia's most "real urban environment" in which to show films; the slow emergence of the strengths of the current generation of independent cinemas; the question asked about both Denmark and Korea, "How does that small country make such interesting films?"; his own introduction to Danish film, through Lars von Trier and others; how, in the era in America when "Scandinavian movie" meant, more or less, "porno movie," Danish film helped make porn chic; the ideal grind house experience evoked by Jack Kerouac in On the Road; the days when every train station in Germany, "a special place," had a porno theater; America's lack of an "off cinema" scene like the ones in European countries; why Danes can't accept film noir (and don't know about soul food); the history of the Husets Biograf's 19th-century industrial building, overtaken by anarchist squatters in the sixties; the surprises of filmgoing in Brussels; his resolve to program Halloween shows in the face of Danish indifference to Halloween; and his current work with traditional Danish ghost stories.

Colin Marshall sits down in Vesterbro with Mikael Colville-Andersen, urban mobility expert and CEO of Copenhagenize. They discuss where Los Angeles, with its "pockets of goodness," ranks on the global scale of Copenhagenization; what it takes for a city's population to become "intermodal"; his experience growing up in an English-Danish-Canadian household, biking all the time before the onset of the "culture of fear"; the qualities of a mainstream bicycle culture, including a lack of specialized cycling clothes of the type worn by the sport cyclists who have "hijacked" the practice; learning how not to promote cycling from environmentalism, the greatest marketing failure of all time; the need, in some places, to sell urbanism before you can sell urban cycling; his work busting myths about why Copenhagen allegedly differs so much from all other cities; why he settled in Copenhagen himself, beyond not needing to explain his name so often; the photo he took that "launched a million bicycles" and made him into a modern-day Jane Jacobs; the failed science of traffic engineering and how to rebuild it; cycling's "modal share" and what it tells you about a city, especially when it rises above five percent; the bicycle as "the symbol of the future, man"; how helmets kill cycling culture, and his TED Talk on riding without one; our innate need, as human beings, to fear stuff; and what urban cycling promoters can learn from the success of automobiles, and especially their introduction of the term "jaywalking" and the very concept of playgrounds.

Colin Marshall sits down in the Copenhagen offices of Gehl Architects with founding partner Jan Gehl, architect, Professor Emeritus of Urban Design at the School of Architecture in Copenhagen, and author of books including Life Between Buildings, Cities for People, and How to Study Public Life. They discuss what important change occurred in Copenhagen in 1962, and what led to it; the midcentury "car invasion" in Europe and the first modern shopping mall's construction in Kansas City; the re-emergence of the notion that "maybe pedestrians should walk"; the connectedness of walking in Copenhagen, which ultimately forms a "walking system"; the dullness of the anti-car position versus the richness of the pro-people one; the two movements of modernism and motorism, at whose intersection he found himself upon graduating from architecture school in 1960; what it meant to study "anti-tuberculosis architecture," and what it meant to build for the old diseases rather than the new ones; his marriage to a psychoanalyst and ensuing interest in increasing architecture's attention to people; how his PhD thesis became Life Between Buildings, and why that book has endured for over four decades in an ever-increasing number of languages; how first we form cities, and then they form us; what we can learn from Venice; the urban "acupuncture" performed on various American cities today; his long enjoyment of Melbourne; why we've only so slowly awoken to our dissatisfaction with the built environment; the loss of cheap petroleum and stable nuclear families, which propped up suburbia; how he and his team systematize and use their knowledge of cities to examine and assist the use of public space across the globe; and all he finds totally unsurprising about man's use and enjoyment of place.

Colin Marshall sits down in Nørrebro with Classic Copenhagen blogger and photographer Sandra Høj. They discuss the city's current enthusiasm for tree-cutting; the small things in Copenhagen that draw her eye, from pieces of street art to weird details on houses; how she started blogging in the wake of the Muhammad caricature crisis with an interest in disputing the global perception of Danes as living obliviously in a land of pastries and fairy tales; her mission to describe "the good, the bread, and the ugly" of Copenhagen; the Danish tendency to nag about problems; what time spent in "cozy" Amsterdam taught her about her "sexy" home city; what time spend in Paris taught her about how Copenhagen could better respect itself; the bewildering array of political parties putting signs up all over the city, and how rarely their actions match their words; her desire for children to grow up in the same Copenhagen she did; the evolution of Amager, also known as "the Shit Island", and what gentrification looks like elsewhere in the city; the scourge of Joe and the Juice; and her continuing search outward for more "traces of life" in Copenhagen.

Colin Marshall sits down in Copenhagen's Nørrebro with Lars AP, author of the book Fucking Flink and founder of the movement of the same name, which aims to make the Danish not just the "happiest" people, but the friendliest as well. They discuss just what it feels like to bear the label of "happiest" and whether "most content" might not suit the country better; the difference in impact of the word "fucking," especially in a book title, between Denmark and the States; the seemingly inward-turned people foreigners feel as if they encounter when they first visit Denmark; his TEDx Copenhagen talk about his realization that he acted less friendly when speaking Danish than he did when speaking English; "negative politeness" versus "positive politeness"; the importance of internalizing a culture in order to speak its language; how the Danish once had to meet few non-Danes, and how they can still feel the effects of that in American questions like "How you doin'?"; the process and impact of "baking a little meaning" into each social encounter; his tendency to act, when in the Danish countryside, in a way that makes his wife call him "homo jovialis"; how compliments and other acts of friendliness require not just honesty but creativity and surprise for maximum effectiveness; the origins of the Fucking Flink movement, and the stunts he has pulled off with it, such as giving out positive parking tickets; the similar misery of commenting on the internet, driving in traffic on the highway, and staying too embedded in your own culture; the Avatar handshake, and what we can learn from the accompanying greeting of "I see you"; how best to address the needs we have when we get to the top of the Maslow Pyramid; the need to use not just what's between our ears, but what's between us; and how this all relates to the 4,000 years' worth of city building coming very soon.

Colin Marshall sits down before a live audience at the New Urbanism Film Festival at Los Angeles' ACME Theater with Tim Halbur, Director of Communications at the Congress for the New Urbanism, former Managing Editor at Planetizen, creator of the two-disc DVD set The Story of Sprawl, and author of the children's urban planning book Where Things Are from Near to Far. They discuss the anti-Los Angeles indoctrination he received in San Francisco, and what that indoctrination might have had right; the two "nodes" of Hollywood and the beach that outsiders tend to recognize in Los Angeles, and why people claim to live here even when they live thirty miles away; why cities actually build for the car aren't as often derided as "built for the car"; the hard-to-place unease we grew up with in the suburbs; his past producing museum audio tours, and how he would produce an audio tour of Los Angeles that navigates by subcultures; whether Los Angeles is too big, and what it means that we continually try to define and connect it all; what the Congress for the New Urbanism does, and how it addresses the way we once "carved out" our cities for parking lots and freeways; the Jetsonian vision of the future that carried us away after the Second World War; what Disneyland gets right about urbanism; the constant change that defines a living city, and San Francisco's unhappy experience trying to halt it; the Beverly Hills 90210 model of denser-than-suburbia living he found in Los Angeles; his weekly commute to the CNU in Chicago, and what he learns from living in these two quite different cities at once; how he'd like to see Los Angeles change in the next ten years; how Eric Brightwell's neighborhood maps surprise people, and what that means for neighborhood awareness; and the importance of "theming" urban places.

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with showman, "histo-tainer" and "Ambassador of Americana" Charles Phoenix, curator of vintage midcentury slides and author of books like Southern Californialand, Americana the Beautiful, and Southern California in the 50s. They discuss the postwar period's appealing mix of the highest and lowest American sophistication; how the country's new middle class became "buying machines" and "cultural monsters"; the "time travel in a box" he experienced when he found his first set of old slides in a thrift shop; the "luxurious" nature of Kodachrome; what makes any given slide a keeper, and how he can tell, say, a 1960 from a 1961; the layers of history visible in a photo, which he looks through as if through a window; the meaning of the first freeway-side mall with fallout shelter-equipped hidden delivery tunnels; the many midcentury innovations Southern California didn't invent, but perfected; his Disneyland tours of Down Los Angeles, and Disneyland as both a comparison to and metaphor for much in the human experience; how we gave up the joy of cars and let driving become a chore; the 1950s' love of speed in contrast to our modern tendency to " get it over with"; how he finds the good in every era, the seventies included; our hard-wiring to reject the past and buy new; his more recent interest in processed foodcraft, including work with Cheez Whiz and Jell-O molds; his Los Angeles architecture show, with which he intends to reveal the structures not yet properly acknowledged; how social media empowers the sharing of our aesthetic fetishes; whether modern designs like that of the iPhone express the optimism he sees in midcentury Americana; and the importance, often neglected today, of creating anticipation.

Colin Marshall sits down in Hollywood with lawyer turned social dynamics expert Jordan Harbinger, co-host of the Pickup Podcast and co-founder of confidence education program The Art of Charm. They discuss how much time he spends explaining that he isn't Tom Cruise from Magnolia; how he conceives of The Art of Charm's mission to teach confidence, which involves teaching emotional intelligence; whether and how our generation of men have come out especially socially inept; the still-strong number of pickup artist types wandering around Hollywood, and the equally strong number of low-self-esteem women with whom they match; the importance of asking oneself the question "What can I learn from this person?", an entirely different question from "What can I get from this person?"; the Pickup Podcast's origin in someone else's basement, and how that developed into coaching and teaching; the skills of networking through his short law career, and how he realized they also applied to, say, meeting women; the day he found himself ostensibly studying for a law exam while remotely coaching a man for his imminent move from Africa to Denmark; knowing how to use Los Angeles, a land of "towns packed together for tax purposes," especially its areas of dense "city life" like Hollywood and Koreatown; everyone in Los Angeles' essential nature as a foreigner, and how that opens up the question, "Where are you from?"; his dull childhood in Troy, Michigan which led to an adolescence of conning and wiretapping, and then into Germany as an exchange student; language and travel as the engines of good social-habit development, and the advantages of becoming foreign and shifting your linguistic context; how "networking" became a dirty word; specificity, the enemy of relationships; the importance of people as vectors; and the sentiment "it's all who you know — and thank God for that!"

Colin Marshall sits down above downtown Los Angeles in the U.S. Bank tower with Stephen Gee, senior producer at ITV Studios and author of Iconic Vision: John Parkinson, Architect of Los Angeles, the first book on the man who designed such landmark structures in the city as Union Station, the Memorial Coliseum, Bullock's Wilshire, and City Hall. They discuss how such a visionary could have gone unknown so long; Los Angeles' relationship to its public buildings; Parkinson's notion, during a time when Los Angeles set about defining itself, of putting up a built environment that would leave people inspired; the neatness, elegance, and organization that characterize a Parkinson building; the city's assumption that Parkinson would remain a household name for generations to come, and how World War II and the years after threw that off; Parkinson's move from England, and his own move from England in 1995; his struggle to find information related to the architect, and how everything new he learned made him want to learn more (as also happens with knowledge about the city of Los Angeles itself); how you engage better with Los Angeles after coming to understand its original intention; how to break down the false images of the city the rest of the world gets fed; Los Angeles as "the city of the future" in most or all eras of its existence; the modern repurposing of Parkinson buildings, into apartments and retail spaces and law schools; Iconic Vision's origin as, and possible future as, a television documentary; the new relevance of Parkinson buildings in an era when Angelenos have begun to regard and use the city differently; what he learned when he assembled of Parkinson's buildings, from Los Angeles and elsewhere, "in one place"; and what might architecturally excite the always forward-looking Parkinson in this always forward-looking city today. Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with Carren Jao, Manila- and Los Angeles-based writer on architecture, art, and design. They discuss what rain does to the aesthetic of Los Angeles; the role of the river here as the connection people don't realize they have; the difference between the floods Los Angeles used to routinely endure and the ones Manila routinely endures now; how, growing up in the Philippines, she got interested in the shape and form of cities; Manila's "improvisational" nature not centered around always having functioning systems; the Filipino inclination to make guests' lives easier in any way possible; her entry into the United States, but not the one that "everyone knows"; public transit as amusement-park ride; the important role of the Jeepney in Manila's transportation; her life in the San Fernando Valley, very much a place distinct from Los Angeles itself; how writing has forced her to explore this city and its environs, including still-developing ones like Pacoima's "mural mile"; how to get the wide-openness of the Los Angeles experience across to friends, family, and readers; the "third-world" contrasts of nice homes next to squatters' villages in Manila and the Arts District next to Skid Row in Los Angeles; the boom in interest related to architecture, design, and space-making, and the importance of leaving openings for people to construct their own environments; what she'd look at first after five years away from Los Angeles, and from Manila; this city's long-confused relationship with its water; what the Philippines have learned from other countries; what America could learn from the Asian sense of accommodation; what she learns from having to attend neighborhood council meetings; how fast word and social knowledge travel in Manila, how slow they can travel in Los Angeles, and how both have their advantages.

Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library's Maguire Gardens with Nathan Masters, writer interested in all things Los Angeles, especially the history of the city, about which he writes as a representative of Los Angeles as Subject for KCET and Los Angeles Magazine. They discuss how he regarded the distant downtown Los Angeles skyline while growing up in the Orange County town of Anaheim; the changing ways the county of his youth has regarded itself relative to Los Angeles; how far back you can go into the history of southern California and still have it bolster your understanding of the place, even to the era of allegedly "sleepy little village" of Mexican Los Angeles; why observers have insisted that this city has had little interest its own history; how he didn't need to spend time away from Los Angeles to appreciate it; the debate over whether actual orange groves inspired the "Orange" in Orange County, and his grandfather's home-movie footage of the uprooting of said groves; why observers have insisted that this city stands atop a desert; the competing boosting and demythologizing narratives; where he finds the greatest historical surprises, especially in the "old, weird" American 19th century; why knowing your history might get you driving more safely down the Arroyo Seco Parkway; how each foreign culture engages with Los Angeles in a different way, and how Los Angeles has no one way of accepting, absorbing, or digesting these influences; the seeming impossibility, given all this, of writing an overarching narrative of the city; the eternal struggle here between optimism and nostalgia; readers' love of stories of "lost geography"; the creek bed hidden in Koreatown; his own love of stories about trees; and the elusive stories of history's ordinary Angelenos.

Colin Marshall sits down at the intersection of Los Feliz, Thai Town, and Little Armenia with Caleb Bacon, writer on the TBS sitcom Sullivan and Son and host of the podcast Man School (as well as the podcast Sullivan and Son: Behind the Bar). They discuss his feeling in his own guest seat; his move to Los Angeles from Albany purely in search of "good times and good weather"; the deliberately old-school-sitcom nature of Sullivan and Son, and the opportunity its Philadelphia setting provides for racist jokes; how it feels to work simultaneously in "old" and "new" media; how he fell into television, and how he deliberately entered podcasting during the Great Podcasting Boom of '09; why he even focused his first podcast The Gentlemen's Club on men's interests; how he soon came to interview, alternately, comedians and pornstars, and what the overall combination taught him about humanity and the Los Angeles entertainment industry; the conversations he had with other men as he pulled his own life into shape, what he learned from them, and how that experience fueled Man School; the riches of "real stuff" yielded by genuine-curiosity-driven conversations, even outside of podcasting, as when he once met a retail clerk who mentioned getting kidnapped in Africa (and then invited him to come on Man School); whether our generation has become worse at being men than previous generations; how social fragmentation, of Los Angeles' type and others, has led men to have less meaningful communication with one another; his interest in the rules that new-media creators, in their ostensibly rule-free environments, inevitably create; Thai Town's enduring Seinfeld billboard; Man School's first live show at the Los Angeles Podcast Festival; the grand lessons he's learned from man-to-man conversations, such as the importance of slight progress adding up to big progress, and what travel teaches you about yourself; and the value of simple suggestions like "Hey man, just be cool," or, simpler still, "Don't be a jerk." 

Colin Marshall sits down at the University of Southern California with Richard Rayner, author of the novels Los Angeles Without a Map, The Elephant, Murder Room, The Cloud Sketcher, and The Devil's Wind as well as the non-fiction books The Blue Suits, Drake's Fortune, The Associates, and A Bright and Guilty Place. They discuss the three or four Los Angeleses in which he's lived since arriving in the city from England in the early eighties; the "up-for-it-ness" of the Los Angeles he first discovered; the reporting he later did from the 1992 riots, and the "geographical apartheid" he saw; his lack of a driver's license, and how he addresses the question of where the buses go; his observations of how the city once flung itself outward from downtown, and now flings itself back inward; Los Angeles' simultaneously unsurpassed optimism and pessimism; USC's Doheny Library as a metaphor for blunt capitalism in action; why we crave stories about Los Angeles' foundation on wrongdoing; how Los Angeles gets liked more in deed than word; how the current wave of interest in local history began; Los Angeles' era of booster books against anti-booster books; his escape from English history only to plunge into Los Angeles history; what his unfinished novel of a man who loses his memory in Wales revealed to him about his own life in America; how his English hometown diversified, and how Los Angeles did the same; his cycle through "dustbins of jaded cynicism," and the different sensibility his students (one of whom has written "the gay Korean Los Angeles novel") bring to bear; his favorite bus lines to take notes on overheard conversations; and how his enjoyment of the riots, in a sense, got him writing about his own criminal past.

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Besha Rodell, who has written about food in New York and Atlanta, and last year came to Los Angeles to become the Weekly's restaurant critic. They discuss the secret appeal and non-Australian origins of the Outback Steakhouse's Bloomin' Onion; her Australian youth, and the friends who insisted she join them at Koala Blue after she came to the States; what counts as authentic Australian cuisine, and the tortured question of "authenticity" in Los Angeles; her concerns with what people really eat; her predecessor Jonathan Gold's influence on the city's food culture; the appeal of putting yourself utterly at a restaurant's mercy; "ego-driven" versus "devotional" cuisine; the strange modern prevalence of kale salads; her preference for odd and uneven dishes versus perfect and derivative ones; how she got to know Los Angeles in the three weeks she had before moving here and then assembling the Weekly's 99 Essential Restaurants list; the paradox of more money on the west side and less food there; how far you have to go before a restaurant doesn't count as "in Los Angeles" anymore — or whether such a distance exists; the spread of this city's culinary interestingness, and how it compares, culturally, to Atlanta's divide between "Inside the Perimeter" and "Outside the Perimeter"; how ideally, a restaurant critic would move to a new Los Angeles neighborhood every two months; the advantages of the "bogus" system of star ratings, and why chefs want their stars; the current blowup in food interest, and what the internet has to do with it; how she came up through restaurant culture, and came to appreciate how you can't be "kind of a cook"; how you can't understand Los Angeles if you don't eat much here, and how best to understand it when you do go eating.

Colin Marshall sits down at the top of the Hotel Wilshire with Lynn Garrett, proprietor of popular online community Hidden Los Angeles and fifth-generation Angeleno. They discuss how best to prepare Germans for their Los Angeles vacation, since their guidebooks have failed; which human needs the many persistent myths about this city fulfill; how here, you are your own salvation; the revitalization of the Los Angeles River, as against the notion that "all it is is dead bodies and gang members"; Los Angeles as reflector of the observer's own particular hatreds; getting to know the city not as a city, but as a constellation of villages; her art-school exploration of the city back when she "didn't know not to"; who hangs out and talks on Hidden Los Angeles, and which topics get them most fired up; the human tendency to get upset about change of any kind, whether positive or negative, and to adjust perceptions accordingly; what happened when Hidden Los Angeles went viral, attracting 250,000 followers; Caine's Arcade, Skid Row charities, and all the other ways she's found the community can help (when not arguing); what the followers teach her about Los Angeles, the city no one person can possibly know; and what she learns from leaving the city, as well as how she makes herself an outsider when in it. (Photo: James Acomb)

Colin Marshall walks through downtown Los Angeles with Brigham Yen, Realtor and author of the urban renaissance blog DTLA Rising. They discuss the sort of neighborhood that can rise from nothing, and whether Los Angeles' downtown has come back from a deeper state of nothingness than other downtowns; the "bones" of a city's center, and how Los Angeles' have remained sound through all its problems; the late introduction of public space here; his car-centric youth in the San Gabriel Valley suburbs, and how going to San Francisco for school changed everything; the enduring "obesity" of Los Angeles' streets, even as it has become the fastest-changing city in America; in what order transit, restaurants, bars, shopping, and housing needed to return downtown; how streets become "activated" with human energy; Broadway's prospects for becoming "one of the coolest streets in America"; the healthy urban balance of a Prada by a Fallas-Paredes; how he began writing about cities by writing about Pasadena, and how interaction between the blogging half of his career and the real-estate half has deepened ever since; how he responds to longtime Angeleno's complaints about "brainwashed Millennials" and their fallen expectations; the special importance of an undisputed urban center amid a sea of suburbia; the laid-back sensibility he hopes Los Angeles can retain during its transformation; and what dream people can see actively (and successfully) pursued if they visit downtown Los Angeles themselves.

Colin Marshall sits down at the Old Pasadena offices of Rigler Creative with Thomas Rigler, Steve Reich, and Caitlin Starowicz, creators of City Walk, a new television and web series from KCET and Link TV on the transformation of American cities and our ability to walk in them. They discuss the walkability of Old Pasadena right beneath them; City Walk's origin as a project purely about the health benefits of walking, and how it expanded; their own discovery of the new walkability of American cities as they shot and researched the show, how they found they'd already been documenting that "wave of change" almost inadvertently; their insights into the vision of park planner Frederick Law Olmsted; the buildup of frustration with postwar American cities, and what planning for and living around the car has to do with it; what they felt when experts elsewhere argued that, in fact, Los Angeles is the city of the walkable future; how they learned the distinctive urban language of this city, whether they grew up here or came to it later; the end of one form of the American Dream, the beginning of another, and the consequent "slumming of the suburbs"; how much the context for their interview and urban exploration material has widened with time and additional research; what it takes to make a show about experiences, not messages; City Walk's distinctive aesthetic, meant to represent the life of a city itself, and how the Iverson Mall Walkers fit into that; and how they revived the magazine-format show for the internet just as cities have revived themselves for the 21st century.

Colin Marshall sits down above Gastown, Vancouver, British Columbia with novelist Timothy Taylor, author of Stanley Park, Story House, and The Blue Light Project, as well as the short story collection Silent Cruise. They discuss what, exactly, Vancouver is; what, exactly, CanLit is; his being born into a nomadic lifestyle; his inadvertent prediction of the modern locavore movement; whether one can live in Vancouver without developing an interest in architecture; his fascination with creative and toxic "dyadic relationships," as well as the place of emulation and envy in human affairs; how he discovered René Girard's ideas about "mimetic desire" and came up with a critique of consumerism contra his countrywoman Naomi Klein; the visible desires of Vancouver and its murky, independent-minded past; our quasi-sacrificial system of celebrity; what he learned from watching reaction videos on YouTube; his moves from the navy to banking to consulting to writing;  how he grew fascinated with entrepreneurs; why we haven't eaten so well, historically, in North America; Canada's potential as the New-Worldiest place in the New World; his search for where people gather when he visits a new city, and where he would say Vancouverites go to be Vancouverites; his disputation of tradition in Canadian literature; his next project picking up on the lives of the characters from Stanley Park; and what to open yourself up to when you come to Vancouver.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, British Columbia with comedian and podcaster Dave Shumka, co-host with Graham Clark of Stop Podcasting Yourself. They discuss what everyone in Vancouver is, a little bit; the city's much-touted "livability"; becoming that icon of fun that is a comedian in "No Funcouver"; the origin of Stop Podcasting Yourself; the newly classic Vancouver lifestyle up in downtown condos versus the classic classic Vancouver lifestyle in his hundred-year-old house; waking up in adulthood to find himself in a reasonably cool city; the pull, for comedians and media people, of both Toronto and the United States; his job overseeing international music at the CBC, and to what extent it puts his finger on the pulse of the Canadian musical consciousness; whether music will always out-cool comedy; the quaintness of the Canadian media experience; whether Vancouver has stories to tell, and how he'd like to see them told; the scarred hookers of the less-scary-than-sad Hastings Street; how many Torontonians it takes to screw in a lightbulb; the struggle for comedic visas; the descent of the stretchpant; Vancouverites' tendency to luxuriate in the idea that they could, theoretically, ski and windsurf in a single day; how he heard the call of comedy at a Salvadoran restaurant; his strategic conversational use of mundane topics; Vancouver's stinkiest buses; and the most fruitful sources of ridiculousness he has, including dumbness and his own simulation thereof.

Colin Marshall sits above Hastings Street in Vancouver, British Columbia with Gordon Price, Director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, former Councillor for the City of Vancouver, and creator of the electronic magazine Price Tags. They discuss his personal definition of "Vancouverism"; his city as a mid-20th-century version of 19th-century city-building; the balance of trying to maintain the place's Edenic qualities while shipping out its natural resources; the D-word of density, and whether Vancouver's West End ever really had the highest density in North America; how built environments age in place, passing from horror to heritage;  how building for the car worked, until it didn't; "stroads," like Los Angeles' La Cienega, which combine the worst of streets with the worst of roads; budgets as the sincerest form of rhetoric; the role technology plays in our newfound adoption of transit; whether Los Angeles could become "the Vancouver of 2020" — or maybe 2030; how New York came from the brink, and what he saw during its decline; whether the Utopian question of how to prevent dullness matters to Vancouver; the erotic power of the surreptitious, the illegal, and whatever you can't regulate; the element of his personal life that got him interested in cities, where he used to find them emblems of what had gone wrong in society; gay men as urban pioneers; and how cities can do better with whatever they've already got.

Colin Marshall sits down in Vancouver's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden with JJ Lee, menswear writer, broadcaster, and author of The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit. They discuss where to buy pocket squares in Vancouver (and whether to just have your kids make some); what to wear during the city's "false start summer"; his own uses of color, and his gradual approach toward "weird clothes"; our coming age of wide-open, postmodern suit-wearing, a recovery from men getting stupid about dressing in the sixties and seventies; his own early dislike of suits, when they to him represented all that went wrong in society; his father's quick rise, painful fall, and the undiagnosed, self-medicated depression that laid under it; his realization that people are highly aesthetic beings, always creating aesthetic moments; the adoption of tragic versus comic narratives, and which one led his father to stop dressing well; the way precision has replaced instinct for well-dressed men; Montreal and its status as Canada's style capital; his favorable impression of Toronto's dress, textbook though it may be; Vancouver's athleticism-influenced casualness and its limitations; how he starts conversations with clothes, even in New York; the lie behind the idea of "truth" in dress; how men now wear suits, but often defensively, out of fear; the decline of Chinatown tailoring culture; the way men today don't quite know how to be in a tailor shop, never having had that sort of interaction before; and his current project of essays on fatherhood, and the importance of leaving a legacy of ideas for his sons.

Colin Marshall sits down in Yaletown, Vancouver, British Columbia with Paul Delany, professor of English at Simon Fraser University, editor of the reader Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City, and author of the article "Vancouver: Graveyard of Ambition?" They discuss whether it makes sense to talk about a "postmodern" city in 2013; the influence of Douglas Coupland, William Gibson, and Jeff Wall; Vancouver's future-oriented open-endedness; his path to Vancouver from England via the United States and specifically a crumbling New York; the state of Vancouver in 1970, when he arrived; how the West End became dense in the fifties, and how Yaletown evolved; English literature's interest in the phenomenon of the modern city, and his own; the city as a nexus of fascinations; his disappointment in Vancouver's architectural development and its lack of internationalism, save for buildings like the downtown library, the unofficial campus for the city's many foreign language students; all the condo towers as Ballardian "prisons with the locks on the inside"; Microsoft's aborted entry into Vancouver's suburbs and its subsequent relocation to downtown; what led him to ask whether Vancouver made for a graveyard of ambition; the importance of getting outside Vancouver, and regularly; the lack of a fruitful intellectual model to replace postmodernism as a means of viewing Vancouver; and how the city's large and growing Asian presence prepares it for the future.

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Leslie Helm, former Tokyo correspondent for Business Week and the Los Angeles Times, editor of Seattle Business, and author of Yokohama Yankee: My Family's Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan. They discuss the Asia connections of Los Angeles and Seattle; Japan's changing place in the zeitgeist since when he covered their economic bubble; how he observed the West's acceptance of Japan from his vantage as a quarter-Japanese yet Japanese-born "outsider"; how much of his family drama turns on the issue of how Japanese each member looks; the point of foreigner's entry Yokohama was before it became considered an extension of Tokyo; how firm identities as foreigners helped members of his family's older generations thrive in Japan; the new coolness of part-Japaneseness in this internationalist era; his frustration with the myth of Japanese difference and purity; what actually happened to Japan the economic powerhouse; the weakness of Japan's craft-based strengths in a software-based economy; what the low level of English in Japan reveals about the country's educational system; the fame his family accrued in the shipping business, and the bad reputation the company ultimately developed once sold; his kids, who look Japanese but grew up Western; the upside to the Japanese burden of obligations; to what extent Japan has realized it needs outsiders to keep the country going; what it means that Japan can burn through so many Prime Ministers in such a short time with no social disruption; the Shinto religion as Boy Scouts; how this book of family history became a painstakingly designed volume for the world to read; what America has, still, to learn from Japan; and which country seems more likely to overcome its worst tendencies. 

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz, Los Angeles with Joseph Mailander, who since 1981 has written fiction and poetry as well as political and cultural analysis in the city. His new collection is Days Change at Night: Notes from Los Angeles' Decade of Decline, 2003-2013. They discuss his long relationship with Argonaut Street; the unique changelessness of Playa del Rey; how Los Angeles became the first recognizably great city built on a mechanical scale; the pronunciation of "Playa del Rey", "Los Feliz", and even "Los Angeles", and his impatience with our sanctimoniousness in our rectitude and insistence on our errors; the fact that nobody comes to the city looking to see rules enforced; how contrarian a position he takes in naming 2003-2013 as the "decade of decline," and what New York looked like in its own, more severe one; the counterintuitive way political, economic, and social decline bring with them a flowering of arts and culture; Los Angeles' tendency to punish the very people who have fun in it, and whether they actually feel punished; how the renter-heavy housing market reflects political decline; young people who just want to make enough money to move out of town, and why they often don't do it after all; his repeated crossings of the Shakespeare Bridge to get to the theater district; what Disney Concert Hall, with its faulty fire alarms and lack of meeting places, means to him; conductor Gustavo Dudamel's hair as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's value proposition; how Los Angeles seems to have missed the arc of its own musical narrative; the expensive development of Grand Avenue, "the official street of Los Angeles ego," as a signal of out-of-touchness; Ye Rustic Inn, its Myrtleburger, and its promise of anonymity; and which administrators just don't understand the character of the city.

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Franklin Hills with Jeff Weiss, music writer for the LA Weekly and many other publications, editor of The Passion of the Weiss, co-host of the podcast Shots Fired, and co-author of the book 2pac vs. Biggie. They discuss the total time of his life spent waiting for rappers to show up to interviews; Tyler the Creator and Odd Future as today's representatives of Los Angeles, and what the collective has to do with West Coast experimentalism and the city as a magnet for eccentrics; how he fights his personal war against cliché; kids today, and their tendency to listen to music of all eras, including golden ones, several of which we live in at any given time; Dam-Funk, Matthewdavid, Flying Lotus, and the new, highly Los Angeles-y genre they have created; the genesis of modern instrumental hip-hop; the un-irony of Los Angeles, and your need to carve out your own world within the city if you live in it; his journey from jock to writer, and his novel about a real tragedy on his baseball team; his childhood growing up in a culture-free household; how he one day found himself "hate-watching" Girls; how the Low End Theory helped him stop hating Los Angeles, and how the city concurrently "opened its gates" more generally; which albums can mentally prepare you for the city, and especially for its absurdity; his mentorship by Herbert Gold, the alleged rival of Jack Kerouac; and the only two prices that have come down in the past decade: that of cocaine, and that of writing.

Colin Marshall sits down in Pasadena with journalist Patt Morrison, best known for her "Patt Morrison Asks" column in the Los Angeles Times, her years hosting Life and Times and Bookshow with Patt Morrison on public television as well as Patt Morrison on KPCC, and her book Rio L.A.: Tales from the Los Angeles River. They discuss her childhood in an Ohio town of 2,000 people, where the nearest cool place was a book; how and why her family decided to pull up stakes and stay on the move before suddenly deciding to settle in Tuscon, Arizona, a bustling metropolis by comparison; how she developed a kind of historical fourth-dimensional vision, letting her see what's been here as well as what is here; how she came to Los Angeles for Occidental College, and what she discovered here; what others have discovered in Los Angeles, like the individuality of expression, bordering on eccentricity, that comes with a certain type of property; how reading about Nellie Bly as a child convinced her then and there to become a journalist; the lessons she's learned from working across several major media; what she read to better understand Los Angeles, and what books she'd put in the city's welcome wagon kit; her drive to collect stories about "then" as well as "now"; Los Angeles' authentic-ness, as opposed to its authenticity; what you need to master to live the ever-growing number of lifestyles possible in the city; retaining that Los Angeles sense of perpetual astonishment, and reinforcing it by regularly traveling abroad; why we seem to have forgotten the importance of clothing on the West Coast, and whether $500 sweatpants and $100 filp-flops say something meaningful about Los Angeles; popular confusion about the real eastside-westside border, and what she's done to fight the misconceptions; and what to keep in mind when you, too, come to Los Angeles.

Colin Marshall sits down in Glassell Park with comedian and man of cinema Chris Gore, who has talked movies on such television shows as The X Show, The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, and Attack of the Show; has written books including The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, The Complete DVD Book, and The Fifty Greatest Movies Never Made; hosts the podcast PodCRASH with That Chris Gore; and has a new comedy album and picture book coming up called Celebrities Poop. They discuss how he takes his work seriously, but not himself; his "war" on the top five podcasts; his contretemps with Representative Dan Lungren while editing Videogames magazine; Colin's Podthought on PodCRASH, and the superiority of essays and films that don't tell you how to feel; his first television appearances on FX, and how he there learned to read a teleprompter by pretending not to read it; growing up a Michigander and a nerd, discovering alternative culture through film (and building his own eight-millimeter home theater at age seven) while actively not giving a shit what anyone thought of him; his choice to come to Los Angeles because it smelled less like pee than New York; his place in film culture versus nerd culture, and the word "nerd" versus the word "geek"; how he makes a podcast out of his appearances on other podcasts in the podcast Mecca that is Los Angeles; meeting and talking to cool people as a byproduct of a career, or as the raison d'être of one; which of them buys cars and which of them buys bespoke suits; what it felt like being around for the nineties' American indie film boom, and why only Quentin Tarantino has kept up his auteur's head of steam from those days; and why he made My Big Fat Independent Movie when that boom got to be too much.

Colin Marshall sits down above Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles with Tyson Cornell, proprietor of Rare Bird Books and Rare Bird Lit, former longtime Director of Marketing & Publicity at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, punk rocker, and co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection Yes Is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales. They discuss the seeming contradiction between Los Angeles' image as an "unreaderly" place and its rank as the largest book market in America; this city's tendency not, unlike other cities, to tell you straight-up what it is; how his study of the American newsstand brought him to Los Angeles, and then to Book Soup; the perspective he gained on Los Angeles through both working newsstands and having as a neighbor the manager of the Laugh Factory; how the reading came first in his life, and then the punk rock; Yes Is the Answer and the supposed antagonism between punk and prog; his time rocking in the both-advanced-and-retrograde Japan alongside former hair metalists; Sparkstastic, the upcoming book on Los Angeles (but England-beloved) band Sparks by Tosh Berman, also formerly of Book Soup; the nature of working at a bookstore, or of trying and failing to work at a bookstore, among the industry's classically high-functioning freaks; how much crazier crazy writers can get than crazy rockers, and the ultimately tiresome nature of the non-Thompson, non-Bukowski literary wild man persona; the way that books and bookstores seem both unimprovable, in away, and yet somehow headed straight for disappearance; why books cost so much, and the advantage of slapping dogs on their covers; and the implications (and potential conspiracy theories surrounding) girls who make millions on their self-published vampire e-books.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Condesa with Gabriela Jauregui, writer, poet, and co-founder of the publishing collective sur+. They discuss her childhood in Coyoacán and at what point during it she realized she lived in a place with a rich literary history; her coming up reading and speaking Spanish, English, and French; the real beginning of Latin American small presses, and what it means for the excitement of Spanish-language literature; why Mexican books get shrinkwrapped, anyway; how she mastered English while studying in Los Angeles, and the pleasure she finds in writing in a language not quite her own, especially one with weird exceptions, non-rules, and all the qualities of a "pirate language"; what her interest in the mechanics of language has to do with her pursuit of poetry; how you never quite know who's a poet in Latin America; the way Los Angeles revealed itself to her, and how understanding Mexico City involves approaching it as something between Los Angeles and New York; her memories of growing up in Mexico City's "dark years," including but not limited to fake M&Ms; "Malinchismo," the Mexican idea that whatever is Mexican is by definition inferior, and how it has fallen away, at least in part, where art and literature are concerned; how to read your way into Los Angeles of Mexico City, and if you don't want to read, how to use Alejandro Jodorowsky movies for the same purpose; and all the layers of history you can experience in Mexico City that, unlike in Europe, you can experience all at once. 

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Condesa with Juan Carlos Cano and Paloma Vera, founders of the architecture and urbanism practice CANO | VERA. They discuss how everything in Mexico City's built environment exists "behind," being interesting in irregular ways; all the untrue superlatives you hear growing up about how Mexico City is the biggest in the world, and what an abstract concept "the biggest city" turns out to be anyway; the miracle of Mexico City's continued improvisational operation, especially as regards garbage collection; the amount of architect-less building going on in Mexico City, and what they're doing to help make it easier and more efficient; the creation of cities through the creation of connections, rather than through the building of beautiful things; where best to walk in the giant soufflé that is Mexico City; the intrinsic sense that Mumbai, Bangkok, or São Paulo make when you come from Mexico City, and how you feel at  home when you have to discover, anonymously, what a place is about; the meaning of Condominio Insurgentes to the urban environment, and the question of who built the thing in the first place; the city as a mirror of society's favorite ideas in one particular moment; the contradictory image of Mexico as a place where nothing works, but everything moves; the historical Mexican relationship to space as it appears both in Teotihuacan and Ciudad Universitaria, in pre-Hispanic markets and downtown today; how Mexico City grew and ego; and the Zócalo, the best place in town to both feel and fill the void.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Roma with Nicholas Gilman, author of the book and blog Good Food in Mexico City: Fondas, Food Stalls, and Fine Dining. They discuss the culinary importance of places like Mercado Medellín; how Mexico City's art, not its food, first brought him here (make a beeline though he did to the handmade tortillas when he first arrived at 18); all the warnings about "what you shouldn't do" in Mexico City — or, for that matter, the New York City of the seventies and eighties in which he grew up; the strides Mexico City has made in the past fifteen years, especially as regards cleaning up pollution and opening up small business and culinary opportunities; his career switch from painter to food writer, and his discovery that you simply "don't have to suffer so much" in Mexico City; his realization that no useful English-language food guides to the area existed, how that prompted him to publish his own, and the great deal of attention it soon drew; what people get wrong when they first go eating in Mexico City, such as understanding the "timing" of the food; the dismantling of the car culture, the institution of bicycle programs, and the conversion of Mexico into at least a new "second-world" country; his eating strategies in a new city, including looking for their markets; the importance of tapping into a city's social knowledge, especially that possessed by taxi drivers; how to convince people you want to eat "the real thing," i.e., the food they themselves eat; bringing a necessary outsider's perspective to another culture; the various misconceptions that linger about Mexican food; the usually unhappy experiences of foreign cuisines that make it to Mexico; and when best to eat huitlacoche.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Roma with novelist and essayist Brenda Lozano, author of the Todo Nada and contributor to Letras Libres. They discuss the space Spain's troubles have opened for Latin American literature; the passion for Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde she learned from one particular teacher; how she began seriously reading in English, and only later in her native Spanish; the difference in enjoyment of Spanish versus English literature, and how the languages ultimately behave like two different animals; the importance of the pleasure of reading, as well as the acknowledgment thereof; poetry as pure sugar; Mexico City's combination of high culture and bad parties; how, when she began writing essays, she found ways to have a good time writing about even assigned topics, and what it revealed about the general skill of having a good time wherever you happen to go; the three years of her early twenties she spent writing a "terrible novel," and what they later gave Todo Nada; her conviction of the overestimation of youth, which led her to build the novel around an aged character, but a young narrator; what could possibly be the sales pitch for Dorian Gray stockings; the newly widened Mexican generation gap; her need to "close the door" when writing, so literary influences like Jorge Luis Borges or Clarice Lispector can't step right in; her first, worldview-changing encounter with Fernando Pessoa, when she asked, "Is this literature?"; what she felt standing next to a wax Octavio Paz; the current absence of non-wax literary fathers; her Mexico City literary community, a group of argumentative friends; getting to know places through literature, like Japan through Banana Yoshimoto, 1930s Los Angeles through John Fante, or indeed Mexico City through Roberto Bolaño; and, despite her having been born and raised there, her continued excitement about writing in Mexico City.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Condesa with Kurt Hollander, photographer, filmmaker, magazine editor, and author of Several Ways to Die in Mexico City: An Autobiography. They discuss his microbiologically informed view of life; the presence of death in Mexico, especially since people there now die developed-world deaths and, to an extent, developing-world deaths; his first enjoyment of Mexico's working-class culture, and his perspective, as an American, on American cultural encroachment; his earlier life on New York's Lower East Side, a barrio which prepared him for the one-huge-barrio that is Mexico City; the importance of "doing New York right" to subsequently spending time in other major cities; what he learned publishing the magazine The Portable Lower East Side; what kind of immigration makes a place more interesting, and what kind of immigration makes a place less so; how moving to Mexico City presented him the greatest learning curve of his life; when, and how, he got sick and didn't seem like he would get better; how danger makes culture, which he considers to be the accumulation of survival strategies; what it means to adapt to a culture, and what bearing doing so has on your survival; his strategies for seeking out the remaining strongholds of working-class culture, such as riding the Metro and exploring the miniature economies that grow in its stations; the importance of the pulqueria, and other places Mexicans warn foreigners away from; and how he has never felt in harm's way in Mexico City, despite respecting nothing, criticizing everything, and always going with the more dramatic story.

Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City's Colonia Roma with Diego Rabasa, co-founder of Sexto Piso press. They discuss why this might make for the most exciting moment in Mexican, or even Spanish-language, literature; Mexico's past era of invincible intellectual giants, from whose shadow writers now emerge; these writers' response to their country's "total social meltdown"; how Mexico City got more secure as Mexico itself got less secure, a process that has by now made Mexico City the safest place in the country; his dull but well-off childhood in a PRI family, his university studies of engineering, and his subsequent discovery of literature, culture, and books; what Juan Rulfo revealed to him about his country; Sexto Piso's early mission to translate foreign writers, and its publication at first of hardly any Mexican writers; who, given Mexico's high illiteracy, supports Mexico City's cool bookstores; the correct pronunciation of "Donceles", the finest street for used books; Sexto Piso's presence in Spain, a much more conservative literary market; the upside and downside of taking government funding; the importance of throwing parties unlike the standard dull publishing cocktail affairs; having, as a publisher, to cover for only semi-professional booksellers and journalists; what to read to best understand the Mexican reality; how Mexico City became a "completely different place" from where he grew up, with its citizens now "getting the city back"; the enduring need to keep an eye on the politicians even as arts movements offer encouragement; and how he gets his mind off the corruption by reading Bruce Chatwin.

Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park, Los Angeles with Roland Kelts, lecturer at the University of Tokyo, co-editor of the literary journal A Public Space, and author of the book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. They discuss whether Japan has yet really figured out how to sell its pop culture abroad; the success of CrunchyRoll.com; his time growing up as a partial outsider in the white northeastern United States, and how anime and manga's focus on the outsider thus resonated with him; the commission he received from the Coppolas to write a story about Japan, which had him live in Osaka for a year; the subsequent offers that came his way to write about Murakami, Miyazaki, and Japanese youth culture; why the Wachowskis like anime so much;  what his youthful Anglophilia revealed to him about the parallels, especially aesthetic, between Britain and Japan; how we even have sushi in American convenience stores, yet nothing like Japanese street vending machines; whether he felt, as did novelist Todd Shimoda, a not-fully-foreign presence in Japan; how he splits his time between New York and Tokyo, and the importance of maintaining ties with his native land; how the geographical oscillation provides him perspective on both cities, and what escapes his attention (Lena Dunham, for example) when he's away from each; the relative lack of coded engagement and easier physical flow of New York; his understanding of American psychology coming through a cross-country drive of vast spaces and non-major cities; and the passing of Donald Richie, which raises questions of how best to write about Japan, a country which must now return to doing more with less.

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake, Los Angeles with Vincent Brook, teacher at UCLA, USC, Cal State Los Angeles, and Pierce College, and author of books on Jewish émigré directors and the Jewish sitcom as well as the new Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles. They discuss the difference between Los Angeles obsession and Los Angeles chauvinism; his time in Berkeley, when Los Angeles became the enemy; the Christopher Dorner incident and the old racial wounds it has re-opened; Gangster Squad and the cinematic abuse of Los Angeles history; the city's tendency to repurpose rhetoric about it, no matter how negative, and Reyner Banham's role in that; Los Angeles as Sodom, Gomorrah, and whipping boy; what the German word Stadtbild means, and how Los Angeles lacks it; the great power ascribed to the city by its criticism; whether or not we only use twenty percent of brains, or of cities; hidden places, including but not limited to Barnsdall Park; the work Los Angeles requires from you to master it, and whether that counts as a desirable quality; how technology enables you to watch Sunset Boulevard as you cruise down Sunset Boulevard; Watts Towers as the key to Los Angeles; the city's far-flung museums, and their 21st-century tendency to roll large objects through the streets; how he came to teach a Rhetoric of Los Angeles class, and what his students have taught him; the truth of most local legends, even when contradictory; and how best to see the Los Angeles palimpsest.

Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood, Los Angeles with Kevin Smokler, author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School. They discuss what makes him think of Holden Caulfield as a Bing user; why we study novels in high school at all, and what it might have to do with Renaissance classics scholarship; how we got turned off to these books the first time around, and the radical notion that we now have time to properly absorb them; his hymn to his obnoxious teenage self, when he felt he possessed many abilities, yet none worked in concert with one another, and all lacked context; how these curricular books interact with the teenage impulse to rail at unfairness; whether Jane Austen represents the triumph of content over form or form over content; what, exactly, is the matter with The Scarlet Letter; David Foster Wallace's notion of challenging the reader in the act of seduction; books now fashionably disliked, such as A Separate Peace; our onetime love of Dead White Males, our swing too far away from them in the early nineties, and the ambiguous DWM-relative position in which we now find ourselves; how he earned a lasting reputation at his high school for deeming Shakespeare "trite"; those moments where the necessary context for a work floods in all at once; The Day of the Locust, and how he read it only after coming to Los Angeles at 19 to supplicate before the altar of cinema; high school readers' tendency to gravitate to the freaks and the outcasts, and whether his home city of San Francisco still welcomes such people; Rebecca Solnit's lament over Google, and how the city's future belongs to them rather than to the Grateful Dead; the life of a coffee-shop based San Francisco writer; and his next book, on music, which will go looking for a universal cultural experience in the particulars of his own adolescence.

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Clive Piercy, founder and principal of design studio air-conditioned and author of the photo book Pretty Vacant, an appreciation of Los Angeles "dingbat" apartments. They discuss Reyner Banham's enduring definition of the dingbat; his time growing up in England enamored with American culture, and his surprise to find Los Angeles existed in color; the glory of freeways and the guilt of driving them, and the sense of failed utopia they share with dingbat buildings; how dingbats crept into his Los Angeles photography jaunts, shaped by his love of Ed Ruscha's paintings, and what happened when his fellow immigrants living in them came out to confront him; how his countryman Martin Parr perfectly captures the blandness of modern architectural wonders; his countrywoman Frances Anderton and their separate flights from the crushing burden of history; the cars parked under dingbats, and their saddening cheapness that resonates with the saddening cheapness of the home itself; inherent British negativity versus inherent American positivity; his participation in the aesthetics of eighties Los Angeles, the redesign of the Shangri-La hotel, and the newspaper coverage of the 1984 Olympics; how the mini-mall co-opted postmodernism, getting the proportions all wrong in the process; Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, which brought Banham and Ruscha together; Clive James and Ian Nairn's writing on cities, which honor the high and the low together; how neither graphic design nor Los Angeles needs you, and how that's the appeal; the current availability of all aesthetics, and his students' tendency not to discriminate between them and focus on brands instead; and whether he's been able to get any of these internet-savvy kids, usually from Asia and indifferent to Los Angeles, excited about dingbats.

 Colin Marshall sits down in Nishinomiya, Japan with translator, writer, and former Kansai Time Out editor Christopher Stephens. They discuss whether higher Japanese skills get a foreigner more suspicion; the nearby presence and touristic effects of novelist Haruki Murakami's elementary school; the older writers, like Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima, who stoked his interest in Japan; the experimental music to be found in Japan, such as the work of Keiji Haino and the Boredoms, and specifically in the Kansai noise scene; the Osaka duality between money-making hard workers and underground weirdness; the local pride taken in relative roughness and unrefinement, and the stereotype of the bad Osakan; what actually distinguishes the Osaka dialect, and how entirely different words might see use in one city but not its neighbor; Japan's visual culture, and the problematic emphasis on beauty that can ensue; his youth in Fresno, California, whose finest quality was the way it pushed him out; the time he took Wilco to an Osaka psychedelic sixties rock bar; how, when the Japanese open a psychedelic sixties rock bar, they really open a psychedelic sixties rock bar; his early struggles with regional backwardness in the eighties, and what happens when Japanese friends still ask him to hold their babies; Osaka's high crime rate for Japan and Fresno's high crime rate for California; whether Paris syndrome actually afflicts the Japanese; the West's eagerness to believe everything they hear about Japan; photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki's purchase of the entire collection of Toba's science-fiction erotic museum; the cannaboid substance known as "herb" that recently made the rounds in Japan; the persistence of visual art in Japan which goes well beyond Takashi Murakami, and his own specialty, the Gutai group of painters; why no Japanese person has yet appeared on this show, and what linguistic reasons might explain it; the corrections Japanese people make to his English; his work editing Kansai Time Out during the heyday of its breed of publication; Japan's relatively robust print culture, at least by contrast to America's; how little time translation leaves to learn new words or savor the language; and, despite the world's having lost confidence in Japan, his theory that darkness always brings light, and that trouble sparks creativity.

Colin Marshall sits down overlooking greater Kyoto on Mt. Ogura with Stephen Gill, poet, BBC radio scriptwriter, and executive director of People Together for Mt. Ogura. They discuss the mountain's place in a traditional Japanese poetry card game; how, after scores of Japanese noticed in it an opportunity for free trash disposal, the mountain generated the headline "Ogurayama, gomi no yama" (Mt. Ogura, Mountain of Trash); the compilation of a collection about Mt. Ogura featuring verse by one hundred different poets; the onset of sightseeing season, which mostly brings visitors to the neighboring Mt. Arashiyama; the rich literary heritage of this now-suburban area, which even offers real locations from The Tale of Genji; the modern development of Kyoto, whose tower blocks at least cast into relief its more historical elements in the "glorious chaos" mixture well known to Asia; his three stretches in Japan, and the constant visits to the doctor his early acclimatization required; how he makes radio programs about Japan, always beginning with an image and then crafting a broadcast around it; how he only learned about his native Britain by living abroad, and what a foreign poet can offer Japan by way of a helpful thorn in the side; his view of Kyoto as a vast intermeshing of systems, which once there tend to last a hundred, or even five hundred years; what could possibly "shake up" Kyoto short of actual destruction; and what it means for him to "tune in" to a place like this. He also reads haiku poems, both his own and those by other People Together for Mt. Ogura participants.

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Koreatown with filmmaker Rob Montz, director of Juche Strong, a short documentary about North Korea and its propaganda. They discuss reaching the same age as Kim Jong-un without a hermit kingdom to rule; the question of why North Koreans continue to believe in their state, despite having good reason not to; his early fascination with North Korea's World Cup showing, and how pursuing that fascination led him from standard opinions on the country to newer, more interesting ones; his realization that North Korean ideology comes built upon the same basic structures of psychological truth that any of us have; his interviewing of experts on North Korea, and their disagreements about the nature of the Juche idea; his trip to Pyongyang, and how it didn't require him to hide underwater from North Korean commandos, breathing through a reed; the state's aspirations to totalitarian watchfulness, and how incompetence shatters that image right at the airport; the boredom a visitor to North Korea endures, and how that boredom differs from the boredom we experience in the developed world, where we've mostly cured it; the nihilism that sets upon a mind deprived of the ability to autonomously create meaning and provide purpose; how life in the constant American stimulation stream may render you more vulnerable to boredom when you momentarily step out of it; how many pleasures a people will willingly forego if they're given a larger sense of purpose and community, and how we know the North Korean government knows this; what North and South Korea still have ideologically in common, though the South chose the means of ideological expression that let its people get fed; Confucian values on both sides of the DMZ, and how they even manifest in the strange filial piety of East Asian friends; his extension of the examination of North Korean-style propaganda to United States politics, and especially the ceaseless repetition of the phrase "God bless America" therein; of Washington, D.C., where homosexual atheist political operatives instruct Republican politicians to insist  upon the divine ordainment of American exceptionalism an inveigh against the "gay menace"; and how you can help fund the completion of Juche Strong on Indie Go Go (not to mention the clam-roasting footage you can get for doing so).

Colin Marshall sits down near Nara, Japan's Tōdai-ji temple with artist, critic, and teacher Christopher Olson. They discuss his thoughts, as a Winnipegger born and raised, on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg; the displacement, discombobulation, and respectable bullshitting of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, a copy of which he keeps at all times on his phone; high-risk art, and the stuff that requires more time spent absorbing than creating; the still-exciting art school idea of limitations and restrictions as the engines of creation; whether or not Japan is "a land of images"; why you can't resist photographing your food in Japan, and what this has to do with the cultural sense of doing things properly or not doing them at all; the utilitarian, quick-and-dirty mindset of our North American homelands, which we notice with special force after having spent time amid Japan's superlegitimacy; the modern west's lack of filial piety, which he came to understand after getting involved with a Japanese lady (in a relationship that endured its Griffin and Sabine period); life in Japan as a constant process of auditing one's assumptions, especially those instilled by western Buddhism; freeloading on the Japanese social contract as a foreigner, and enjoying the liberty to "create your own Japan"; the gaijin you meet in Japan, including the "weeaboo" and the last-refuge English teacher; how Japanese vending machines could possibly not be trashed, robbed, and stripped of all saleable metal; Vancouver, the city where Canadians go to figure their shit out; the benefit of the foreigner's anti-inanity language barrier; how the force that makes Japanese trains run on time also causes the occasional Japanese to jump in front of one; the lack of ambient ambition in Japan, as opposed to the aspirational culture in North America that generates both resentment and a certain charge; his turn toward writing and criticism after an "I'm just not that good" moment in the visual arts; his desire to recapture that Chris Marker sense of delirious displacement in day-to-day life; and how he's ridden that distinctively Japanese sawtooth pattern of culture shock.

Colin Marshall sits down seven stories above Kawaramachi, Kyoto, Japan with John Dougill, professor of British culture at Ryukoku University, blogger at Green Shinto, and author of books including Kyoto: A Cultural History, In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians, and Oxford in English Literature. They discuss the commonalities between the Kyoto geisha and the English gentleman, who practice their respective cultures' ritual, regulation, and repression; form's dominance over function in Japan, as exemplified by one young fellow in a Union Jack t-shirt; how he got a handle on Japan by writing a book on Kyoto, and how in the process the scales fell from his eyes, revealing the "magical paradise" he lives in; his ambivalence toward the "sprawling urban mess" that has built up around modern Kyoto; Oxford, the other city in his life, and the formula of "old buildings and young people" that makes it ideal; his early feelings of isolation and anger toward Japan, and how he overcame them; coming to represent British culture in Japan, using Marmite and other traditional tools; his attractions to "earth religions," particularly Shinto, which he considers to be the true essence of Japanese culture; the Japanese tendency to contextually follow a variety of religious traditions and honor a variety of "equally valid" though sometimes opposing truths; how Japan's "hidden Christians" created and protected their own mixed folk religion; his current project, a book on Japan's UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the problems inherent in a place becoming one; how Kyoto's younger generation has preserved and repurposed traditional machiya buildings; and the process by which he has come to see his own country through Japanese eyes, which means he sees a great deal of "rudeness, dirtiness, and lack of efficiency" — a different Britain, in other words, than the one he grew up in. 

Colin Marshall sits down in Nakatsu, Osaka, Japan with guitarmaker Josh Parkin proprietor of Josh Parkin Guitars. They discuss how the intensity of Japanese enthusiasm extends to guitar-playing; how Japanese friends in London urged him not to set up shop in Tokyo, but in Osaka; his early life in Yorkshire, "the English Kansai," where he made his first attempts to build and modify guitars; the importance of finding the best handmade pickups and of learning to see the difference between .2 and .3 millimeters; the excellence of Japanese manufacturing, and its somewhat less impressive mastery of anthropometrics; his working life on Denmark Street, the center of London guitarmaking, and why he decided not to open his own business there; his travels through Asia before moving to Japan, which began in India and eventually found him homeless in Beijing; what it takes for a foreigner to open a business in Osaka (besides a few years off that foreigner's life); the impossibility of finding a decent banger in Japan; his dissatisfaction with the usual foreigner's job of teaching English, because it wasn't making guitars; his work with Tim Olive and experience of the Japanese noise scene, which seems to spring from within the culture rather than interpreting traditions outside it; the way everything in Japan gets easier after six months, except perhaps dealing with the ward office; Japanese-style obsessive drive as a necessity of guitarmaking, no matter where you do it; and his dream job of building a guitar according only to the player's musical style.

Colin Marshall sits down in Osaka, Japan's Senri-Chūō with Brian Ashcraft, Senior Contributing Editor for video game site Kotaku, contributor at Wired, and author of the books Arcade Mania! and Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential. They discuss the kind of arcade gaming best (and now only) seen in Japan; the Expo 70-developed north of Osaka versus the city's "real" south; Osaka's reputation across Japan for brash un-gentility; where best to do one's gaming in Osaka, the the overall continuing robustness of Japanese arcades; the tradition of North American arcade gaming growing up around alcohol, and the tradition of Asian arcade gaming growing up around coffee, cigarettes, and milk tea; the Nintendo Entertainment System, known in Japan as the Famicom, and how it shaped both a decade and a generation on either side of the Pacific; the inevitable proximity of Japanese celebrities to gaming culture, whether through commercials or some stronger connection, in stark contrast to their game-averse American counterparts; his Dallas-Tokyo flight attendant childhood neighbor, and the strange but alluring cans of Coca-Cola she'd bring back from work; his first Japanese friend, whose family introduced him to their country's gift-giving culture; Tokyo's feeling of a "city of strangers," versus the more personable Osaka; his trying early years of Japan, and how he recognized his own sprachgefühl while watching Battle Royale; his time in Japan's having made him interested in his own Texas background; how he has made sure his sons learn about American culture, and how he laments their limited linguistic interaction with their American grandparents; the importance of raising children in Japan without giving them "the strange-last-name complex"; Japan's lack of weirdness, or at least the lack of weirdness you perceive if you take the time to ground your observations of it, including observations of or relating to arcade machines and schoolgirls, with as much non-oversimplified historical and cultural knowledge as possible.

Colin Marshall sits down in Kyoto, Japan's efish café with Michael Lambe, Deep Kyoto blogger, teacher, and Public Relations Representative for the Kyoto Journal. They discuss the city's flummoxing preponderance of Irish pubs and the "celebrated infamy" of one in particular; the rich cultural heritage that brings foreigners to Kyoto, the modernization that foreigners bewail, and the preservation efforts that certain Japanese now make; his arrival in Japan on the JET program and original intent to go to the "wild snowswept north" of Hokkaido, though he wound up going from the northeast of England to the northeast of Japan instead; the Beatles-in-1963 treatment he received as the only foreigner in town; his time in Fukushima, then known as an unusually safe place, and one famous for its fruit; disasters, such as the 2011 one in Fukushima, as facts of life in Japan, and the necessity to rebuilt efficiently as another fact of life; his own adoption of that spirit when he volunteered to build houses in the Miyagi prefecture; the times he found himself bowing on the phone, leaving taxi doors open in England, and having lived over a decade in Japan; the difficulties of living vegetarian in Japan, even when you allow yourself fish; missing British television amid the "appalling" morass of cheap Japanese variety shows; evasion of the British television license men versus Japan's (as seen in Haruki Murakami's "Town of Cats"), and how he once got an NHK collection agent to think him a madman; how his four-year stint in Tokyo came up against his small-town sensibility, and how he disappointedly discovered the capital's absolute lack of demand that he speak (and thus learn) Japanese; his move to Kyoto, where visiting a rock bar he began making "real" non-Anglophone Japanese friends; the role of "the foreign guy" in Japan as comparable to Norm's on Cheers; Sons music bar, one place he discovered in the project that is Deep Kyoto (and Tadg's, which he recommends wholeheartedly); the history of the Kyoto Journal and its latest special issue on energy; Japan's odd reliance on nuclear power (not to mention squat toilets); and how blogging has connected him with foreigners, opposed to his original mission as that is. (Photo: Stewart Wachs)

Colin Marshall sits down in Kobe, Japan with guitarist, improviser, and sound artist Tim Olive, whose latest album is 33 Bays with Alfredo Costa Monteiro. They discuss Japan's importance to global experimental music culture; his own swerve toward experimentation after a western Canadian childhood spent listening to Black Sabbath's Paranoid; his early exploration of Javanese music in a Saskatchewan record library; how a Québécois girlfriend took him from Montreal to Osaka, where he lost "the rage"; how struck he felt by the sea of black hair Japan first presented to him; Osaka's "glorious ugliness," Nara's deer, and Kobe's wild pigs (just one of the signs of its close proximity to nature); his lack of a computer until last year, his longstanding ambivalence toward digital technology, and the double-edged sword of the internet's power to open up everything all at once; his workshop full of guitars in various states of dismantlement, and the importance of instrument modification to the physicality and sense of touch in music, both of which he prizes; Japan's distinctive combination of the highest new technology and the oldest traditions, as seen in the zoning collage of Osaka where venerable temples meet up with glossy love hotels; the fluid senses of time and space one must cultivate when moving between the West and the East, or even between Asian countries; his "under the table"-style freedom in Japan, and the other kinds of freedom the country affords, such as to one particular naked salaryman before the cops caught up with him; 845 Audio, the label he founded to release 33 Bays without delay; and his recommendations for getting tapped into the Kansai experimental music scene.

Colin Marshall sits down in Nara, Japan's Nara Hotel with writer of place Pico Iyer, author of such books as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and most recently The Man Within My Head. They discuss the discovery that Japan looks exactly like Japan, and the "piercing sense of familiarity" the enthusiast feels upon visiting for the first time; autumn in Japan, and its place at the core of The Lady and the Monk, his second book and still his favorite; Japan's distinctive combination of buoyancy and poignancy, which leads to the pre-savoring of wistfulness to come; the culture's dissolution of mind, heart, and soul all in the same place, and his efforts to build an intellectual infrastructure around his Japan-related intuitions; his recent reading of John Cage, an unexpected master of the Japanese virtues of not knowing and not saying; the necessity, when you want to write about something, to write about something else, and of writing about a passion in order to write about yourself; the Californian question of "being yourself," and its inadmissability to the Japanese mindset; his relief at not having to be Japanese within Japanese society, and what being a Japanese in Japanese society has done to visit a female brain drain upon the country; what it takes to best remain an outsider in Japan, enjoying its peculiar kind of diplomatic immunity, and how Donald Richie mastered that exchange of belonging for freedom; street vending machines and train-station bathrooms as outgrowths of both Japanese thoughtfulness and the nation's tendency to regard itself as a family; his visit to West Point, where the cadets received The Lady and the Monk as required reading; the danger of Japan's getting left behind by the increasingly interconnected world, what with its bad public relations and low level of spoken English; the enduring "vitality" of the seemingly less civilized places outside Japan; and how Japanese literature expresses nothing happening because Japanese life values nothing happening.

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Tom Lutz, founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and author of the books Crying, American Nervousness, 1903, Cosmopolitan Vistas, and Doing Nothing. They discuss whether the internet has brought about a new golden age of the essay; giving writers the word count they need to write about the subjects they want to, such as the literature of Romania; "publish what you want to read" as a guiding editing principle as "write what you want to read" is a guiding writing principle; the team of specialized editors that help him sift through a hundred pitches per day; why on Earth the name Los Angeles Review of Books was still available in the 21st century, and the seat of its "steampunk" appeal; the curiously "doubled relationship" non-New Yorkers have to New York publishing; how his readership turned immediately global, and whether coming from as international a city as Los Angeles necessarily entails that; the internationalism of "taco trucks and Korean spas," and the attendant indifference of distinction between "high" and "low" culture; connection as the very purpose of essays, and cosmopolitanism and debate as the essence of literary culture; the possible corrupting influences of the review form itself; the surprising pieces he has run, such as Ben Ehrenreich's consideration of the "death of the book" which became a consideration of Bruno Schulz; what's to be done about the divide between popular writing and "professionally deformed" academic writing; the value of clarity, honesty, curiosity, and a little bit of obscurity; whether to rule out the parts of Los Angeles by now written into the ground, such as the freeways, the beach, and the entertainment business; his early wanderings through Los Angeles and how they placed him in the city the way books couldn't; and literature's inability to catch up with the expansiveness of Los Angeles, the way he couldn't read everything printed in the year 1903, and the way even Herbert Spencer couldn't capture his entire life in his three-volume autobiography.

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles' Sunset Triangle with Jay Caspian Kang, editor at sports and pop culture site Grantland and author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve. They discuss his youthful Midnight in Paris dream of drinking in red leather bars with dead authors; the racy science fiction of L. Ron Hubbard; the current or former importance of New York City as a destination for a youngster with literary ambitions; his avoidance of the role of "tribal writer," tacitly assigned with explaining his culture to outsiders; growing up imprinted by the last "dangerous," pre-pop hip-hop, which he used as a tool to deal with otherness in his North Carolina high school; filling his main character Philip Kim's head with that and other preoccupations of the era in which he grew up, such as The Simpsons; the thirty-ish generation's combination of high ambition with almost patternlessly scattered efforts, as exemplified by Lena Dunham; slightly younger creators' instinctive consciousness of themselves as a "brand" based on their volume of output; his desire to write a hyper-real novel of San Francisco that would skewer — sometimes by actually killing — that city's more self-satisfied sort of residents; the divide between old and new San Franciscans, and those who fell in between by growing up there in the eighties, when the utopian dreams had fallen through and the town needed an identity; how Chris Isaak turned up in his book; the Virginia Tech shooting, and how he and other Korean-Americans knew immediately that an Asian school shooter had to be Korean; the comparative racial situations of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and what makes Crash "one of the worst movies ever"; coming out of a "hoity-toity MFA program" and writing a genre novel versus one that uses the elements of genre; Troy McClure quotes providing the book with a "funny unreal superstructure," and other aspects of The Simpsons' "large intrusion" into the text; and Los Angeles as a writer's escape from the writerly life which doesn't demand that you be as young, old, rich, or poor as New York does.

Colin Marshall sits down at Hugo's Tacos in Los Angeles' Atwater Village with Adrian Todd Zuniga, founding editor of Opium magazine and impresario behind the international reading series Literary Death Match. They discuss what might make Los Angeles "the new Berlin"; his aim to make the city the literary center of the world by 2022; the hatred that flows into Los Angeles, but not out of it; Literary Death Match TV, the project that moved him here, and his battle against the idea of its being "too smart for television"; December 12th's live pilot shoot at Hollywood's Florentine Gardens; his experiences putting on Literary Death Matches in cities like Tulsa, Helsinki, Amsterdam, and Beijing; his love of his collaboration, whether or not it comes from growing up as the last of eight kids and always wanting to hang out with the most interesting people; how to "explode what literature is in the current pop culture landscape"; his frequent travel, his use of flights as a writing environment, and the thousand-page novel his travel memoir has become; turning your own experiences into fiction, and which rules that changes (especially the sexual ones); his transferring to 23 different schools in childhood due to the workplace conduct of his "tactless genius" father"; his current search for a "quieter sense of what life is" and the conflict between wanting to change book culture forever and wanting to go to sleep; and how he taps into the universal desire to feel literary.

Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Pearl District with Camas Davis, food writer and founder of the Portland Meat Collective. They discuss why bacon has hit the zeitgeist so hard; her interest in fostering an "alternative economy of meat"; her former career writing travel pieces, which invariably and instinctively became food pieces; her education in the "meta-meta theoretical" exploration of food; how meat became cool again, after industrialization made it uncool (and not particularly tasty); her agreement with even the hardest-core animal-rights vegan about the horrors of industrial meat production; growing up in Eugene, where if you weren't vegetarian, you weren't cool; her return from vegetarianism to the meat-eating fold with a bacon meal while teaching in a women's prison; how American got itself into an entitlement mentality about cheap meat thrice a day; the importance of killing animals we eat ourselves, and how she finds some people are better at it than others; her time studying in southwestern France, what exactly separates French eating culture from American, and how the French are just getting into some of what has made American food unpalatable in recent decades; all the surprising things you can do with a pig's head; Portland's food consciousness and food renaissance, and how they might serve as a bellwether for a countrywide shift in attitudes about eating; Portland's suspicion of eateries that get "too big for their britches," which results in a certain elevated-comfort-food trademark cuisine; her butchery classes, in which she's found far fewer obnoxious hipster foodies enrolling than she'd expected; our rightful fear of most meat, and the meat we need not be scared of; and whether America has many small food movements, or one big food movement.

Colin Marshall sits down in the basement of Portland's Hollywood Theatre with Dan Halsted, head programmer there and founder of the 35mm Shaolin Archive. They discuss fake Bruce Lee films; his adventure of rescuing classic kung-fu film prints, including gems like The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and The Boxer's Omen from a shuttered, junkie-surrounded theater in Vancouver; his youth in a distant Oregon town with 600 people, his move to Portland, and his discovery of kung-fu cinema; how much more kung-fu movies offer than the fighting; the advantageous openmindedness of Portland filmgoing culture; exploitation films and Quentin Tarantino's high-profile love thereof; how different cities react to kung-fu movies, like the robust Chinese turnout in San Francisco or the disappointing attendance in St. Louis; kung-fu movies as a gateway to Chinese culture; 36 Chamber of Shaolin as a gateway to kung-fu movies; the evaporation of celluloid film, and the apparently dramatic shift in the way those under age twenty experience cinema; the various meanings of terms like "exploitation" and "grindhouse," and how the attendant concepts cannot be separated from the seventies, a time when Hollywood acted serious and independent film acted frivolous; what Portland's smallness affords a film programmer; why audiences sometimes prefer watching a beaten-up print to a pristine one; how Portland has successfully integrated food and alcohol with filmgoing; his experience getting tased, and how the Portland police force, known for its own aggression, tried to use kung-fu movies against him in court; and his never-ending task of pushing outward the limits of local film taste. Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed or on iTunes.

Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Jarrett Walker, public transit consultant and author of the blogs Human Transit and Creature of the Shade as well as the book Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. They discuss how Portland "turned the battleship" toward sustainable transport in that least likely of all decades, the seventies; the city's discovery of its own extraordinary capacity for self-promotion in the nineties; his adolescence there spent in fascination at the buses departing to all their myriad destinations; how thinking about transit makes thinking about cities more interesting; the unfortunate divide between urban design and transport planning; how the North American revolt against highway-building also hampered the construction of transit infrastructure; a city's transportation system as the ultimate test of its citizen's freedom; the close relationship between a city's density and its transit possibilities, and why fantastically inefficient systems are always pleasant to ride; how he has come to love Los Angeles, during its current transitional moment, as someone who has hated it; Los Angeles' place as a "city on the edge" that always captures the imagination, no matter the petty judgments it draws; Los Angeles' distinctive geography offering the best possible opportunity for transit-building; the questions he asks about whether a city wants him to understand the whole of its transit system, and whether it treats him as a free actor; the surprises that delight him now that he's gotten used to confusing, sad, and unpleasant transit experiences; airport stations and their tendency toward "symbolic transit"; and the importance of whether a city treats transit as a commuting device or as an all-purpose urban structure, and whether or not it's motivated simply by the coolness of the vehicles.

Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Montavilla with Kevin Sampsell, publisher of Future Tense Books, editor of Portland Noir, and author of the memoir A Common Pornography and the novel This is Between Us, forthcoming from Tin House. They discuss the meth crime to be found beyond 82nd Avenue; Portland from the vantage point of his childhood in Washington's Tri-Cities; how he met other writers by publishing his own "lo-fi chapbooks"; how one forges one's own unique voice by maintaining their not-giving-a-crap nonchalance; his chronologically un-pinpointable founding of Future Tense and its surprise success with Zoe Trope's Please Don't Kill the Freshman; writing as a kind of martial art, which develops you even if you start out flabby, and which demands its own kind of meditation; how he became a (more) serious reader at Powell's Books; his love of southern writers, and more generally those who combine grittiness and heart; how unimportant he finds sense of place in fiction, yet how much praise he won for "capturing the Tri-Cities" in A Common Pornography; his technique of mixing the mundane with the shocking and hoping for the best; moving from the "no style" and short chapters of his last book to the longer chapters and conversational style of his new one; and the attractions of the Portland writing life, including having space to live and being in a place where nonfiction writers and poets might actually associate.

Colin Marshall sits down at Portland State University with Carl Abbott, professor there of urban studies and planning and author of Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People. They discuss the debate over Portland's status as a "small city" or a "big town"; the distinctive ease of making connections in the city; how modern-day Portland enthusiasts would look at the place before 1965 and see Akron, Ohio; the oft-made comparisons between Portland, Seattle, and Austin; the history and continued presence of agriculture and industry around the "cool Portland" of today; Microsoft and Boeing, the "accidental" companies that made Seattle the younger sibling that out-competed Portland, one with better booms but worse busts; Portland's "conservatively progressive"  politics, and how that sensibility shows up in its light rail system and central library (especially as compared to Seattle's); the relationship between the city's vaunted "livability" and its patterns of diversity; how he came to Portland and when, exactly, the city turned away from its former stodginess (and when its porno theaters started turning into revival houses); Portland entrepreneurship, which Portlanders prefer to call "D.I.Y."; how best to engage new immigrants and hip youngsters in "Portlandism," a civic-minded, participatory approach to incremental problem-solving; science fiction's visions of cities, which present recurring patterns related to urban theory; and whether Portland counts as a utopian project, if a practical one.

Colin Marshall sits down in Portland's Slabtown with Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter, the most civilized community on the internet, co-founder of Fuelly, and creator of several other sites as well. They discuss his escape from San Francisco's "goofball startup culture"; what it means for MetaFilter to be "civilized"; his desire not simply to create "a safe place for people to yell past each other"; the importance of keeping personal identity out of debates; the strange backend provided by MetaFilter's question-and-answer service Ask MetaFilter; the second-most popular Ask MetaFilter thread of all time, Colin's own "What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?"; the strange popularity of questions about how to talk to girls, relate humanity, and/or live life, also known as the "forever alone" series; what it takes to become one of MetaFilter's ten worst users, drunk on power or stupidity; the hyperarticulate sourness that makes bad comments on MetaFilter especially bad, and how it leads to users pre-emptively armor-plate their sentences; Portland as a setting for the simple life, but also the good one; advertising's domination of internet business models, and the bite mobile browsing even now takes out of that; who's actually clicking those ads that ostensibly support everything; the benefits of living down the long tail, and of executing difficult-to-describe ideas that are therefore difficult to replicate; where to shut yourself off from the net in Portland, be it on a bike or at a food cart; and how a Portlander can possibly react to a kid on a unicycle, in a Utilikilt, playing a bagpipe, topped with a Darth Vader helmet.

Colin Marshall sits down in southeast Portland with Mia Birk, author of Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Future and President of Alta Planning + Design, which strives to make biking, walking, and mass transit an integral part of daily life. The discuss exactly how much happier he would have been riding a bicycle to the interview than riding a bus; the way Portland "got the ball rolling" for its cycling infrastructure development in the nineties; the moments of surprising hostility she found upon first pedaling down Portland streets; bicycle infrastructure as a facilitator of cooperation; how to extend enthusiasm for cycling beyond the guys in Lance Armstrong spandex to those who simply need to get somewhere; the ill effects of America's having spent decades incentivizing driving, and exactly how European cities like Copenhagen pulled so far ahead; how she gauges the cycling in a new town, asking first to see "the good, the bad, and the ugly"; the importance of creating conditions of delight for riding in a city, and the need to re-teach the occasional public official how to use a bike before doing so; how the declared identity of a city affects the implementation of cycling within it; how she finds you can fit "a little party" into every day; and what, exactly, to do when you turn up in Portland yourself, jonesing to ride.

Colin Marshall sits down in northwest Portland with comic artist and film critic Mike Russell, co-host on the Cort and Fatboy podcast, creator of Culturepulp, Mr. Do and Mr. Don't, The Sabertooth Vampire, and more. They discuss the excruciating process of drawing an interview; his adaptation of a page of David Foster Wallace's "Up, Simba"; what it's like to artistically live-blog the Portland Opera; the unusual robustness of the Portland comics industry, and its incentivization of "putting comics where they shouldn't be"; his current task of drawing a comic for a set of European finance ministers; the origins of Portland podcasting, and how he became a part; how Star Wars formed at least part of his cinematic consciousness, and what it takes to grow up into an astute genre fan; the worrisome effects of nostalgia and "remix culture"; the Portland "put it out there, what the hell" attitude; Portlandia's proper title of Southeast Portlandia, and how Los Angeles still sees the dream of the nineties as alive in the city; Portland as an undrying source of drawable weirdness; and the quintessentially Portland sport of "hashing," or taking runs from bar to bar, drinking beer at each.

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Thom Andersen, professor at the California Institute of the Arts' School of Film/Video and director of films including Red Hollywood, the new Reconversion, and the well-known documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, on the truth and falsity of the city's representation in motion pictures. They discuss The Fast and the Furious shooting on his street; the end of the current era of impressive car chases crafted by Nicolas Winding Refn and Quentin Tarantino; H.B. Halicki's original Gone in 60 Seconds, and the importance of its literalism regarding greater Los Angeles' South Bay; how rarely mainstream cinematic interest looks beyond white people of "immodest means," and what the films that do go beyond them achieve (such as the creation of detective films that actually involve detecting); Killer of Sheep, Boyz n the Hood, and the differences between garden-variety "gang movies" and those that truthfully deal with survival; the questions to do with the black population, bank bailouts, and the destruction of the working class he believes movies could address but rarely do; how much more interesting reality is than our imaginations, which by now have long since filled up with junk; Los Angeles as a representational battleground, and the way filmmakers have an alibi here not to do important work; the native's lack of advantage in understanding this city, and the outsider's advantage in making it strange again, as seen in Zabriskie Point, The Outside Man, Model Shop, and Point Blank; the changes in Los Angeles, how they vanish in comparison to the changes in major Asian cities, and how they have for the most part taken place among the people rather than in the infrastructure; the racism of Crash versus the naïveté of Falling Down; his continuing fascination with the Los Angeles wherein people struggle to make a living; and what fillms and books can to do change minds, given that they so often make minds in the first place.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's South Beach with entrepreneur, author, blogger, traveler, and learner Ben Casnocha. His latest book, co-written with Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn, is The Start-Up of You. They discuss the advantages of hanging an IKEA world map on the wall; his ten days of silent meditation and the feeling of enlarged thumbs that resulted; the San Francisco Bay Area's convergence of Californian spirituality and Californian technological intensity; the three Californias: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and everything else; "NorCal" pride and State of Jefferson stickers; being the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and how that got him involved in technology startups to begin with; how where you physically live now matters both more and less than it used to (and who still lives virtually on Livejournal); how loyalty now extends horizontally to your network rather than vertically to your company, and how your identity now comes before your role as an organizational component; his lifelong habit of reaching out to interesting people, and how it differs from the standard sleaziness of "networking"; his visits to Detroit and Athens, and how those cities may have strained his appreciative thinking muscles; his interest in underrated and underdiscussed places as well as people, such as those in South America; his adoption of "home bases" around the world, be they in San Francisco, Santiago, Zurich, or Tokyo; the pronunciation of Tegucigalpa; the loneliness he sees deep in the eyes of people who declare themselves "nomadic"; the necessity of acting consistently on curiosity, and of cultivating both a highly technical and a highly nontechnical mind; whether moving to a city means moving to randomness; and his sensory-deprivation experience floating in a saltwater pod.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Bernal Heights with Peter Orner, author of the novels Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the short story collection Esther Stories as well as co-editor of the nonfiction collections Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. They discuss the heightened Americanness of Chicago and what it has offered his literary sensibility; our tendency as Americans, for good and ill, to chase stuff, whether in the city or the suburbs; his fascination with how life simply goes on amid grand (and possibly meaningless) power struggles; how, as a fresh college graduate, he found his was to Namibia; how his experience compares with the fictional Scottish doctor who falls in with Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, especially in the sense of the gnawing burden of non-belonging; life in a country where things slow down, and the space for thought that provides; how Namibia inspired him to write a story of a man lost in a Kafkanly inescapable shopping mall, and how he used a school's sole typewriter to compose it; his constant aspirations to the condition of the short story collection, the "highest form," and how even his novels secretly take that form; the experimentalism of great books that don't seem experimental, like Bleak House or Moby Dick; how Namibia's situation compares to that of Zimbabwe, and how many of Zimbabwe's problems can be laid at the feet of Robert Mugabe; how he experiences a San Francisco beyond the Fisherman's Wharves and the Transamerica Pyramids; and his criticism of the city's increasing pricing out of families that leads, ultimately, to a loss of stories.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens with Cariwyl Hebert, founder of the community-based classical music appreciation society Salon97. They discuss New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross' hatred of "classical music"; her project of pretension removal and safe-place creation; how she identified a need in the way her work in classical music proved a reliable conversation-ender; developing and implementing the idea of the classical listening party around which  Salon97 is now based; listening party themes that draw attention and/or create tension, and how she strikes the correct balance between too schmaltzy and not schmaltzy enough; having to begin musical discussions with pure opinion, and bringing out the controversial lives of the composers to generate discussion; returning the social aspect to classical music, by beer, wine, or other means; what, exactly, a composer can infuse their music with while keeping it "classical"; the life of the classical music enthusiast in San Francisco, whether or not it crosses into competitive culture-vulturing; what  a Salon97 listening party is actually like, versus Ross' experience of the concert hall; why we sat down at our concerts in the Victorian era and never stood back up; the casualizing influence of the tech industry and how it opens up the various levels of San Francisco culture; and how you can watch Mozart doing stuff.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space with Stan James, founder of Lijit, creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco's position as the American city to be in for those with technological interests, not exclusively technological interests; the optimal Mission-style burrito ordering strategy; how we've left the concept of immersion in virtual reality behind in favor of always being at least a little bit on the internet, and how we can see it in the ways we navigate and even date; stepping outside our reactions to new technological developments by going back to Plato; parental disregard for the protocol of Skype calling; his life in Berlin, another city where people go to do projects and make things; how and why he became "Wandering Stan," and the importance he's found of digging into others' lives when he's in actual places; whether younger so-called "digital natives" can better handle technological addictiveness; how wide a swath of the human experience San Francisco offers; how he discovered the difference between his engaged-in-a-project face and his dead-eyed Reddit-browsing face; and how word of Avril Lavigne reached Nepal before it reached him.

Colin Marshall sits down somewhere in between San Francisco's Chinatown, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill with conceptual artist, experimental philosopher, and writer Jonathon Keats, author of the upcoming book Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. They discuss his own role as, above all, a fake; his attempt to epigenetically clone such celebrities as Lady Gaga, Michael Phelps, and Barack Obama; Forged, forgery, pursuit of simulacra, and Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes; content's ongoing release from form, and how it sends out the concept of forgery even as it brings it back in; the enthusiastically forged paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Thomas Kinkade's massively replicated, "master highlighted" images; authenticity as it relates to spaghetti and meatballs; San Francisco's intriguing tension between the claims of its own authenticity and its vision of itself as an experimental utopia — or, in his words, its simultaneous tendencies toward the "incredibly smug" and "very insecure"; why Europeans love San Francisco, and whether that has anything to do with the city's ultimate derivation from their own; his thought experiments' usefulness as "curiosity amplifiers," generating larger questions than the ones they came from; the difference between doing experimental philosophy in San Francisco and in other countries, like Italy; and the exhilarating American freedom that also numbs.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission with Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial Director at McSweeney's. They discuss security breaches at the McSweeney's office by overenthusiastic fans seeking a physical connection to their favorite publisher of physical books; his tendency to act as "the Joe Lieberman of publishing" in his editorial career, carrying unchanging tastes through changing times; Geoff Dyer, the writer with whom he has worked the longest, and how the subject-independence of Dyer's writing parallels the subject-independence of his editing; the counterintuitively un-self-indulgent qualities of "Dyeristic" prose; memoir booms vampire booms, and the eternal bad-book boom; how he finds the real action in hybrids of fiction and essay, and how those forms provide the surprises that all art should; his life in New York publishing before his homecoming to the San Francisco Bay area, and how he has come to regard the ecosystem/echo chamber of the New York literary scene at a distance; the dominance of food and technology over books in Bay Area culture; David Byrne's new ​How Music Works​ , and other books that you want certain authors to write; and the potential usefulness of the authorly switcheroo, as when Dyer planned to write a book about tennis but wrote a book about Andrei Tarkovsky's ​Stalker​.

Colin Marshall sits down at downtown San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum with monologist Josh Kornbluth. They discuss the proper pronunciation of the word "monologist"; his simultaneous return to the practice of oboe-playing and late entry into things Jewish; the question of whether Andy Warhol is "good for the Jews," and how he spun it into a monologue; the qualities of faith shared by Judaism and the communism of his childhood, which still releases endorphins when he thinks about it; the difficulty of dragging beautiful, pure abstractions of any kind into the concrete human sphere; Haiku Tunnel, the "FUBU of office workers"; the implicit premise of perhaps most monologues that everything ultimately connects to everything; how to show you've put in the hours on a performance by presenting its artifice just right; building a career in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how the place ratchets the average New York Jew's stress level down from eleven to ten; New York as his own personal primordial ooze; how San Francisco tends to push out its aspirers, especially where theater is concerned; the outsider's longing to understand music, Judaism, or both, and how he's come to experience both as practices; and the wonder of trying, failing, and trying again at one's craft within a community.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Castro with Daniel Levin Becker, member of the experimental literary group Oulipo, reviews editor at the Believer, and author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. They discuss whether Oulipo membership impresses the ladies; his earlier, long pre-Oulipo days, when he would make mixtapes consisting entirely of songs without the letter "e" in the title; his fascination with taking mundane patterns, applying enough work to them, and making something pretty incredible; palindromes, beau présent, homophones, metro poems, mathematical constraints, and Greimas squares; his Fulbright-enabled stay in Paris to organize Oulipo's junk, which led to his writing a book on the group, and then to their offer of membership even before he thought he had accrued the necessary literary steez; whether Paris retains its status as a literary-minded young American's dream, and its status as a "literary mindfuck" nevertheless; what Paris legitimizes, including but not limited to sexy Orangina animals; "gamification," in the artistic, urban, and Silicon Valley senses; the possible use of Oulipian restrictions in Many Subtle Channels itself; what makes Oulipo distinctively French, and what its irony about the canon may have in common with the irony of D.A.R.E. shirts worn in the United States; the Believer as a representative of west coast United States literary culture, and how the scrappiness of Chicago stands in contrast; and when he suspends his Chicagoan-ness, and how much of that involves not eating spicy meats.

Colin Marshall sits down in a back room in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury with Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, owners and transformers of The Booksmith, and now Kepler's in Menlo Park. They discuss being deemed "corporate refugees" by their employees for their tech consulting past; creating a positive, aspirational experience that doesn't make bookstores seem like broccoli; what they learned from spending date nights in other cities, having dinner and then visiting the local independent bookstores; the importance of offering serendipity, deeply knowledgeable service, and a multisensory browsing experience; how they've come to hold 200 events a year, including their popular bookswaps, born of customers' desire to meet people in places other than bars; what makes Haight-Ashbury something more than a neighborhood where a lot of fun stuff happened a long time ago, and how they made it a first priority to connect with the local community; the parallel non-profit functions of community bookstores, including public education; what makes bookstores businesses, but not normal businesses; "matchmaking" books to readers such as Dwight, lover of Russian history; how they create an addiction to books, bearing in mind that half of America doesn't read a book afer high school; what the controversy about Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil illustrates about The Booksmith's "high-touch" business model; the abstraction of life in corporate consulting, and the total lack of abstraction of life in bookselling; bookstores as social networks when you want to unplug from social networks; and the mind-expanding books that running The Booksmith has brought into both of their lives.

Colin Marshall sits down in a Wallace Neff dome in Pasadena with visual and sound artist Steve Roden. They discuss whether art can exist without constraints; his enthusiasm for "dumb ideas," such as painting with his mouth; the influence of Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which he found in a gutter as a kid; the inspiration a Jimi Hendrix impersonator gave him, and how he went on to enter the Los Angeles punk scene of the late seventies and early eighties; his punk band's catalog, including such songs as "Kill Reagan" and "Jesus Needs a Haircut"; his skill set consisting primarily of patience and the ability to evolve slowly; working in forms that admit the most failure, and thus produce the most interestingness; the days when he would hang out at the Westwood Tower Records until midnight, and the clerk that gave him an all-important copy of Brian Eno's Another Green World; the beauty of playing an instrument you know nothing about, and of other ideas born of incomplete information; his involvement with languages he doesn't speak, including researching Walter Benjamin without German, studying in Paris without French, and translating Swedish poetry without Swedish; finding the unknown in Los Angeles, and what it means to be able to traverse the city with ease or difficulty; the importance of maintaining a one-man practice; and his uncommonly fruitful experiences reading liner notes.

Colin Marshall sits down in Sliver Lake with Karina Longworth, film writer at the LA Weekly, co-founder of the film-culture blog Cinematical, and author of the upcoming Masters of Cinema: George Lucas. They discuss the public fascination with criticism versus blogging; J. Hoberman's notion of criticism as reporting what it feels like to be in the screening room; how she promoted a version of herself in her blogging days, and what she regrets about doing so; the pre-YouTube video essays she would create in school about Moonlighting, Judy Garland's apocryphal marriage proposal to Frank Sinatra, and Maury Povich; whether it makes sense to ask if we live in an interesting time for cinema, and whether she can even tell through the fog of writing about movies every week; time travel films and the oft-fumbled promise thereof, especially in the shadows of Back to the Future's pop mainstreaming of scientific devices; what she's learned about making Claire Denis and Sion Sono quickly relevant to readers who may well never have heard of them; how New York gets more movies than Los Angeles, how moviegoing means something different in the two cities, and her cover story about the whole dichotomy; her book on George Lucas, and the looming question of what, exactly, happened to him; her fears about her favorite directors getting too much budget, power, and freedom, and her greater fears about the Dodgers falling victim to the same; the strange fate of the rental collection at Kim's Video; her experience of cinematic burnout, and the subjectivity to which is may lead; Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess, which is actually about computer chess; pictures like Sans Soleil and Kiss Me, Stupid, which so formed their cinematic consciousnesses as to become their representations in film form; and the magical, destructive, entrancing, awful myth of old Hollywood.

Colin Marshall sits down in Echo Park with Carolyn Kellogg, writer on books and publishing for the Los Angeles Times and their literary blog Jacket Copy, board member at the National Book Critics Circle, and formerly the blogger and podcaster behind Pinky's Paperhaus. They discuss what happens when the interviewer becomes an interviewee; her use of early internet radio as a social skill-free way to penetrate the Los Angeles literary scene; that scene's coherence through the internet, and its tendency to be "nicer" than New York's, where publishing has cultural primacy; her tendency to strike less of a local-global balance in Jacket Copy than to regard Los Angeles itself as stateless; the city's unknowability, and the probable facetiousness of anyone who claims to know it; whether books, bookstores, reading, and criticism are or were ever in crisis; solid versus ephemeral media, and the importance of your inability to drop your library in the toilet; publishing's former status as a "gentlemen's business," and how that allowed it the tolerance for failure that every creative industry needs; whether Twitter makes people too nice to produce serious criticism; what makes some social networks suitable for book talk, and others completely worthless; the Los Angeles Times' use of blogs, and Tony Pierce's influence on it; her days in the Los Angeles of the eighties, working at an all-night Russian cafe downtown; how writers don't seem to hate it here as much nowadays, though some sort of heartbreak remains; how she filters not just the daily shipment of books to her house, but the onslaught of books that enter existence on a daily basis; and the possibility that someone's finally getting the multimedia reading experience right.

Colin Marshall sits down below the mid-Wilshire offices of Los Angeles magazine with its associate editor Chris Nichols, the man behind the Ask Chris column and blog, former chair of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, and author of The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister. They discuss the importance of the now-empty Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax; what being a civic booster means in Los Angeles; the remains of the postwar American car culture of easy, breezy livin', and their enduring value; the preponderance of hard-to-explain objects across the Los Angeles landscape, and how he explains them in his writing; the richness and strange inhospitability of La Brea Avenue, currently caught between old and new ideas of the city; architectural preservation, and how much of it in Los Angeles is too much; the surviving Googie coffee shops like Pann's and Norms, Wayne McAllister's pre-Googie creations, and their place in the city's historical palimpsest; his determination to help tourists determine and discover their fantasy of Los Angeles, of which countless many exist; why you have to go out and find the city, and why it will simply never come to you; the wonders of Cucamonga; how he's used Los Angeles as his own personal party space; the Dutch chocolate shop that became a swap meet, and the spectacular twenties movie palace that became a storeroom; how things filled out when "the world moved in" to places like Koreatown, where you can find, for instance, a cafe that is also a boat; what meaning, if any, Frank Gehry's much-discussed Disney Concert Hall has; and his desire to get lost in Los Angeles once again

Colin Marshall sits down in Ocean Park with Frances Anderton, host of KCRW's Design and Architecture and Dwell magazine's Los Angeles editor. They discuss how her countrymen Reyner Banham, David Hockney, and Christopher Isherwood opened up the idea of Los Angeles to England, vague as the understanding of its cityscape remained; the modernism of Los Angeles then emblematized by its freeways and its architectural freedom from the crushing burden of history, as unlike her native Bath as possible; how Paris' Pompidou Centre and the mere image of sliding glass patio doors shaped her architectural consciousness; the rise of preservation in Los Angeles, and how it might take an outsider to clearly see the movement's potential to hinder eccentricity; the American tendency to prostrate ourselves before whatever seems sufficiently old; how stark early-sixties modernism rose in Los Angeles without actually displacing anything, except on Bunker Hill; Chris Burden's ideas about the super-fast self-driving car as the transportation of his future, and his generation's implicit yearning to bring back 1962; how she figured out that radio was indeed a suitable medium for the discussion of design, architecture, and aesthetics, especially when it can include conversations about such subjects with the likes of Moby; and what Moby's architecture blog says about the surreality of Los Angeles, as well as where she still finds that surreality herself after 21 years in the city.

Colin Marshall sits down at the West Hollywood Library with Nate DiMeo, public radio producer and creator of the podcast The Memory Palace. They discuss American history's unique wealth of inventors, fakes, geniuses and eccentrics, such as serial impostor Stanley Clifford Weyman and child prodigy turned streetcar transfer taxonomist William James Sidis; the odd satisfaction of stories that arrive at "close enough" rather than classic success; the issue of the right historical moment for a creation, whether that creation is a podcast, a radio show, or the music of Slash; podcasting's theoretically ideal function as public radio's "indie underground" feeder system, and its failure thus far to perform that function; his own realization that The Memory Palace probably wouldn't take the public radio path, and the freedom that gave him; the enduring appeal, no matter podcasting advantages, of the "kismet" of radio, which can deliver unexpected information, entertainment, and delight; why a relatively high degree of public radio innovation has gone on in Los Angeles, and how a public radio producer can become the hit of any entertainment-industry party here; why the older public radio generation hasn't yielded to the younger; and what it takes for him, as an avowed non-history buff, to draw certain feelings from moments in American history and then reconstitute those feelings in audio form.

Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with novelist Joshua Henkin, author most recently of The World Without You, for their first conversation in four and a half years since his previous appearance on The Marketplace of Ideas. They discuss how the new book makes a space for characters to converge rather than occupying the space between two people, like his last one; the authorial balance between knowing too much and knowing too little, and the need to address the same question in fiction you would on Passover of "why this night is different from all other nights"; his bringing in a divorce, a death, the war in Iraq, and July 4th, and how much is too much; his tendency to throw away thousands of pages when refining each novel, observing the economist's principle of sunk costs; how character is plot, and how stories go wrong when character isn't plot; his ways of fictionally repurposing pieces of his own life that few readers would guess; the dangers of writing about recent-past events, and doing so while achieving the universal with a laserlike focus on the particular; the importance of writing no character as an authorial mouthpiece, especially when dealing with sensitive political and religious issues as The World Without You does; his use of teaching as a feedback look for his own writing, and how early in his career he managed to expose himself to a great amount of what doesn't work in fiction; his writer's life in Brooklyn, and why that borough has become such a writerly place; his childhood in and return to New York, and what that has to do with his characters existing in perpetual relationships to the place; the writer's need to hang out primarily with non-writers; his techniques for achieving a sense of place, and the American difficulty of having any sense of place at all about somewhere as distant as Iraq, which seems to have become a theme of the war itself; the press' eagerness and the author's wariness to discuss the "aboutness" of a book; and the irreducibility of fiction meaning that the easier you can summarize a novel, the worse that novel is. (Photo: Matthew Polis)

Colin Marshall sits down on top of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles with Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times and co-author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture. Last year, he conducted Reading Los Angeles, a yearlong study of the city through the books written about it. This year, he's doing a series of essays and video explorations of Los Angeles' boulevards: first Atlantic, then Sunset, and soon Crenshaw and beyond. They discuss the break from the city's previous connection with the automobile, the single-family house, and private amenity; the unusual number of existential questions Los Angeles has faced and continues to face; outsiders' visceral reaction to Los Angeles "inconsistent" architecture (especially as manifested by Randy's and Dale's Donuts), and the way freedom and ugliness can go hand-in-hand; his having grown up in Berkeley, a process that subjected him to a certain anti-Los Angeles "indoctrination"; the sense that Los Angeles is its "own thing," and how that motivates deadening choices like freeways as well as enlivening choices like turning away from Europe and toward Latin America and Asia; Woody Allen and his attitudes about cities and urbanism, as revealed in films like Annie Hall and Midnight in Paris; how the stereotype of Los Angeles' superficiality conceals its layered nature, and whether the city's best elements can ever be made directly accessible; how to read cities versus reading objects, and how familiarity with Los Angeles helped him read a city like Houston; the complicated relationship between public and private space in Los Angeles, as exemplified by streets that simply give up on sidewalks and beloved midcentury modern houses in terribly alienating locations; and the tendency of tourists to see only the worst of Los Angeles and go no further — unless they go much, much further.

Colin Marshall sits down in Boyle Heights with David Kipen, founder of that neighborhood's combined bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros and a true man of both letters and Los Angeles. He gives commentary on books and literary culture on KPCC-FM and Sirius XM's The Bob Edwards Show, he's written the book The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, he recently translated Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs for Melville House Books, and he spent over four years as the National Endowment for the Arts' Director of Literature, where he got their Big Read program started. They discuss how to sell paper books in neighborhoods the Kindle hasn't penetrated; his interest in getting into conversations about books on both the low-profile person-to-person level and the high-profile media one; whether we have indeed left an actual lost golden age of American reading; the lack of "slack" in American life to use for reading; how rail makes up a city's skeleton, and how Los Angeles' skeleton is growing with new additions like the Libros Schmibros-proximate Gold Line; 1939, the annus mirabilis of Los Angeles literature, and the city's modern desire, as exemplified by Mike Davis' City of Quartz, to fetishize its own depredations and destruction; whether it's hard to keep your mind in the narrative of this city, where even the natives have to immigrate; and that undervalued observer of Los Angeles and the whole of California, Thomas Pynchon. (Photo: Alissa Walker)

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Alissa Walker, writer on urban design, architecture, and the cityscape — especially Los Angeles' — for publications like GOOD, Dwell, the LA Weekly, and more. She also associate-produces KCRW's DnA: Design and Architecture. They discuss Sunset Triangle Plaza, the area of reclaimed street where they sit, and what it says about the Angeleno "mind shift" toward getting out of the car; how many small, cheap improvements can alter the urban experience in the same way as a few large, expensive ones; her friends' lingering fear of getting "all sweaty" while riding bicycles, buses, and trains; the complacency Los Angeles instilled in its residents in the seventies, eighties, and even nineties; increasing the "stumble upon" factor in a large, spread-out city; her experience building a more accurate narrative of Los Angeles, a city that hasn't done much to brand itself lately, than the ones in the New York Times; the urban projects that work in this city and the ones, like a "living wall" being torn down right behind them, that don't; Los Angeles' tendency to create spaces in which to compress and imitate itself; the lack of markers, literally and figuratively, to show you "where the stuff is"; learning and showing Los Angeles through its architecture, and other works of public design more interesting than the artisanal chairs so popular last decade; her part in the GOOD Ideas for Cities project, especially when it went to her native St. Louis, and how it got her thinking about the possibilities of American cities; and her recommendations on how best to keep your eyes on the streets in Los Angeles.

Colin Marshall sits down at UCLA with urban planning professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking and the man who's made us aware of the fact that our cities' problems come not from too little parking, but too much. They discuss the academic tendency to believe, without verification, anything bad about Los Angeles; how this city became the densest car-oriented one in America, as well as the most car-oriented dense one; falsely perceived parking "shortages," how they led to minimum free parking requirements, and how those have worsened our urban experience; Los Angeles' parking requirement-skirting Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, which made even monstrosities like 1100 Wilshire usable; the development of technology needed to allow parking prices to respond to demand, and how it works in systems like San Francisco's SFPark; the importance of treating parking space just like any other real estate, and how irresponsible we've been about that; how Ventura streets got free wi-fi through their parking program; what ruined Westwood, and what parking policy had to do with it; how he realized parking mattered so much, and why the general public has only begun to; the necessity of humor when you're writing about parking for 800 pages; and how cycling makes it users happier than any other mode of transportation (perhaps because of its lack of parking complications).

Colin Marshall sits down nine stories above Westlake with Jesse Thorn, host of Public Radio International's Bullseye, proprietor of the Maximum Fun radio and podcast empire, and host of the men's style web series Put This On. They discuss what it takes for GQ to introduce you as a guy who hates Los Angeles; the points of starkest division between northern and southern California, including burritos and new-aginess; his time growing up in San Francisco's inner Mission district, where he was spoiled by the ease of getting around and much else besides; coming of age amid the city's crack epidemic, nearly witnessing shootings, and dodging batteries thrown from rooftops; neighborhoods as extensions of your home into the outside world; the vast distances one must traverse in Los Angeles, and the toll they takes on one's ability to "pop on over" anywhere; Put This On's exploration of the great men's style cities, including New York, London, and Milan ("the Los Angeles of Italy"); the utilitarianism of dress in America, and the prevalence of surfer and skater traditions in southern California; the twin tendencies of white Angelenos to expensively project the image of not caring about clothes and to nevertheless pay close, anxious attention to their physical attractiveness; and the knowledge that neither he nor anyone else can never go home again to the old now-gentrified San Francisco neighborhood. Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed here or on iTunes here.

Colin Marshall sits down in Del Rey with David C. Sloane, professor and director of undergraduate programs at the University of California's Price School of Public Policy and editor of Planning Los Angeles. They discuss the book's obvious contrarian marketing angle against the widely held idea of Los Angeles as the most chaotic, least planned U.S. city; how people assume Los Angeles to be both older and newer than it really is; the city's much-discussed "polycentricity" coming from trains, not cars; freeways as conduits, Berlin Walls, psychological shortcuts, and Brasília-style monuments; the fears surrounding the non-disaster of "Carmageddon" and what they say about the increasing difficulty of the midcentury Los Angeles lifestyle; the transition to a world of multimodal transportation, where bicycles, cars, and trains coexist; his move to Los Angeles during the inauspicious year of 1992, though one that paradoxically saw several highly auspicious urban developments on the way; the changes in thinking that led to the changes in American cities from their nadir in the late seventies and early eighties; whether Los Angeles, having spread to its geographical limits, has now run out of excuses for not looking inward; and the city's anxiety about which places are "real" and which "fake."

Colin Marshall sits down in Lakewood City Hall with D.J. Waldie, author of books like Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, collaborator on books like Real City with photographer Marissa Roth, and a 34-year employee of the City of Lakewood as Public Information Officer and Deputy City Manager. They discuss the importance of Wallace Stevens' "work and walking" to his own writing; his advice to the latest wave of Los Angeles newcomers looking for solutions to the problem of how to live here; what it means to lead a "redemptive" suburban life, and whether "suburban" means the same thing to every writer; Lakewood and other rapidly built postwar tract-home communities as exciting, frightening experiments in living from which new democratic vistas could well; the meaning of Lakewood's motto that "Times Change, Values Don't"; how considerable variation can arise from built uniformity; his premise that there are no "good" places, and his ongoing interest in the question of what would happen if you fell in love with the place where you are; how knowledge of a place, if not quite love for it, can enrich the experience of that place; how the newest Angelenos seem to long to connect to and invest in their place; and how Los Angeles' resistance to its own history has contributed to bad choices over the years, leading to frustrations financial, racial, and otherwise. (Photo: Tom Johnson)

Colin Marshall sits down in Little Tokyo with novelist Todd Shimoda, author, in collaboration with visual artist L.J.C. Shimoda, of "philosophical mystery" novels with science, engineering, Japanese and Japanese-American themes. His latest, Subduction, follows a disgraced young physician into his four-year exile on a tiny, earthquake-prone, mythology-freighted island off the Japanese coast. They discuss Japan's very real earthquakes in Kobe and Fukushima; the book's obsessed characters, whether obsessed with seismology, documentation, or simply staying on the island; the question of how much scientific data he can safely include in a novel, and if this age of Wikipedia changes that; the "four-dimensional" Japanese cultural co-existence of mythology and science, and its blurred boundary between practice and belief; writing a novel of Japan without writing a novel of Japanese-ness, and avoiding other problems that befall Westerners' writing about the East; Haruki Murakami, Kobo Abe, and the Japanese International Style; his risk of real-life island despair while living on Kauai, and his regular, pendulum-like moves between the urban, suburban, and rural worlds; how to use the cultures that converge in Los Angeles to write a novel of Los Angeles, where the appearance of no neighborhoods becomes the reality of too many; the city's actual earthquake of the previous evening; Chin Music Press' sense of geographic place; and the availability of a constant stream of Western fascination with Japan for a novelist to tap into. (Photo: Mike Mazzoli)

Colin Marshall sits down in Barnsdall Art Park with Hollywood Steve Huey, writer and media personality, former critic at All Music Guide and host of the web series Yacht Rock. They discuss his introductions to the likes of Michael Jackson, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Barry Manilow; elements of his home state of Michigan, including Big Rapids (not to be confused with Grand Rapids), Ann Arbor, and the urban ruins and $5,000 mansions of Detroit; the All Music Guide's shaping force on his musical consciousness; the lack of a genre equivalent to Yacht Rock today thanks to marketing departments' lack of imagination; great works, like Nirvana's Nevermind, that both found genres and dissolve them; life in the music nerd ghetto within the entertainment capital of the world at the time of bewildering musical (and cinematic and televisual) bounty; acquiring the name "Hollywood Steve" through a one-off gig on Pirates of the Caribbean; how he came to appreciate Barry Manilow, an artist known to some as a byword for bad music; and why guilty pleasures — whether musical ones in the case of Barry Manilow, or urban ones in the case of Los Angeles — are better enjoyed as regular pleasures. (Photo: Sammy Primero)

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with Eric Brightwell, proprietor of both Pendersleigh & Sons Cartography, which offers hand-drawn maps of neighborhoods in Los Angeles and beyond (and posts them to Amoeba Music's Amoeblog), and Brightwell, which offers luxury and craft items to the discerning cosmopolitan gentleman. They discuss the days when Silver Lake was Ivanhoe; the distinctively shifting and disputed nature of Los Angeles neighborhoods; the differences between neighborhood mapping by Google Maps, by Yahoo Maps, on subway station walls, and by hand; the unintended Berlin Wall effect of freeway construction; his attracting of angry, all-caps comments from the gangs of Frogtown; longtime Angelenos' lack of awareness about the neighborhoods that surround them, and their need to believe that their own has gone to the dogs; Hollywood's retailers of pimp-geared $169 three-suit deals; how an authenticity jones can ruin your experience of Los Angeles; his discovery of microsubcultures in unexpected places, and the larger fact that no one part of the city is more interesting than any other; Hitler's Pacific Palisades bunker; and the advanced art of entering a neighborhood, exploring it, and documenting it without knowing anything at all going in. (Photo: Fern)

Colin Marshall sits down in Silver Lake with comedian, writer, and comedy writer Todd Levin, who's written for Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, Conan, and the Onion News Network. They discuss using comedy performers as tools; the advantages of being a cipher; deliberately bewildering the audience, listening for reactions beyond laughter, and in the process becoming a connoisseur of silence; the comparative humorous possibilities of Tetley and Bigelow tea bag package copy; the inevitable and healthy decision to stop reading internet feedback on one's work; Conan O'Brien's coxcomb of hair; New York's inherent masochism, and Los Angeles' bus stops full of people who look just about to surrender; the pleasures of New York's crosstown buses and the agonies of its garbage trains; Los Angeles' lack of an excuse for shuffling around in flip-flops; his heightened suspicion of venues that aggressively promise good times, and what aggressive promises of laughter can do to comedy; the ultimately fruitless technique of reliable joke insertion, which reveals an anxiety to hold an audience's attention and in so doing loses that attention; that particular Conan O'Brien brand of delivering silliness and lasting memories at once; and the haunting question of telling which of your actions indicate maturity, and which indicate complacency. (Photo: Lisa Whiteman)

Colin Marshall sits down at KPCC headquarters in Pasadena with Tony Pierce, the station's blog editor, former editor at LAist and blog editor at the Los Angeles Times, and author of the Busblog. They discuss the time when he was the only English-language blogger to ride the bus; the longing for Los Angeles that brought him out of the Chicago suburbs; his years in the collegiate Eden of Isla Vista; making like the rich young prince in the bible and selling all his stuff in order to leave San Francisco and come back to Los Angeles; beginning to blog as a way to let all the city's single ladies know he was here; his encounters with different groups of people on different transit lines, and his strategic use of the subway for drinking; how people in Los Angeles can live here for decades without ever bothering to be truly present, and how they might do that in any city in the world; his push, while editing LAist, to tap into as great a variety of voices and experiences as possible; his belief that the Busblog, despite its explosive popularity, never deserved to get known at all; the fixture of Los Angeles literary culture that is the paradoxically positive Charles Bukowski; and how, in all of the Busblog's non-fanciness, he still wants to let the ladies of the world know he's available.

Colin Marshall sits down in an undisclosed Hollywood-ish location with Mark "Frosty" McNeill, co-founder and creative captain of the internet radio "future roots music" collective Dublab. They discuss founding an internet radio station in 1999, when everything sounded like a tin-can phone; the nature of future roots, where the very old meets the very new, the very traditional meets the very experimental, and everything sounds different yet retains a common undercurrent; Dublab's mission to curate the curators, or "DJ the DJs"; his theory that all art is derivative, especially all music, but in a good way; his days doing gruntwork at USC's classical station, and the roomful of free John Cage, Terry Riley, and Nonesuch albums it afforded him; Dublab's early courtship by the companies of the internet bubble, and the free lunches (and nothing else) this offered; Los Angeles' great advantages of diversity and space, of both the physical and mental varieties; what about music seems to incentivize narrow rather than wide appreciation, and how to get around that without being a pusher man; Secondhand Sureshots, the short documentary he co-directed, and what it says about the importance of repurposing forgotten and obscure sounds; whether and how the dust on a record acts as "seasoning"; and the joy of reconstructing someone's personality by buying their record collection at a thrift store — and how he did just that by giving it a spin on his show Celsius Drop.

Colin Marshall sits down at NPR West in Culver City with Andy Bowers, Executive Producer of Slate's podcasts and fourth-generation Angeleno. They discuss his status as a "secret Angeleno"; what it takes to introduce microphones into entertaining conversations without things getting tiresome; the difference between podcasts as podcasts and podcasts as imitation radio; discovering the joy of biking in Los Angeles; the city's troubled downtown bike lanes and what they emblematize about local civic projects; what problems arise when you try to get anything accomplished in a city with 88 distinct municipalities; Roger Rabbit, Chinatown, and the allure of mythical Los Angeles malice; whether or not you can really move into a Woody Allen movie; his youth in Los Angeles and his return which converted the city from an adolescent one into an adult one; the various placements and interpretations of Los Angeles' great east-west divide; his time at National Public Radio bureaus in London and Moscow, and the accessibility of those cities' cultural institutions; his time producing Day to Day, and the loss of public radio's old eclecticism; podcasting as radio's skunkworks, especially in this podcasting Mecca of southern California; podcast listeners connecting with hosts even more than with content; and why Stephen Metcalf stirs so many people up, anyway. (Photo: Steve McFarland)

Colin Marshall takes a trip to the 99¢ Only Store and beyond with Billy Vasquez, better known as the 99 Cent Chef. They discuss the store as a prime venue for peoplewatching (whether the people dress in their Sunday best or in pink-striped miniskirts); the appeal of midcentury Googie diner architecture; how he drove out to Venice Beach on the 10 and stayed in Los Angeles for 37 years; the meaty usefulness of both chorizo and soyrizo; asparagus, a product you'd never have found at any 99-cent store a decade ago; 99-cent Italian beer with 99-cent Italian pasta, and 99-cent German beer with 99-cent German chocolate cake-coated marshmallows; ingredient substitution (like cumin for curry powder) as the essential skill of the 99-cent gourmand; the strange allure of Vienna Sausage corn dogs; inventing the only pasta that pays tribute to John Cassavetes; the suicidal possibilities of marshmallow ropes; the delicious possibilities of portobello crab rockefeller; the Banquet-to-Contessa spectrum of frozen dinners; the two-piece 99-cent deal to be had every Tuesday at Popeyes'; the Los Angeles Expo Line as a glorious passageway to places like Earlez Grille, Let's Be Frank, and Chef Marilyn's Soul Food Express, and his adventures at cheap eateries on rail lines past; how his Cajun heritage taught him, with nutria and crayfish, that you can eat anything; his street photography, and the Restaurant Nocturnes video series that came out of it; and all of the fascinating contradictions of Los Angeles, a city both beautiful and tarnished, that just might disappear if you don't water it.

Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with Michael Silverblatt, host of the literary interview program Bookworm from KCRW in Santa Monica since 1989. They discuss how he's managed to host a book show for so long "in Los Angeles, of all places;" the near-racist tradition of New York writers savaging Los Angeles in the thirties and forties; introducing the likes of Edward St. Aubyn to Angelenos and others well beyond; radio as a dreamlike "mad tea party," whether dreamt in one's car or at one's computer; the band Sparks as American humorists, the writes Krys Lee as an exponent of ethnic writing as both exotic and erotic, and how to recommend both without resorting to anything so uninteresting as opinion; being not a critic, and not a fan, but an omnivorous conversationalist; the lamentable rise of "patented hip taste;" how Terence Malick's Badlands drew him out to Los Angeles from the East Coast; the Angeleno phobia of cultural confrontation; Los Angeles' failure to insist upon or preserve its genius; not driving because you never learned versus not driving because you don't know how to get the money for a car; America as a "cavalcade of marvels;" and the importance of accepting and existing the confusion of an ungraspable whole, whether its the whole of a book, of a film, of an album, or of Los Angeles.

Colin Marshall walks through Larchmont with Molly McAleer, co-founder of HelloGiggles and writer for CBS' Two Broke Girls. They discuss the definition of internet fame, especially when one's internet debut comes in a photo funneling a beer; whether moving to Los Angeles after graduating from the disappointingly party-free Boston College counts as a betrayal of Boston; her avoidance of the label "humorist," and thus any association with Mark Twain; her time at Defamer, which gave her a "magical" view of Los Angeles, and what she'd say to those who accuse it and every other Gawker site of hastening the decline of western civilization; joining Two Broke Girls at the height of the Whitney Cummings boom; Koreatown, her point of entry into Los Angeles after having lived in a frat house with 32 dudes; aging a thousand years after spending six in Los Angeles; how much of a discount on nail polish counts as a deep discount on nail polish; her struggle to be as popular with her friends as her mom; the resurgence of press-on nails; experiencing utter brokeness in Los Angeles, and getting banned from using Google ads when those friends tried to help her out; cookies aside, the reduced presence of the Girl Scouts, except in cases of high-profile transsexual trouble; her resistance to driving, and her feeling that some people are meant to drive, while others are meant to be driven; the basic tasks of life that somehow never get taught; manicures as the last bastion of personal maintenance; and how hard it is to avoid humblebragging when The Wonder Years' Fred Savage directs your script.

Colin Marshall sits down in downtown Los Angeles with Pico Iyer, writer about place — both our dreams of it and its realities. They discuss his new book The Man Within My Head; how best to introduce Graham Greene's The Quiet American to new readers; how he started a book on being a pleasantly bewildered foreigner in Japan and finished a book about Greene, brush fires, and his own father; the roles of fathers both chosen and unchosen; the ultimate unknowability of other people, and the form of intimacy found in accepting that not-knowing; graduating from school into a British Empire twenty years dead; his Fowlerian perspective to Los Angeles' Pyle; England under the burden of too much past, California under the burden of too little, and his inoculation against the excesses of both by having oscillated between them; his return to England in the form of Japan; how Los Angeles anthologizes the world within itself versus how Japan does, and how Los Angeles handles its multiculturalism versus how Toronto does; his distrust of words, and Greene's distrust of everything but words; his father's interaction with the children of the 1960s' Californian counterculture, and Hunter S. Thompson chronicling the collapse of that culture while seeing idealism without ideology; living friends as traveling companions versus dead authors as traveling companions; and Greene as, at once, his predictor, reflector, guide, understander, and anticipator. (Photo: Derek Shapton)

Colin Marshall sits down in Atwater Village with comedy writer and music video director Scott Jacobson, who has written for programs like The Daily Show, Squidbillies, and Bob's Burgers, and made videos for artists like Nick Lowe, Superchunk, and The National. They discuss the comedic style of George Herriman's Krazy Kat and whether a place exists for it today; expectations, the enemy of comedy; what it means that the likes of Adult Swim and Tim & Eric can thrive in today's world, or if they indeed thrive in it; The Daily Show's rise alongside George W. Bush's, and the trickiness of presenting its voice as the voice of reason; the feeling of finally getting a foothold in New York, and the sense of personal failing that comes from not loving it; whether anyone else misses the obscure cruelty of Craig Kilborn's Daily Show; the "journalistic vamp" and other news filler, up to and including Glenn Beck's moment of popularity; the "trash compactor of reality" that is political coverage, and the solace offered by a Squidbillies or a Bob's Burgers; his childhood love of the divisive Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; the way critical opinion eventually came to elevate Carl Barks' Scrooge McDuck Comics, and the joy of bringing something in "low art," like Hospitality's "Friends of Friends," to the public's attention; using ridiculous contexts to smuggle genuine content; New York's manic energy that insistently pushes you forward; and the phenomenon of "really smart people doing really stupid things" that, championed by the David Lettermans and Conan O'Briens of the world, has risen to prominence in modern comedy.

Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. They discuss José Saramago's way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don't; how we recommend books, films, and shows to friends, thus caring about how they care about how characters care about one another; Michael Haneke's scary Funny Games viewed with an audience and Michael Haneke's ludicrous Funny Games viewed at home; what's so great about Wittgenstein; the trade-off between humanizing and monsterizing your viliains, as with Hitler in Max and The Boys from Brazil; the perfect biological pitching of Onion's 9/11 headline "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell"; what makes the 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray so gripping; our desire to feel we've misjudged characters; Buffy, Angel, and our bets about liking them; and characterization and reversion to type all the way from Shylock to Stewie Griffin. Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed here or on iTunes here.

Colin Marshall sits down in Larchmont with comedy writer Megan Ganz, who's written for the Onion and Important Things with Demetri Martin, and now writes for NBC's Community. They talk about easing her transition from New York to Los Angeles with the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink; Los Angeles as an unfurnished apartment to New York as a furnished one; her fond memories of aimless subway trips; what we don't know about growing up in Michigan, especially regarding the preparation of vegetables and local pride in Tim Allen; the Onion as something to aspire to in adolescence; the best comedy's tendency to happen naturally, without being in on its own jokes; what one would get wrong by assuming Community, the "show that can get away with anything," represents a model of sitcoms today; her use of the voices of various characters and institutions rather than he own; the comedy gold to be mined from misalignments between tone and content; community college-going as a hobby; and the lingering question that hangs over certain people, places, and operations: "How serious are you?"

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Wade Major, senior film critic at Boxoffice, co-host of IGN's Digigods, and regular participant on KPCC's Filmweek. They discuss what Sucker Punch represents the coagulation of; whether it is a greater crime for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies sincerely, or for Zack Snyder to make Zack Snyder movies cynically; the importance of spontaneity, not formula, to creative business; the simultaneous democratization of criticism and of filmmaking itself; the world he emerged out of film school into; his father's career in silent pictures; the philosophical differences between the film schools at USC, UCLA, and CalArts; the possibilities of a new business model for criticism meant to be read after seeing the movie; Pauline Kael's conception of criticism as a means of keeping filmmakers honest; bigtime directors' assumptions that they can't make films about their real passions; The Artist as it taps into both filmmakers' and critics' fears of getting left behind; how without taste, you've lost; feeding off the energy of a roomful of strangers in actual theatrical screenings, and learning something about yourself at the same time; the "dysfunctional family" that is the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; the critic's mandate to move film into a larger cultural context; and the director's mandate to get out into the world and live before ever shooting a frame. (Photo: Kristi Lake)

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Feliz with comedy writer, baseball reporter, and Twitter "suggested user" Alison Agosti. They discuss the preferred pronunciation of "Los Feliz"; Rancho Cucamonga's chief industry of teenage pregnancy; how Los Angeles looked while she was growing up in the Inland Empire; the promise of New York as a land of letters, art, and coats; her mass childhood purchase of used Woody Allen tapes, including but not limited to Husbands and Wives; the morning she woke up to 1500 e-mails from Twitter in her inbox; her realization that comedy writing could count as a job; what it takes to get on a Maude team; her struggle to coming up with new ways to write "hit the ball" or to present a narrative in a 2-1 game against the Diamondbacks; her music blog Headphones In; finding humor in the complicated, as unworkable as it can end up in a sketch; raking in the Twitter stars by mentioning eating something weird by yourself; her weariness of apologizing for Los Angeles, a city that doesn't work against you except when you can't find parking; Venice, either the "weirder" or "non-shitty" Santa Monica; how we only children who refuse to network or compete can explain ourselves to actual grown-ups; the appeal of the intelligent, loud, brilliant but unself-aware Woody Allen-type character; what she likes to satirize in herself; playing (but not beating) Ecco the Dolphin on the Sega Genesis; and "the woman-in comedy thing," which turns out not to be a thing at all. (Photo: Philip Eierund)

Colin Marshall sits down in the Los Angeles Central Library's courtyard with John Rabe, host of Off-Ramp, KPCC's weekend pointillist portrait of Southern California. They discuss the merits of recording in a library courtyard and in Cheech Marin's house in Malibu; picking a road in Los Angeles and following it wherever it goes; the troubled history of Cypress Park and the truth about the Isabel Street shooting; the Los Angeles "churn" and the effect of constant neighborhood change on the historical consciousness; the historical bounty to be found in the Los Angeles Public Library's photo collection; the city's rising optimism and falling crime (and its lack of a mob); the McMartin preschool trial; his desire to live in a place with the word "gardens" in its name; his tendency to look ahead, not back, and to move randomly, not in patterns, and how that shapes Off-Ramp's character; his anger at drivers who slow down on the freeway with their brakes; his plan to banish citizens who break the social contract and institute a Waste and Fraud Corruption Lottery to give money to the rest; the lessons of Carmageddon; what makes radio documentaries sustain; and how, if you want to create radio, you should just break out your iPhone (or whatever you have) and record something. (Photo: Karl Rabe)

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with film and television critic David Bax, co-host of the podcasts Battleship Pretension and Previously On. They discuss his fifth-grade shoving match over Ghostbusters; the difference between criticism and the assertion of one's opinions; being a film and television critic while living right near the heart of film and television production; Chicago's advantages as a filmgoing city, including but not limited to the Gene Siskel Film Center; discovering a cinephile community on the bus; St. Louis and other cities' loss of local critics writing with local sensibilities; whether the aspiring critic must first reject working in production; the sharpening of his critical perspectives on formalism and structuralism as revealed by Michael Mann's Public Enemies; if a critic should tell an audience why they like a film, why the audience should like a film, why the audience should pay attention to a film, or simply how a film works; why the internet offers a superior medium for television criticism; what television can do that film can't, and why to watch them differently; whether television shows labor under a corrupting business model; Treme, New Orleans and geographical verisimilitude; the askew real-placeness of many Los Angeles productions; the outdated marketing of television as evidenced by the Whitney billboards that once littered town; how and why to avoid approaching art as commodity; what he would say to those who who don't consider criticism a "real job" (and how he would agree with them); and the necessity of discussing film and television as if for posterity, just as a program like The Sopranos seems to have been created for it. (Photo: Jenny Smith)

Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood at midnight with film critic Tyler Smith, co-host of the podcast Battleship Pretension and host of the podcast More than One Lesson. They discuss the strong associations between diners late at night and talk about movies; his struggle to stay in Chicago and ultimate move to Los Angeles; his choice between screenwriting and film criticism; film criticism's relationship with the kinds of conversations film geeks have; the impulse to start a podcast, and what it took to understand what makes a fascinating film discussion; how to talk to comedians about film, even if they claim not to care about the medium; his return to his old church in Nixa, Missouri to give a lecture about the film industry in Los Angeles; the concept of discernment not just in criticism, but in Christianity; the power and influence some Christian ideas about film ascribe purely to content; Fight Club and the attitude pictures hold to their own content; whether film reflects the personality of its creators or possesses one of its own; and how much one wants to get to know the personality behind a film when that personality happens to be, say, Orson Welles'.

Colin Marshall sits down at the Los Angeles Central Library downtown with Map Librarian Glen Creason, author of Los Angeles in Maps. They discuss the point at which Los Angeles becomes not just a place to live but a subject; riding the old Pacific Electric streetcars that prompted the city to grow so large in the firs place; using maps to see the influence of trains, water, the movies, and oil on the city's spread, growing up in the "Leave it to Beaver territory" of South Gate; early Los Angeles-boosters selling the city by employing mapmakers' sleight of hand; downtown's death in the sixties and seventies, and its more recent revival; learning little but having a lot of fun at UCLA during the Summer of Love; when the city "took a breath and reinvented itself," Los Angeles' uniquely dramatic geographical setting; how multiculturalism took hold from the very beginning; what it took to build the Third Street Tunnel; how miracles of civic engineering turned into freeway frustration; the non-disaster of "Carmageddon"; where the water in the Los Angeles River went, and how it remains useful as a navigational aid; the American notion of creating an Eden; whether Los Angeles is, as the posters say, "a world in itself"; former Italian and German communities, and current Indian and Chinese ones; the city's surprising new walkability; whether the "driver's paradise" days of twenty minutes to everywhere really happened at all; becoming the Map Librarian serendipitously; Los Angeles' past of rabbits, gambling ships, and Central Avenue jazz clubs; what happened in Chavez Ravine; how good intentions in Los Angeles' development have often led to reconsideration; how even longtime Angelenos learn from the ways the constant influx of new Angelenos approach the city; and the endless last rites given to Los Angeles that it never quite needs.

Colin Marshall sits down at Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood with Eliza Skinner, comedian, musical improviser, comedic rap-battle impresario, writer, and the woman of the one-woman show Eliza Skinner is Shameless. They discuss a Scotsman who left his wife possibly due and possibly not due to what he felt in her onstage spirit; the one-way intimacy of performance; the proper cultivation of one's personal brand; the odd confluence of skills required for the non-career (absent an eccentric billionaire) of musical improvisation, and the fear some have of practicing them; when New York felt like one big "last call"; the apparent ease of performing in Los Angeles as a buoy for the spirit; breaking the shackles of "musical improviser" as an identity; the women of Shameless like Amy and Karen, who compulsively complicate their lives in ways they don't understand; matching mother-daughter breast implants; the lack of female characters who are lovable yet not likable; the fact that nobody, given that everyone plays the hero in their own story, thinks of themselves as an asshole; the fears of being misunderstood, of foxholes, and of getting stuck in underwater tubes; Tyler Perry, who honed his craft on the theatrical "chitlin' circuit," as the ideal career model; the logistical requirements of setting up freestyle rap battles; and what it takes for RuPaul to deem you "shelarious." (Photo: Tyler Ross)

Colin Marshall sits down at Fat Dog in West Hollywood with comedian and actor Jordan Morris, co-host of the comedy podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go!, writer on the web series MyMusic, former host of Fuel TV's The Daily Habit, and creator of satirical commercials for "Gamewave" and the "Action Circle." They talk about growing up in Orange County with the solace of ska music; The Simpsons' un-overstatable influence on the current generation of young comedy writers; whether and how "Family-Guyization" is affecting comedic culture; the usefulness of college as "a place to be bad for a while"; how those who move to Los Angeles from other major cities have gone blind to their hometowns' sources of suckiness; the prohibitive cost of a bedazzled T-shirt; what kind of a golden calf Conan O'Brien's show represents for today's comedic minds; "gab podcasts" and the rapidly diminishing viability thereof; the temptation to pander to your audience, whichever audience your medium determines you have; whether working at an "action sports" channel made for a living hell; how and why fifteen-year-olds maintain their alienness to non-fifteen-year-olds; and how best to satirize the troubled relationship some hardcore gamers have with human sexuality. (Photo: Pat Weir)

Colin Marshall sits down at the La Brea Tar Pits with David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, editor of the anthologies Writing Los Angeles, Another City, and Cape Cod Noir, and author of The Myth of Solid Ground, The Lost Art of Reading, and the upcoming novella Labyrinth. They talk about his attitude as a young New Yorker moving to Los Angeles; his approach to everything in life through the filter of books; his "graduate education" writing for the mythologized oasis of writerly cool that was the Los Angeles Reader; the importance of competition in print journalism; criticism as the search for the most important questions; how to talk about a city that doesn't know how to talk about itself; how to have a coherent conversation about a city that resists coherent conversation; the "sacred ordinariness" of Los Angeles; how literature of exile became literature of place; ersatz public and protected pseudo-urban space; whether the city will feel the same ten years from now; whether we'll still have what architectural critic Reyner Banham described as an "autopia" ten years from now; how narrative offers our only hope of meaning, yet only offers meaning up to a point; and what happens when our narratives go bad, assuming we notice. (Photo: Noah Ulin)

Colin Marshall sits down in Hollywood with comedian, actor, and novelist DC Pierson, man behind the one-man show DC Pierson is Bad at Girls, one-third of the Mystery Team of Mystery Team, and the author of The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To. They talk about innate, unchanging age; teenage blogging; Daria; the compulsion to read criticism; moving to Los Angeles from New York; avoiding falling into the standard complaint-driven narratives of young New York writers who move to Los Angeles; whether and how Los Angeles is shinin'; the mysteries surrounding how many Hollywood residents earn their income; building things rather than tearing things down; becoming the butt of your own jokes; blogging one's first hundred days in Los Angeles; and the inherent criminality of existing in one's twenties. (Photo: Zac Wolf)

Colin Marshall talks to Alan Nakagawa; sound artist; visual artist; installation artist; founding member of Los Angeles' long-running, multi-disciplinary, multi-ethnic, soon-to-be-dissolved arts collective Collage Ensemble; director of the experimental music Ear Meal webcast; L.A. Metro public art executive; member of Otonomiyaki, the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble and Ear Diorama Ear; and very serious eater indeed.

Recorded on location in Mexico City, Colin Marshall talks to David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, Las llaves de la ciudad, Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, and the blog Mostly Mexico City. A native New Yorker, Lida moved to Mexico City in 1990 — a year considered by many to have been the megalopolis' absolute nadir in terms of crime, crowding, and pollution — and hasn't looked back, becoming the best-known English-language chronicler of el Distrito Federal in the 21st century.

Colin Marshall talks to Laurie Ochoa and Joe Donnelly, founding editors of the new Los Angeles literary journal Slake. The magazine, which has just released its third issue, combines fiction, poetry, essays, reportage, photography, and several different kinds of visual art into a regular exploration of Los Angeles from every angle — and an exploration of the rest of the world from a Los Angeles angle.

Colin Marshall talks to J. Hoberman, senior film critic at The Village Voice and author of books on such cinematic subjects as 8mm and Super 8 pictures, Dennis Hopper, the 1960s, midnight movies, and Yiddish tradition. In his latest title, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, he examines the American decade from 1946 to 1956, a time of "cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, atomic tests on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy bracketed with Marilyn Monroe."

Colin Marshall talks to Chris Andrews, Katherine Silver, and Rosalie Knecht, English translators of the Argentine novelist César Aira, whom some readers in the Anglosphere are now finding as exciting as Borges. Despite having published over fifty books since 1975, Aira has only recently broken into English with novels such as An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became a Nun, Ghosts, The Literary Conference, and the new The Seamstress and the Wind that showcase his ability to balance the fine-grained observational detail of with outlandish fantasy and the methodical work habits and genre sensibilities of a mainstream author with the experimentalism and caprice of the avant-garde.

Colin Marshall talks to Peter Toohey, professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Calgary and author of Boredom: a Lively History. You don't need to keep your finger on the pulse of the contemporary scene to realize how important a subject boredom has become. We've all felt the emotion often — or at least we all think we feel it often. But we've also long felt the absence of a serious exploration of boredom, one that drills down to its true nature. Could Toohey have explained what we're experiencing when we experience boredom and why?

Colin Marshall talks to musician, writer, and artist Nick Currie, also known as Momus. Having recently relocated from Berlin to Osaka, he returns to the program to discuss his brand new book Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans. The novel follows up his previous book Solution 11-167: The Book of Scotlands with a similarly humorous exercise in social geography but one within a richer narrative framework — a narrative framework that pits twelve Japan "experts" against twelve Japan "idiots" — dealing with issues of imagination versus experience, monoculture versus diversity, and foreign versus future.

Colin Marshall talks to essayist, novelist, traveler, and "global soul" Pico Iyer. Since Video Night in Kathmandu, his journey through the rapidly changing Asia of the mid-1980s, Iyer has told us all about what it feels like and what it means to exist in and pass through places from Atlanta to Kyoto to Asunción to Pyongyang. Having been born to an Indian family and grown up equally between England and Santa Barbara, California, he both embodies and tirelessly describes the hybridized, cross-pollinated, geographically conversational world culture in which we all find ourselves.

Colin Marshall talks to Daniel Hernandez, bilingual bicultural binational journalist, blogger at Intersections, and author of Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the 21st Century. In 2007, the Mexican-American Hernandez moved to Mexico City to explore its spirit of adventure, its multitude of youthful subcultures, its undercurrent of chaos, and its sheer day-to-day surrealism. His first book collects pieces on Mexico City subjects as far-ranging as fashion parties, kidnappings, original punk rock, death, cellphone-thieving transsexuals, a particularly intense native sauna, and the "emo riots" of 2008.

Colin Marshall talks to Merlin Mann, thinker, writer, and speaker on time, attention, and creative work. Following up on his June 2009 visit, he's back on the show to talk about a great many things, not least his new podcast Back to Work with Dan Benjamin, a program about productivity, communication, barriers, constraints, tools — and, nearly always, fear. The conversation also ventures into other, unusually personal topics, including dealing with entrepreneurs, trying not to hate the internet, and having one hundred dollars in the bank.

Colin Marshall talks to Tim Harford, also known as the Undercover Economist. He wrote the book of the same name as well as The Logic of Life and now Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. In this latest book, Harford examines the value of numerous small-scale experiments — numerous enough to try many different things, and small-scale enough to fail without serious consequence — in business, technology, medicine, finance, climate change, and even his own life and career.

Colin Marshall talks to Steve Himmer, editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction and author of the novel The Bee-Loud Glade, wherein an eccentric millionaire named Crane picks Finch, a former corporate blogger, out of a rapidly deepening post-firing squalor. Finch finds himself in a very particular future on Crane's intricately landscaped grounds: employed as a decorative hermit, he must do little more than eat, sleep, meditate, and accomplish occasional (if sometimes inexplicable) Crane-assigned tasks. As it turns out, this suit's Finch's sensibilities just fine, even when Crane's corporate empire begins to crumble.

Colin Marshall talks to Dave Kehr, former film critic at the Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune and current DVD columnist for the New York Times. In his first collection, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, he brings together his writings on some of the finest films and filmmakers of the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, including Jean-Luc Godard, Manoel de Oliveira, Blake Edwards, and Albert Brooks.

Colin Marshall talks to Susan Bernofsky, author, scholar, and translator of such German-language writers as the Swiss Robert Walser, the Japanese Yoko Tawada, and the German Jenny Erpenbeck. New Directions recently released a strong lot of Bernofsky-translated books from Walser, including the novels The Assistant and The Tanners, as well as Microscripts, a collection of short, hard-to-categorize works originally written in a one- to two-millimeter-high pencil script of Walser's own devising.

Colin Marshall talks to Aaron Katz, director of such films as Dance Party USA, Quiet City, and the new Cold Weather. Continuing his established tradition of examining the sphere of urban twentysomethings who aren't quite sure how their lives got to this point or where they're going next with a strikingly aestheticizing gaze, Katz incorporates a near-Sherlock Holmesian plot into his latest film. His central characters, a Portland ice-factory worker, his DJ buddy, and his sister, find themselves embroiled in a forbiddingly seedy mystery when a girl goes missing and it falls to them to find her.

Colin Marshall talks to Lee Rourke, literary critic, contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine, and author of the story collection Everyday and the novel The Canal, winner of the Guardian's 2010 Not the Booker Prize. A book ostensibly about boredom, The Canal also illustrates, within a brief span of literary time, how boredom isn't really boring — or even how boredom isn't really boredom as we usually conveive of it when we actually sit down and face it, as does the book's protagonist, who one day walks out of his office job and never walks back.

Colin Marshall talks to Geoff Dyer, the "intellectual gatecrasher" who has written, in addition to several novels, books on photography, World War I, jazz, John Berger, travel, and D.H. Lawrence. His essays turn out to cover an even wider span of subjects than his books, and his latest collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition includes pieces on Susan Sontag, Def Leppard, Ian McEwan, avoiding real jobs, Richard Avedon, Editions of Contemporary Music, W.G. Sebald, growing up an only child, and the search for the perfect donut and cappuccino.

Colin Marshall talks to Sarah Bakewell, author of biographies on Jorgen Jorgenson, Margaret Caroline Rudd, and, most recently, the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne. How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer examines the life of a man whose life you'd have thought was already pretty damned well examined. More remains to learn, it turns out, even after Montaigne himself wrote three volumes of personal essays which have attained over 400 years of success and counting. Bakewell finds a man who, despite revealing no end of personal detail and disclosing no end of his own opinions, paraxodically becomes near-universally relatable to the reading public across the world and through time. Yet could he have achieved this not in spite of his essays' specificity, but because of it?

Colin Marshall talks to Jeffrey DeShell, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Arthouse, a novel that takes the form, structure, and aesthetic of each of its chapters from famous films like Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, Bela Tarr's Satantango, Arthur Ripley's Branded to Kill, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, and Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. DeShell's protagonist, a "failed fortysomething film studies academic," lives through a story among the meth-dealing toughs of Pueblo, Colorado that pulls him through not the events, not the settings, but the very substance of the cinematic art of these and other classics of the "arthouse" theater.

Colin Marshall talks to Stephen Battaglio, business editor at TV Guide magazine and author of David Susskind: A Televised Life, the first biography of the pioneering talk show host and producer of both television and film. With his firm Talent Associates Ltd., Susskind made his name with live shows like East Side/West Side, movies like Raisin in the Sun, and theater productions for television like Death of a Salesman. All throughout The David Susskind Show's near-thirty-year tun, Susskind engaged in relaxed, incisive, long-form conversation with a vast array of luminaries from business, politics, entertainment, and the arts, virtually creating the evening television talk show form as audiences knew it at its peak.

Colin Marshall talks to Françoise Palleau-Papin, teacher of American literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and author of This is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson. The book comes as the first study of its length of all of the late Markson's novels, a body of work which includes such early detective "entertainments" as Epitaph for a Tramp and Miss Doll, Go Home, such intermediate and comparatively traditional yet still exuberantly inventive books as Going Down and Springer's Progress, and the final five novels for which readers know him best. Running from Wittgenstein's Mistress to The Last Novel, these brief but deep excursions into isolated creative minds showcased Markson's unmatched skills at shaping facts and ideas from art, philosophy, literature, and history into narratives like no other writer has ever written.

Colin Marshall talks to cartoonist and entrepreneur Hugh MacLeod. At Gapingvoid.com, MacLeod showcases his business card-sized works of art that strike several particularly tricky balances at once: between light and dark, between abstraction and representation, and between inspirational optimism and stark, abyss-gazing confrontation with the human condition. His cartoons have thus gained a following with not only artists, but marketers, entrepreneurs, job-haters, and many more variants of humanity besides. In his latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination, MacLeod combines cartoons with writing on subjects like giving artistic gifts, ditching your unsatisfactory life, waking others up, and getting woken up.

Colin Marshall talks to novelist and philosopher Lars Iyer, author the blog Spurious and the new novel Spurious. In both the blog and the book, the philosophers Lars and W. discuss their favorite artists and writers — Franz Kafka, Andrei Tarkovsky, Maurice Blanchot, Béla Tarr — and what they see as their own pathetic inability to live up to their collective example. As Lars deals with a dampness problem ever encroaching on his apartment, W. berates him with a seemingly endless series of insults that takes friendly verbal abuse to a high art form.

Colin Marshall talks to Chaz Bundick, founding member and frontman of the experimental pop project Toro y Moi. Last year, Bundick introduced Toro y Moi to the world with the electronic, relatively sample-heavy solo album Causers of This. Now he darts all the way across the spectrum of the project's sound with Underneath the Pine, a record influenced by late-seventies R&B, film scores, and the unexpected purchase of a bargain-priced Fender Rhodes.

Colin Marshall talks to C. Max Magee, founding editor of literary web magazine The Millions. With Jeff Martin, he’s co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, a collection of essays from such luminaries as Ander Monson, Reif Larsen, Michael Paul Mason, Jonathan Lethem, and David Gates about the next iteration of their medium, what the reading audience of today best engages with, and the relationship between the ever-evolving industrial capacity of text distribution and the artistic forms to which it gives rise.

Colin Marshall talks to Gabriel Josipovici, author of many novels and critical essays involved with the aesthetics and techniques of modernism. In his latest book, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, he traces modernism’s roots further back in history than perhaps any other scholar of modernism has done before. It’s all in the service of the titular question, which expresses a deep concern of anyone who enjoys modernist works today: how and why has the Western world so largely ignored the excitement and potential of modernist art, that is, art conscious of its own limits and responsibilities?

Colin Marshall talks to Jonathan Rosenbaum, former Chicago Reader film critic, advocate of international cinema, and author of books on Orson Welles, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. In his latest, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, he examines the way serious engagement with film has changed over the decades, what new experiences it has brought to enthusiasts and critics, and what possibilities it has opened for cinematic artists.

Colin Marshall talks to critic Scott Esposito, blogger at Conversational Reading, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and marketing coordinator at the Center for the Art of Translation. A lover and promoter of today’s most interesting fiction, Esposito writes about fiction at the intersection of the experimental and the international. This conversation took place at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2011 conference in Washington, D.C.

Colin Marshall talks to cultural journalist Saul Austerlitz, author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes and, most recently, Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy, which examines the careers of beloved U.S. comedy icons like Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers as well as more cultishly comedic figures like Albert Brooks as well as filmmakers not normally associated directly with comedy, like Robert Altman and the Coen brothers.

Colin Marshall talks to Luke Fischbeck, founder of Los Angeles experimental music group, art-creation unit, and engine of community Lucky Dragons at the 2011 Art Los Angeles Contemporary international art fair in Santa Monica. Alongside collaborator Sarah Rara, Fischbeck performs with conventional instruments, unconventional instruments, video, improvisation, incompatible technologies, and audience collaboration. The Wire calls their music "a celebration of ancient shared memory and introspective spirituality." Lucky Dragons perform at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum on Thursday, February 3 at 7:00 p.m.

Colin Marshall talks to David Edmonds, co-host with Nigel Warburton of the popular philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites. Edmonds and Warburton have also collaborated on a new book, Philosophy Bites: 25 Philosophers on 25 Intriguing Subjects. The text features conversations from the podcast, including Peter Singer on animal rights, Alain de Botton on architecture, Adrian Moore on infinity, and Barry Smith on wine.

Colin Marshall talks to Darcy Paquet, film critic and author of New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves. Since 1999, Paquet has maintained the web site Koreanfilm.org as the premiere destination for Anglophone lovers of Korean cinema, which has experienced an unprecedented explosion of creativity and artistry since the beginning of the decade. In his book and on his site, Paquet discusses such vital Korean filmmakers as Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), Hong Sang-soo (Woman is the Future of Man, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, 3-Iron), and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Joint Security Area).

Colin Marshall talks to book critic and former Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin. He’s also the editor of several anthologies of Los Angeles writing and the author of The Myth of Solid Ground. His latest book The Lost Art of Reading examines changes in his own and others’ style of engagement with books in the age of fragmented attention, always-flowing information sources, and countless outlets for on-demand media.

Colin Marshall talks to design philosopher, bookmaker, and man of aesthetics Leonard Koren. In addition to publishing WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing in the 1970s and providing consultancy on certain aesthetic matters, he’s created books like Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, How to Rake Leaves, and Undesigning the Bath. He takes on the very meaning of the term “aesthetics” in his latest title, Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions.

Colin Marshall talks to conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats. In addition to his well-known projects like selling his thoughts, creating pornography for plants, and genetically engineering god, Keats writes about language for Wired magazine. His new book, Virtual Words: Language from the Edge of Science and Technology, collects his examinations of neologisms both failed and successful from our age, including qubit, crowdsourcing and bacn.

Colin Marshall talks to Nathan Rabin, head writer at The A.V. Club, the cultural magazine published by The Onion. There, he began a regular feature called My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year writing up movies that performed poorly at the box office and with critics, categorizing each as a “Failure”, “Fiasco”, or “Secret Success”. He continued the feature after a year, and has now collected pieces on Last Action Hero, Ishtar, Battlefield Earth, and more into My Year of Flops: One Man’s Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure.

Colin Marshall talks to Yunte Huang, poet, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. In the book, Huang combines a personal narrative of his research into American literature’s most beloved (and loathed) Chinese detective with the stories of E.D. Biggers, the writer who invented Charlie Chan, and Chang Apana, the real-life Chinese detective on the Honolulu Police whose exploits inspired him.

Colin Marshall talks to Kevin Kelly, co-founder of and “Senior Maverick” at Wired magazine. In addition to his copious online writing on technology and culture, he’s published such books as New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, the Economic World. His latest book, What Technology Wants, explores the nature of what he calls the “technium”, that is, technology itself, considered as one big organism which grows, changes, and definitely wants something.

Colin Marshall talks to literature professor, psychotherapist, and cultural critic Mikita Brottman, author of The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. In the book, Brottman challenges a host of conventional wisdom and received ideas about the value of reading, especially the reading of "high" literature. This mission takes her through examinations of both her own history with reading and the nature of such species of the printed word as the gothic novel, the true-crime paperback, and the celebrity confessional.

Colin Marshall talks to documentary filmmaker Nicholas Sherman, director of Soundtracker: A Portrait of Gordon Hempton. Hempton, one of the world’s best-known field recordists, has dedicated his life to traveling the United States and the world to create “sound portraits” of distinctive places. In Soundtracker, Sherman follows Hempton’s road trip in his 1964 VW bus which becomes a quest to capture the sounds of a train and a songbird together.

Colin Marshall talks to film critic David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and former longtime critic at the Christian Science Monitor. Sterritt’s books, from titles on Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock to more recent ones on B-movies and even the television sitcom The Honeymooners, reveal cinematic interests that stretch from the avant-garde to the long and widely beloved to the ostensibly (but perhaps not actually) disposable.

Colin Marshall talks to John Rabe, longtime public radio personality and host of KPCC’s Off-Ramp, a weekly examination of Southern California and especially Los Angeles. The show’s interviews and field pieces provide, as Rabe puts it, a “pointillist” aural portrait of the city and its surrounding half-state, highlighting some of the most interesting people, places, and things there without attempting the futile task of precisely representing the massive amount and constantly changing composition of Southern California culture.

Colin Marshall talks to Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and co-founder the zine which has become the massively popular blog Boing Boing. His latest book, Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, is the story of his quest to fully customize his life by building, maintaining, and operating as much as possible with his own hands: hacking his espresso machine, making his own sauerkraut, building cigar-box guitars, brewing his own kombucha, and carving his own spoons, to name only a few of his eclectic set of pursuits.

Colin Marshall talks to blogger, entrepreneur, and liver of the unconventional life Chris Guillebeau. Having written his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel for “a small army of remarkable people” since 2008, he’s now the author of a book which expands on his ideas and experiences, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World.

Colin Marshall talks to Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor, creators of the new men’s style web series and blog Put This On, which explore all facets of the art of “dressing like a grown-up.” Thorn is also the host of Public Radio International’s The Sound of Young America as well as the comedy podcast Jordan Jesse Go; Lisagor is also a co-host and producer of the comedy podcast You Look Nice Today.

Colin Marshall talks to novelist Joshua Cohen, author of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and now Witz. The new book follows the cross-country (and international, and possibly even interplanetary) journey of Benjamin Israelien, born with a beard and glasses, already nearly a grown man. After a Biblical plague on Christmas Even 1999, Benjamin becomes the last Jew on Earth. He’s first celebrated, then marketed, then turned upon.

Colin Marshall talks to Tyler Smith and David Bax, hosts of the film podcast Battleship Pretension. For over three years, Smith and Bax have explored on the show all aspects of cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema technique, and cinema criticism, doing so with the freewheeling, humorous sensibility of the best late-night film school conversations.

Colin Marshall talks to Jack Hues, lead singer and, alongside Nick Feldman, primary collaborator of the rock group Wang Chung. Throughout the 1980s, Wang Chung released such albums as Points on the Curve, Mosaic, and The Warmer Side of Cool, as well as the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s film To Live and Die in L.A.. Now they’re back recording and touring again, having recently completed one U.S. tour and about to launch another in support of their new double EP, Abducted by the 80s.

Colin Marshall talks to music journalist, critic, and observer of America Greil Marcus. Though they span countless subjects, Marcus’ past books have been rooted in examinations of icons like Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Presley, and Bill Clinton. In his latest release, When that Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, he takes on the Irish singer-songwriter’s vast, varied catalogue, documenting his own responses to Morrison’s music as well as the far-flung cultural and psychological resonances it sets off.

Colin Marshall talks to Steven Moore, author, critic, former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History, Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language.

Colin Marshall talks to Suzanne Jill Levine, noted translator of creative, innovative, adventurous Latin American Fiction from authors like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig. She’s also a professor at UCSB and the general editor and co-translator of Penguin Classics’ five new volumes of nonfiction and poetry from widely respected Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing, On Mysticism, On Argentina, The Sonnets, and Poems of the Night. Her own book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction has been recently reissued by Dalkey Archive.

Colin Marshall talks to David Lipsky, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Crafted out of transcripts of a five day-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace on the tail end of the publicity tour for Wallace’s breakthrough novel Infinite Jest, the book reveals facets of the beloved author that have never before been seen publicly.

Colin Marshall talks to Tan Lin, professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University and author of the books Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01 and Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource). His latest book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, uses its form to escape the notions, conventions and structures of the traditional reading experience. Tan Lin’s Tumblr Tan Lin’s books: Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (New American Poetry), Blipsoak01, Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource), Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] (Wesleyan Poetry) Technology/business/culture writer Nicholas Carr (1959 - ) Architect Rem Koolhaas (1944 - ) Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker’s Joy of Cooking Tan Lin’s BOMB Magazine interview 7 Controlled Vocabularies, Lulu edition Writer David Shields (1956 - ) and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto David Shields on The Marketplace of Ideas Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture)

David Toop is a composer of sound, writer about sound, curator of sound and research fellow at the London College of Communication. His works in text include Ocean of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather and the Rap Attack books. His latest is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, which explores the sound of silent art. David Toop’s web site David Toop’s books, Rap Attack, No. 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, Exotica, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (Five Star Fiction S.) and Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the ListenerAmerican writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870)Oren Peli’s film Paranormal Activity (2009)Dutch painter Nicholaes Maes and his Eavesdropper paintingsIrish painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992)English novelist Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)Scottish novelist John Buchan (1875-1940)English writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)Irish writer James Joyce and his novel Ulysses (1882-1941)Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)German electronic band Kratfwerk

Colin Marshall talks to novelist Todd Shimoda, author of 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, The Fourth Treasure and now Oh!: A Mystery of Mono No Aware. Shimoda calls his stories “somewhat experimental, post-modernish, dealing with Asian or Asian-American themes to some degree, but also broad questions of existence,” or “philosophical mysteries.” His latest novel documents an embodies a search for the elusive Japanese literary concept of mono no aware. Persons/places/works/sites referenced in this interview, in the order mentioned Todd and L.J.C. Shimoda's web site, Shimodaworks Todd Shimoda's novels: 365 Views of Mt. Fuji: Algorithms of the Floating World, The Fourth Treasure and Oh!: A mystery of 'mono no aware' The literary concept of mono no aware Novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) Novelist Kobo Abe (1924-1993) Novelist Albert Camus (1913-1960) Albert Camus' The Stranger (Everyman's Library) The Japanese concept of ikigai, or the worth of living Chin Music Press Kobo Abe's The Ruined Map: A Novel An excerpt of Todd Shimoda's Ruined Map sequel-in-progess, Why Ghosts Appear

Colin Marshall talks to Sharpham College for Buddhist Studies founder Stephen Batchelor, author on, scholar of and educator about Buddhist topics. His latest book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, recounts his journey from young spiritual seeker to devoted monk to questioning student to holder of the complex hybrid of principles and practices he has achieved today. This personal narrative builds upon and provides a background to his famously controversial Buddhism Without Beliefs.

Colin Marshall talks to Andrew Bujalski, the young director of the films Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, which is newly available on DVD. Though Bujalski’s funny, realistic movies are often considered by critics to be of a similar genius to other independently-produced pictures of the 2000s focusing on the personal relationships of twentysomethings, they possess an intellect and an aesthetic all their own.

Colin Marshall talks to Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant surgeries and robotics. His latest, the father-son memoir Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, comes out this summer.

Colin Marshall talks to David Shields, professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself.

Colin Marshall talks to musicologist, writer, microtonal composer and educator Kyle Gann, author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″. The former new music critic at the Village Voice, Gann turns his eye and ear in the book to Cage’s most well-known composition, four minutes and 33 seconds in which no notes are played. Famous and infamous in equal measure, 4′33″ has been variously considered a work of genius, a game-changing musical revelation and a charlatan’s publicity stunt.

Colin Marshall talks to Peter Brunette, Reynolds Professor of Film Studies and director of the Film Studies program at Wake Forest University. The author of books on such beloved filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai and Roberto Rossellini, Brunette has now written a book on Austrian cinematic provocateur Michael Haneke. The latest published entry in the University of Illinois Press’ “Contemporary Film Directors” series, Michael Haneke examines in depth the art of and the ideas behind the auteur’s theatrical releases, from late-1980s and early-1990s works such as The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video through his newest and best-known pictures Caché and The White Ribbon.

Colin Marshall talks to speaker, writer, blogger and entrepreneur Seth Godin. Having already built a large body of published work on the nature of ideas, how they’re conceived, how they’re spread and how they’re executed, Godin has expanded his intellectual purview with his new book Linchpin. Extending the thoughts and observations he applied to marketing in books like Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars, his latest work examines how individual human beings, not corporations or organizations, can most fruitfully practice their art in the transforming information economy.

Colin Marshall talks to Chris Bohn, editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership.

Colin Marshall talks to James Donelan, lecturer and Program Coordinator in the English department and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He's also the author of Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic a study of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, poet William Wordsworth, philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and poet/philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and what their work reveals about the development of the idea of the autonomous mind and its interaction with the external world, especially its works of art.

Colin Marshall talks to Sean Carroll, theoretical cosmologist specializing in dark energy and special relativity at the California Institute of Technology and blogger at Cosmic Variance. In his new book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Carroll explores possible answers to the question, “Why does time always move forward, never backward?” Addressing the issue necessitates drawing from various domains of physics, going all the way back to the origin of the universe.

Colin Marshall talks to Brian Reynolds Myers, contributing editor to the Atlantic and professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his new book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters, Myers examines North Korean propaganda meant for both internal and external consumption and through it constructs the closed country’s view of itself, its relationship to other countries and the Kim dynasty that has controlled it for 60 years. This approach reveals not a Stalinist ideology but one closer to Nazi Germany’s in its prioritization of the military and fixation on racial purity and a threatening outside world.

Colin Marshall talks to Nick Currie, better known as Momus. Since the mid-1980s he has led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands. Since 2004, he has written the blog Click Opera on his life, work and art adventures, which he closed on February 10, the eve of his 50th birthday.

Colin Marshall talks to cinematic journalist and curator Livia Bloom, editor of Errol Morris: Interviews, a compilation of conversations with the nonfiction filmmaker behind such movies as Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. The book, which includes two interviews conducted by Bloom herself as well as other notable film writers like Paul Cronin and Roger Ebert, reveals a directorial mind filled with curiosity, love of truth and real or imagined misanthropy.

Colin Marshall talks to Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University, research associate at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and chief scientist at Consensus Point. He’s also the thinker behind Overcoming Bias, a popular blog about issues of honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting and the far future, around which a large rationality-centric community has developed on the internet. “Flicking through Robin’s thoughts,” says the Observer, “you start to feel the ground shifting beneath you.”

Colin Marshall talks to Rob Walker, observer of advertising and marketing in all their forms. Author of the New York Times‘ “Consumed” column and the book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, Walker is also the co-creator of the “Significant Objects” project, an experiment wherein various authors and media personalities craft fictional stories to accompany everyday objects found at thrift stores. The objects are then auctioned off, revealing the value-adding effects of narrative.

Colin Marshall talks to Steven E. Landsburg, professor of economics at the University of Rochester, Slate's "Everyday Economics" columnist and author of The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics. A pioneer in the popular-economics genre with his 1993 book The Armchair Economist, Landsburg now focuses his quantitative mind on issues of epistemology, ontology, morality and otherwise that have heretofore remained mostly untouched by such analysis.

Colin Marshall talks to Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of All Souls College and author of The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, the latest in Penguin’s sprawling History of Europe series. Wickham integrates textual and architectual evidence to craft a new, fascinatingly detailed historical experience of the era beginning at the decline of the Roman Empire and ending at the rise of European nations as we know them today. Eschewing both teleology and grand narratives, Wickham presents the Middle Ages not as a mere stepping stone to modernity but as a fascinating period in and of itself.

Colin Marshall talks to Jeremy Haladyna, director of UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and composer of the sprawling 28-piece-and-counting Mayan Cycle. Drawing upon over twenty years of research and exploration, Haladyna has translated countless concepts from Mayan thought, art and architecture into music that counts strings, flutes, scratch turntables and even sampled paper towel dispensers among its sonic components. An album of selections from the Mayan Cycle is now available from Innova Recordings.

Colin Marshall talks to Pepita Ferrari, director of Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. The first documentary film to concentrate specifically on documentary filmmaking, Capturing Reality features conversations with the likes of Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Nick Broomfield, Albert Maysles, Scott Hicks and Molly Dineen about such important issues in the genre as interviewing, editing, the line between fact and fiction, the evolutionary possibilities of individual projects and the effect of a filmmaker's presence.

Colin Marshall talks to The Philadelphia Lawyer, author of both the web site of the same name and the book The Happy Hour is For Amateurs: A Lost Decade in the World’s Worst Profession, which is now out in paperback. Combining Kafka-like tales of the gamesmanship and pedantry of the legal profession with vivid accounts of the intense debauchery required to counterbalance all that wasted time in the office, The Philadelphia Lawyer’s web presence has attracted a large, devoted audience of disaffected litigators, suspicious law students and dedicated bacchanalists alike. His book brings the distinctive sensibility of his much-e-mailed stories into long-form narrative.

Colin Marshall talks to Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard, host and producer, respectively, of The Signal on CBC Radio 2. Since debuting in March of 2007, the program has evolved to provide a highly distinctive listening experience that offers two skillfully-curated hours of late-night contemporary music to listeners across Canada — and, via the internet, the world — that’s neither predictable nor easily genrefiable. Brown accompanies Sheppard’s unusual sonic selections with commentary that’s long impressed fans with its friendliness, intimacy and wealth of odd stories.

Colin Marshall talks to Peter Bagge, the comic artist behind the beloved series Hate as well as Apocalypse Nerd, Neat Stuff and Sweatshop. His new book, Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations, collects his stories originally written for the libertarian magazine Reason, works of comic journalism on such subjects as the Iraq war, gun control, the “War on Drugs” and Amtrak.

Colin Marshall talks to So Yong Kim, director of In Between Days, winner of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision, and more recently Treeless Mountain, which is now available on DVD. The story of two very young sisters in Seoul left with their distant aunt while their mother searches for their absent father, the film belongs solidly to the realist tradition while evoking the scale, perspective and feel of childhood. The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott calls Treeless Mountain one of the “vital, urgent and timely” vanguard members of the new genre of “neo-neorealism.”

Colin Marshall talks to Ken Freedman, general manager of Jersey City’s WFMU, the longest-running freeform radio station in the United States. Since the mid-1980s, Freedman and his staff have made WFMU’s name a byword for the modern freeform sensibility with a combination of, among other factors, early adoption of new distribution technology, avoidance of identity politics and pure, unadulterated unpredictability.

Colin Marshall talks to longtime Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger, author of Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France. An ardent culinary Francophile in earlier decades, Steinberger has, along with much of the rest of the food world, come to realize that a malaise has fallen upon the cuisine that once led the world in taste, artistry, experience and sophistication. Steinberger’s book chronicles the history of French food, the recent developments that have forced it to face tough competition from countries like Spain and the United States and the importance of such things as the legality of lait cru cheese, the effects of viticultural subsidies and the fall of the once-almighty Michelin guide.

Colin Marshall talks to three music writers who have written books on English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, whose debut album Five Leaves Left originally shipped on September 1, 1969. Joining the conversation to celebrate the record’s fortieth anniversary are Trevor Dann, former head of BBC Music Entertainment and author of Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake; Patrick Humphries, noted biographer of musicians and author of Nick Drake: The Biography, the very first book on the man; and Peter Hogan, author of Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music and an enthusiast of Drake’s music from the very beginning.

A conversation about religion and falsity with Joel Grus, humorist, atheist and author of Your Religion is False.

A conversation with Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and founding blogger of Marginal Revolution. Cowen's new book is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.

A conversation with Greg Milner, who's written music and technology journalism for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Slate, Salon and Wired. His new book, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, tracing the evolution of music's capture from Edison cylinders to vinyl albums to waveform synthesis.

A conversation about the early works of filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who brought an entirely new irreverent aesthetic and sociological sensibility to the 1960s Japanese film scene, with Kim Hendrickson, executive producer at The Criterion Collection and producer of their new box set Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes: Three Films by Shohei Imamura.

A conversation about bringing intelligent video to the internet with Brian Gruber, founder and executive chairman of FORA.tv, the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates from the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences.

A conversation with novelist, journalist, memoirist and traveler Lawrence Osborne, author, most recently, of Bangkok Days.

A conversation about rock music's foremost intellectual "non-musician."  producer and cultural theorist with David Sheppard, author of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno.

A conversation about the dissolution of the friendship between two very different philosophers with John T. Scott, professor of political science at the University of California, Davis and co-author with Robert Zaretsky of The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding.

A conversation with Alain de Botton, author of fiction, nonfiction, journalism and various hybrids thereof. Following treatises on Proust, philosophy, travel and architecture, de Botton's newest book of "philosophical journalism" is The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

A conversation about the rise, fall and rise of the long-playing album format both technologically and artistically with journalist Travis Elborough, author of The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again.

A conversation with writer, speaker, blogger and student of the creative mind Merlin Mann. In 2004, Mann founded 43Folders, a blog and community focused on tips, tricks, tools and techniques designed to improve one's productivity, and in late 2008, he took the site in a new direction, toward the habits and thoughts of humanity's best creators and what can be learned from examining them.

Part three of our ongoing series of conversations about the future of books and reading, this time with publishing consultant Richard Eoin Nash. Nash ran the widely-acclaimed Soft Skull Press between 2001 and March of this year.

A conversation with Jon Raymond, editor at Plazm magazine and author of the novel The Half-Life and the new short story collection Livability. With filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Raymond co-adapted two of Livability's short stories into the critically-acclaimed feature films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.

A conversation with Edward Champion, critic, host and producer of the cultural interview podcast The Bat Segundo Show, blogger behind Reluctant Habits and all-around "intellectual shock jock".

A conversation with filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo. Roger Ebert calls Bahrani "the new great American director."

A conversation about using old technology to craft modern sounds with electro-acoustic musician Ethan Rose, whose newest album Oaks was recorded with a vintage 1920s Wurlitzer organ found in the skating rink at Portland's Oaks Park. Two tracks from the record are included in this broadcast.

A conversation about creating radio fiction and humorously raising consciousness with Thomas Lopez, founder and president of the ZBS Foundation. This broadcast contains excerpts from the ZBS productions Dreams of the Amazon, Ruby and Two Minute Film Noir.

A conversation about iterative creative processes, building music in layers and the history of loud sound with electronic musician Tim Hecker, whose latest album is An Imaginary Country, from which two tracks are featured in this broadcast.

A conversation about aesthetics and evolutionary biology with Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.

A conversation with novelist, journalist, documentarian and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College Ian Buruma. His latest book is The China Lover, a historical novel examining the life and career of Manchurian-born Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi through the eyes of three different narrators.

A conversation about appreciating the seasons, collecting international field recordings and turning others on to sound art with composer, multimedia artist, critic and ROOM40 label head Lawrence English. Two tracks from English's latest record, A Colour for Autumn, are included in this broadcast.

A conversation about reading, writing and radio with Michael Silverblatt, who has hosted KCRW's Bookworm, the beloved forum for the discussion of fiction and poetry on public radio, for twenty years. [Marketplace of Ideas home]

A conversation about the craft of interviewing and the state of public radio today with Jesse Thorn, host and producer of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America as well as the principal of podcasting empire Maximumfun.org.

A conversation about what's wrong with literary studies and a possible way forward with Jonathan Gottschall, English instructor at Washington and Jefferson College and author of Science, Literature and a New Humanities.

A conversation with physicist and University of Utah adjunct professor of anthropology Gregory Cochran, co-author with Henry Harpending of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

A conversation about the organic basis of decisionmaking with Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large at Seed magazine and author of How We Decide.

A conversation about what gardens say about human nature, what's missing from mainstream radio and the place of the humanities with Robert Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University and host of KZSU's Entitled Opinions. His latest book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.

A conversation about the genesis of probability theory with mathematician Keith Devlin, author of The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern.

A conversation about having fun with poetry, providing an alternative to academia and hosting television programs from one's own home with writer and "cultural polymath" Clive James, author of Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about knowledge, commerce and the Western canon with novelist and journalist Alex Beam, author of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.

A conversation about the greatest British philosopher of all time with Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and the University of North Carolina and author of How to Read Hume. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about Margaret Thatcher, the most controversial British Prime Minister of the 20th century, with Claire Berlinski, author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about intellectual rigor and intellectual confusion with New York University physicist Alan Sokal, the man behind the "Sokal Hoax" and author of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about art markets with Don Thompson, professor emeritus of marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business and author of The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about what's next for humanity with David Friedman, professor of law at Santa Clara University and author of the classic work of 20th-century political philosophy The Machinery of Freedom. In his new book, Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World, Friedman explores the law, the economics and the very sensory experience of a host of possible futures through the technologies likely to shape them, including universal surveillance, e-cash, designer kids, advanced encryption and nanotechnology. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about technology, philosophy and a beloved American motorcycle journey with Mark Richardson, auto and motorcycle editor of the Toronto Star and author of Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about demographics, punditry and American voting with Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University and author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about the red tape of viticulture, huge followings in Japan and Cabernet uprisings in the streets of Indianapolis with wine educator and blogger Tyler Colman, known in the blogosphere as "Dr. Vino", author of Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists and Mobsters Influence the Wines We Drink. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about the workings of the novel, the world between journalism and academia and literary versus religious belief with James Wood, book critic for the New Yorker and author of How Fiction Works. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about what's wrong with American education's priorities and how to fix them with the American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray, author of Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about econophysics, generating genuine randomness and the rise of blogs with mathematical journalist and blogger Brian Hayes, author of Group Theory in the Bedroom. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about the dictionary-reader's ultimate challenge, all 21,730 pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, with Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about one man, one son, and one D.I.Y. film school with novelist and former CBC film critic David Gilmour, author of The Film Club: A Memoir. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about art, criticism, literature, philosophy, and a certain Belgian boy reporter with novelist Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about science, aesthetics and the crossing of disciplinary boundaries with David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard, author of Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, and founder of Le Laboratoire. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about asymmetrical warfare, Red Dawn and the Hmong in Fresno with Gary Brecher, “War Nerd” columnist from The eXile. [download show] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about the rise of cultural blogs, using one’s own life as novel source material and the genius of Rupert Thomson with literary blogger Maud Newton, founder of MaudNewton.com. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about the encyclopedic novel, female creativity and Rush Limbaugh with novelist, essayist and poet Alexander Theroux, author of Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

Part two of our special series on the future of books and reading: conversations with writer, thinker, entrepreneur and maker of mischief Kevin Smokler [site] and Dave Weich, director of marketing and development at Portland, Oregon's Powell's Books.

A conversation about art school, the Milgram Experient and Andres Serrano photos as bible covers with graphic designer and novelist Chip Kidd, the man responsible for countless bestselling (and some not-quite-bestselling) book jackets. His new novel is The Learners: The Book After The Cheese Monkeys.

Part one of a special Marketplace of Ideas series on the future of books and reading: conversations with Daniel Menaker and Odile Isralson, host and executive producer of Titlepage, the first book-themed internet TV show.

A conversation about the climate change debate, the evolutionary psychology of art and bad academic writing with Denis Dutton [site], founder of Arts & Letters Daily and editor of Philosophy and Literature.

A conversation about swinging, eating, strip clubs, lying, gambling, consumption and pornography with Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me and author of The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).

A conversation about personality, innovation and openness in cities and "mega-regions" with urban theorist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?

A conversation about experimental philosophy with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and author of Experiments in Ethics.

The second part of a conversation about life in film and literature in Japan and America with translator, filmmaker and Japan expert John Nathan, author of Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere.

The first part of a conversation about life in film and literature in Japan and America with translator, filmmaker and Japan expert John Nathan, author of Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere.

A conversation about the art of engineering, the value of jokes and the nuisance of spam with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and author of iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.

It's The Marketplace of Ideas live in Los Angeles! Come bid farewell to Dutton's Brentwood Books and watch a live taping of The Marketplace of Ideas, featuring a conversation with Mark Sarvas, noted Elegant Variation blogger and author of the upcoming novel Harry, Revised. This all happens on Saturday March 29th at 12:00 noon. Dutton's is located at 11975 San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA.

A conversation about speed-dating, the advantages of city life and the fun economists are having with "Undercover Economist" Tim Harford, author of The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.

A conversation about Generation X, penciling techniques and libertarianism with Peter Bagge, creator of Hate and Apocalypse Nerd.

A conversation about Texan cotton-growing, Chinese manufacturing and African entrepreneurship with Pietra Rivoli, Georgetown business professor and author of The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy.

A conversation about education, urbanism and Abbas Kiarostami with essayist, novelist, poet and film writer Phillip Lopate.

A conversation with Gail Pool, author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.

A conversation about economics, evolutionary biology and Ayn Rand with Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics.

A conversation about the interplay between early modern science and poetry with Angus Fletcher, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate School and author of Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare.

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A conversation about bridging the gap between history and prehistory with Daniel Lord Smail, professor of history at Harvard University and author of On Deep History and the Brain.

A conversation about using incentives, eating ethnic food and becoming a cultural billionaire with Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and blogger at Marginal Revolution.

A conversation about publishing, book criticism and LA literary culture with David L. Ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

A conversation about literature, the human brain and umami with Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large at Seed magazine and author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

A conversation about college towns, the importance of story and MFA programs with novelist Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony.

A conversation about online journalism, travel writing and H.L. Mencken with Jason Wilson, editor of The Smart Set from Drexel University and The Best American Travel Writing series.

A conversation about consciousness, free will and toilet training with David P. Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington and author of Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars and Other Realities of Evolution.

A conversation about the revolution in decisionmaking brought about by large-scale quantitative analysis with Yale law professor and economist Ian Ayres, author of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart.

A conversation about voting one way and living in a place that votes another with David Starkey, poet, playwright, professor of English at Santa Barbara City College and editor of Living Blue in the Red States.

A conversation about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind on the 20th anniversary of its publication with Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion.

A conversation about Barry Goldwater with CC Goldwater, the 1964 presidential candidate's granddaughter and producer of the new film Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater.

A conversation about ridiculous military hardware and highly un-epic science fiction with Zack Parsons, editor at the popular humor site Something Awful and author of My Tank is Fight!: Deranged Inventions of World War II.

A conversation about the 1960s with Cathy Wilkerson, former member of Students for a Democratic Society and Weatherman, whose new book is Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman.

A conversation about the very definition of a powerful idea with Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA and former president of the American Historical Association. Her latest book is Inventing Human Rights: A History.

A conversation about food writing, Lost Girls and the disappointing DVD of David Lynch's Lost Highway with Jessa Crispin, founder and editor of Chicago-based literary webzine and blog Bookslut.

A conversation about that most revered of all beverages and the devices that close our bottles of it with George M. Taber, wine journalist and former business editor of Time magazine. His new book is To Cork or Not to Cork: The Billion-Dollar Battle for the Bottle.

A conversation about optimism, eternal studenthood and funny conservatives with entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. His most recent book is My Start-Up Life.

A conversation about hybridizing genres, using future technology and reading Dwell magazine with Josh Conviser, author of Echelon and Empyre.

A conversation about book criticism, the Los Angeles Literary scene and Michiko Kakutani with Mark Sarvas, author of popular weblog The Elegant Variation. Harry, Revised, his first novel, hits shelves in May 2008.